Paradigm proliferation as a good thing to think with: teaching research in education as a wild profusion

Abstract

This paper situates paradigm talk with its insistence on multiplicities and proliferations in tension with a resurgent positivism and governmental imposition of experimental design as the gold standard in research methods. Using the concept of ‘coloring epistemologies’ as an index of such tensions, the essay argues for proliferation as an ontological and historical claim. What all of this might mean in the teaching of research in education is dealt with in a delineation of five aporias that are fruitful in helping students work against technical thought and method: aporias of objectivity, complicity, difference, interpretation, and legitimization. The essay concludes with a ‘disjunctive affirmation’ of multiple ways of going about educational research in terms of finding our way into a less comfortable social science full of stuck places and difficult philosophical issues of truth, interpretation and responsibility.