Politics of Explanation: Ethical Questions in the Production of Knowledge
Thomas Heaney
National-Louis University
Intellectuals are no longer needed by the masses to gain knowledge: the masses know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than the intellectual and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power--the idea of their responsibility for "consciousness" and discourse forms part of the system.
Michel Foucault 1977, p. 207. |
In "The Brave Little Tailor," the Brothers Grimm told of a mild mannered man of unassuming build and intellect. It seems that one day his shop was beset with flies and in his frenzied attack on the situation, as chance would have it, he destroyed several of the insidious insects with one blow. As anyone who has attempted to maim or kill the pesky beasts knows, it is difficult to overcome one, must less seven flies. And so it was inevitable that later, as the tailor reflected on the significance of the day's events, he came to realize that this was a rather extraordinary accomplishment--one which stood out in sharp contrast to his humdrum existence and which certainly ought to be recorded. So he wrote a sign which he proudly displayed, first in his shop, and finally on a cord hung from his neck. The sign simply stated, "seven with one blow." Henceforth, all that saw the sign trembled in fear; villains, giants, no one could help but be intimidated by the knowledge that this otherwise dwarf of a man was capable of leveling seven with one blow.
This story serves to introduce several important themes in any discussion of the politics of research and explanation. First, it exemplifies a relationship between knowledge and power. Knowledge, formally documented in the proposition, "seven with one blow," promoted and sustained the illusion that the tailor was formidable and to be feared. Second, it exemplified the role of power in creating explanations and meaning. The significance of the slaughter of seven flies with one stroke of the morning's newspaper was interpreted in a manner most likely to enhance the social status and prestige of the signifier, namely the perpetrator of the slaughter. This was accomplished, as we will later see, in a manner not unusual in the social sciences: not by falsifying the data, but by ignoring--albeit unwittingly--critical and determining questions which might yield information about the nature of the seven upon whom the fatal blow was inflicted. In fairness to the tailor, he made no attempt to hide the information when asked. Quite simply--and fortunately for the tailor's adventure--he did not encounter any critical questions during his journey. For his "seven with one blow" was an adequate and true proposition, expressing the empowerment he had found within his own modest experience.
The two themes emerging from this story need elaboration: first, the relationship between knowledge and power; and second, the influence exerted by the wielders of power over processes by which knowledge is produced.
Power and Knowledge
Power and knowledge are "essentially contested concepts" (Sallie, 1955). Such concepts are not only the source of endless debate, but derive their meaning from assumptions of value and policy. They rest ultimately on what Gouldner (1970) calls "background assumptions" which are composed of sentiments, the conception of reality accented by personal experience. Such assumptions constitute the individual and social grounding of an essentially contested concept. One cannot define concepts such as "power" or "knowledge" without reference to the political position of the person employing them. Political points of view are embedded in definitions and can be revealed through careful conceptual analysis.
Power
Power can be, and frequently is, understood as simply the capacity for action. Many adult educators have taken to using the term "empowerment" in this way, suggesting that their successful clients of schooling have developed the "power" to read or to operate complex machinery. Such "powers" are better termed "capacities" (or the grating neologism, "competencies"). However, a definition which equates power with ability inadequately explains the social dimensions of power. In the social order, power is an ability to act which is often exercised by affecting the behavior of others (Craig and Craig, 1979). But even this understanding of power falls short, failing to provide guidelines for distinguishing between the exercise of power and other forms of influence--for example, overwhelming evidence or love--which equally affect the behavior of others.
Lukes (1974) has argued that, in the world of social relationships, power is exercised in conflict over goals, decisions, strategies, and position. Power is more than mere capacity which when exercised affects the behavior of others; it is also a capacity exercised at the cost of the other's capacity to act. Our tailor exercised power over his neighbors when he affected them in a manner contrary to their own inclinations to otherwise belittle, rob, or even maim such an obvious mark. Knowledge, represented in the proposition, "seven with one blow," became a protective shield for the tailor, thwarting the assaults of brigands and giants. For the tailor, as for us, power was attained when he was victorious over competing interests.
There are three dimensions in this latter view of power. The first emphasizes open and explicit conflict in decision-making wherein power is established by the outcome. Power inheres in the one who, by reason of superior strength, mental acuity, or both, prevails over the opposition. Competitors lock horns; power is to the victor.
But certainly not all power is characterized by force. The exercise of power is like the skill of the surgeon, the knife being best inserted in a person whose mind and senses have been dulled. Power is most effective and most secure when it becomes so much a part of the background that it is unobserved and internalized. In the second dimension of power, its wielders systematically exclude potential competitors from the process of decision making. The public agenda is controlled to eliminate from discussion those issues which are potentially threatening to the interests of the powerful. This dimension of power is characterized by "a mobilization of bias" (Bachrach and Baratz, 1970) which causes decisions to appear inevitable and irreversible. Thus the existence of conflict is obscured. Power is maintained by non-decisions, defined as:
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a means by which demands for change in the existing allocation of benefits and privileges in the community can be suffocated before they are voiced, or kept covert; or killed before they gain access to the relevant decision-making arena; or, failing all of these things, maimed or destroyed in the decision implementing stage of the policy process (Bachrach and Baratz, 1970, p. 44). |
The capacity to enforce non-decisions by keeping an issue from ever being raised is a profound, if largely invisible, form of power. In this regard, the role of educators in maintaining and stabilizing dominant forms of power is best described in terms of what is not contained in the curriculum--namely, critical questions excluded frequently in the name of maintaining a neutral posture. Non-knowledge and limited access to critical questions are a prior condition of non-decisions. The control and manipulation of knowledge, as well as the resulting mobilization of bias, represents a more economical and far-reaching exercise of power than reliance on overt force or the direct imposition of will.
While the second dimension of power weakens opposition by withholding critical knowledge, the third and ultimate dimension of power eliminates opposition by the imposition of a false consciousness. Here the wielder of power "influences, shapes, and determines conceptions of the necessities, possibilities, and strategies of challenge in situations of latent conflict" (Gaventa, 1980). such mind control need not conjure up images of 1984 and Walden Two. The mechanisms of this dimension of power simply involve the inverse of information control. Images propagated by mass media and education not only exclude understandings and meanings which have a high risk of unmasking conflict (as in the second dimension of power), but also include explanations which negatively affect self-concepts and expectations regarding "realistic" modes of behavior.
Those over whom power is exercised in power's first dimension are losers in a game, the rules of which, although frequently unfair, are nonetheless openly proclaimed. In the second dimension of power, the rules are hidden from view so that the losers frequently are unaware they have been victims in a rigged competition. Paulo Freire, in his analysis of the dynamics of power, reserves the term "oppressed" for those who are silenced by power's third dimension. The oppressed speak with a voice that is not their own (Freire, 1970, p. 34). Their very consciousness is the product of constant conditioning and a well integrated fantasy created in the interests and images of the powerful. The oppressed are not only powerless, but reconciled to their powerlessness, perceiving it fatalistically, as a consequence of personal inadequacy or failure.
This reconciliation to powerlessness inhibits self-determining action and fosters increased dependency. Dependency further precludes the development of a positive and self-affirming consciousness and thus lends to the dominant order an air of legitimacy. The ultimate product of highly unequal power relationships is a class unable to articulate its own interests or perceive the existence of social conflict. Speaking of such a class, Mueller notes, "they have been socialized into compliance, so to speak, they accept the definitions of political reality as offered by dominant groups, classes or government institutions" (1973, p. 9).
Knowledge
In all of this, the principal instrument for the establishment and protection of power in its second and third dimensions is the control of knowledge. Thus is knowledge linked to power. While knowledge is naively thought to encompass direct and practical reflections of the world, nonetheless it comprises interpretations and explanations of experience which are shaped by social institutions, the media, and formal education--by instruments of hegemony controlled directly or indirectly by the interests of power. Knowledge is understood here as more than the mere comprehension of reality--reducing experience to an unrelated sequence of "facts",--but rather as the ordering of our experiences into a significant and meaning-ful whole. Such knowledge is about the world, not of the world. Knowledge about the world is constituted by the attempt to explain the logic of experience and is not reducible to experience itself. Knowledge of the world, on the other hand, is unreflective, immediate, and often unarticulated.
It is not primarily in its ordering of experience that knowledge about the world derives its importance for power, but in the significance it attributes to that ordering. The detective is empowered, not by establishing possible motives for the butler and that the butler was alone with the victim only minutes before the murder occurred, but by an interpretation of those elements based on a assumption that the murderer had both reason and occasion for committing the deed. Experience is essential to knowledge, but it is the interpretation and manipulation of experience that constitutes knowledge about the world. To know is to make sense of experience.
The discipline of "making sense" has, since Heidegger, been known as hermeneutics--an interpretive method based on processes employed in everyday life. All understanding is guided by hermeneutics, determined in part by our finite existence in time, history, and culture (Reason and Rowan, 1981). It is one of the canons of this activity that all interpretations are created to show the meaning of phenomena for the interpreter's own situation. "No one is really interested in understanding something that is totally irrelevant for himself (sic) and for the society in which he lives" (Kockelmans, 1975). We are interested in those things that excite us because of our political commitments, because of our personal history, because of our vested interest in status, love, and security. Knowledge, infused as it is with our quiet and not so quiet passions and commitments, offers one of our best hopes for a humane social reconstruction. But, as Gouldner points out, its strength is also its weakness. Knowledge is also historically shaped by forces that embody limits and pathologies (1979, p.5).
Research: Where Knowledge Meets Power
While researchers have traditionally aspired to disinterestedness in their quest for knowledge, knowledge in which no one is interested is unlikely to be remembered, much less published. Interests are frequently hidden and difficult to determine. Economic, political and social systems ascribe "interests" to participants in those systems in ways that are subtle and at times clandestine. Interests of a group are, for example, easily confused with the interests of those who hold power within the group (Davidson, 1995). Workers, for example, are assumed to need skills and knowledge which, in actuality, represent the corporate interests of management.
Major industries have grown for the specific purpose of creating and defining "wants," advertising and educational systems among them. Such interests and "needs," to the extent they are destructive of self or environment, can hardly be held to represent genuine interests. They rather represent the corporate and institutional interests of big business and the growing professional classes. The "disinterestedness" of traditional research represents such a systemic interest nurtured and sustained by academics in order to maintain a position of privilege and protect their monopoly over the production and legitimation of knowledge.
Reason and Rowan have concluded that "what people put forward as the truth is always related in some very powerful way to what they want to be true" (1981, p. 136). The challenge is to determine how "what we want to be true" and the ideals and values upon which that "want" is based are socially determined. What instruments of power mold and shape our desires, our expectations, and our vision? Since it is by virtue of these wants that we grant the attribute of "true" to certain propositions and "false" to others, how is it that these criteria for the validation of knowledge come to be shared? How are "judges of truth" selected and what are the mechanisms for the social determination of legitimate knowledge?
Michel Foucault addresses these questions. For him, "truth" is a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, and distribution of statements or "discourses." In his 1970 lecture on "The Order of Discourse" he shows how rules for the formation of knowledge are linked to the operation of power. Discourses not only exhibit internal principles of logic and order. They are bound by regulations enforced through social practices which include employment and tenure, juried selection of articles and papers, and invitations to join panels of late night talk shows.
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Truth isn't outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics" of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true: the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned, the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth, the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true (Foucault, 1980, p. 131). |
Thus truth is linked in circular fashion with the system of power which sustains it and to the effects of power which it induces. It is this reciprocal causal interaction that Foucault calls a "regime of truth." Knowledge is constituted by power either by exclusion or by inclusion. On the one hand, exclusion occurs through invalidation in which the conceptual framework of a dominant ideology is used to attack and exclude deviant forms of discourse. On the other hand, exclusion also occurs by inattention when counter-discourses are simply not seen or are beyond the purview of "mainstream" thought.
Inclusion, however, is a far more complex phenomenon. It occurs whenever political assumptions--that is, assumptions about social relations of power--are embedded in the very fabric of discourse. As embedded concepts, these assumptions appear to be neutral, but nonetheless function to buttress and support dominant forms of power.
Exclusion
The exclusion of discourse which deviates from institutional interests is the point and counterpoint by which knowledge is produced. An example from the field of adult education is found in the "deschooling" controversy which grew out of discussions at the Center for International Documentation. Illich (1970) challenged prevalent thinking concerning the foundations of modern educational systems and the history of schooling. His discourse was built on a framework which combined a personalist psychology with critical theory and analysis. Despite the fact that this discourse was built on concepts central to the theoretical and practical posture of adult educators--the voluntary nature of learning and self-direction--the discourse itself was almost totally neglected in the body of knowledge included in the curriculum of graduate study in adult education. While the conflict has been acknowledged occasionally in foundations studies (Elias and Merriam, 1980), it is the implied purpose of foundations to give emphasis to those frames of reference and modes of discourse upon which dominant forms of practice have been constructed. The structural dominance of schooling models in adult education demands the exclusion (or minimization) of discourse which contravenes this practice.
But how could it be otherwise? How could candidates for advanced degrees which will qualify them for privileges within an adult education bureaucracy be expected to seriously consider a critique of the very foundations upon which their future security is premised? And how could professors of adult education (or professors in any field of study) retain their psychic equilibrium while struggling to establish their peership with university faculties and simultaneously entertain forms of discourse which demystify and devalue the structures and purpose of the university?
Inclusion
More difficult to perceive is the inclusion of concepts and forms of discourse which positively reinforce and even constitute relations of power. Needed is methodical clarification of levels of meaning which surround key concepts in a mode of discourse, deriving clues both from the context in which the concepts are expressed and the operational applications of the concepts in day-to-day life. Both Foucault (1965) and Thomas Szasz (1970) provided early examples of this form of analysis in their studies of the concept of "madness"-- Madness and Civilization and Ideology and Insanity, respectively. The central theme of these independent studies is that madness does not signify a "reality," but rather posits an interpretation of social deviance. It has proven economically and politically advantageous to incarcerate those who resist patterns of behavior imposed by the State--reinforced by "common sense"--under the guise of treatment, rather than to subject them to more overt forms of punishment. Thus a new theoretical discourse in the form of the "science" of mental health enters the university's curriculum as guardian of social and political practices--a discourse which legitimizes followers of the social order as "sane" and denounces deviants as "mad."
In another example more specifically related to adult education, considerable attention has been given to the concept of "need." Of special note is the work of Marie Rolland-Barker (1982) whose analysis of Lindeman, Bergevin and Knowles enabled her to elaborate a conceptual framework in which usually embedded political and ethical questions were brought to the surface. Who determines need? How are needs influenced or induced as "felt need?" To what extent is "need" an historical construct used to legitimize the imposition of bureaucratic services? Do not adult educators need illiterates, in whose service they find gainful employment, more than illiterates need them? More recently, Collins (1991) has taken up this theme:
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Even though true needs cannot be identified by merely asking people what they want, it is not the role of adult educators to make the actual distinctions on behalf of others. Rather, their task is to organize pedagogical situations where it becomes possible to understand more clearly how needs are constituted, whose interests are served, and in what ways they emerge in the context of everyday lives (p. 68). |
A second example from the field of adult education is found in Kenneth Levine's analysis of functional literacy (1982). "Functional literacy," currently used to justify a variety of workplace and job-related programs, is insidiously ambiguous, while at the same time promoting a comfortable, but illusory consensus about the effects of literacy both for learners and society. Levine notes that the value ascribed to literacy is historically and culturally conditioned. In a hierarchy based on merit, the "competencies" included in the notion of functional literacy are constantly in flux. Wide possession of a particular literacy will devalue it. The concept of functional literacy is thus placed beyond the reach of any strictly empirical operationalizing procedure.
The theory of functional literacy ignores what Hirsch calls the "positional economy" (1977)--that is, goods, services, or social relationships whose high value is based on scarcity. Once some people stand on tiptoe in order to get a better view, others will be forced to do the same, everyone ending up in their original relative position. Functional literacy trades on the prior existence of concealed assumptions about the nature and functions of literacy in society which, in turn, are related to prevalent notions of citizen rights and the good life, both of which are politically structured to maintain both the privileged position of the already literate and the relatively "underprivileged" position of the newly literate.
These examples provide an observable set of political and historical relations between concepts--madness, need, functional literacy--, on the one hand, and social institutions and the relations of power, on the other. The effectiveness and stability of power rests on the installation of a commonly agreed-upon font of "truth," a "common sense," which supports the status quo. Knowledge, primarily a product of universities and other State-sanctioned institutions, becomes an expression of pervasive and dominant relations of power in society.
Explaining Experience in the Face of Power
The crisis facing world economic and political systems demands an almost constant rethinking of explanations of experience. The old ways of making sense no longer work and we are increasingly challenged to devise new ones. A liberal promise of full employment now yields to enthusiasm for a hoped-for, single digit margin of joblessness. Immigrant labor, once essential to the high profits of agribusiness, now is used to explain reductions in real income and to support new restrictions on immigration and the demand for "English-only." Workers now learn to blame themselves for being "less productive" than their counterparts in Japan and Germany, thus justifying union "give backs" and massive reductions in the workforce.
All of this requires the collective energies of persons and institutions responsible for the production and dissemination of knowledge. Foucault has written, "A wide range of professionals (teachers, psychiatrists, educators of all kinds, etc.) will be called upon to exercise functions that have traditionally belonged to the police" (1977, p. 212). Political ideology has assumed greater importance in reviewing political rhetoric, whether in the stump speeches of presidential candidates or in the "Contract with America." Controls on learning resources--access to information, travel to disfavored countries, etc.--forestall the development of explanations which counter dominant discourse.
As soft repression becomes harder, it is useful to look to the not-so-distant historical lessons of countries where the interests of power are unscrupulously enforced. In El Salvador, the university was simply closed so that only the rich, who could afford to send their children out of the country, could provide for a college education. In Guatemala, progressive faculty members were commonly shot in the streets, to be replaced in their classrooms with military personnel. In Bolivia, close to three hundred professors were executed, representing a monumental loss of resources to so small a country. It is, perhaps, surprising in the context of United States' campuses in the 1990's to find academics taken so seriously.
Outside of dictatorships and military juntas, the role of academics is less overt, less the object of constant surveillance. On the third level of power, the politics of officially-sanctioned knowledge is always a matter of compromise. Michael Apple (1993), speaking of compromise, notes:
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These, of course, are not compromises between or among equals. Those in dominance almost always have more power to define what counts as a need or a problem and what an appropriate response to it should be. But these compromises are never stable. They almost always leave or create space for more democratic action (p. 10). |
Given this situation, what are we as researchers and teachers to do? Having seen the relationship between knowledge and power, we cannot naively assume to free ourselves and the knowledge we produce from political influence or consequences. Power is always a contextual element in our efforts to explain the world--the subtle, lifelong influence of our privilege as academics is easy to ignore--and enters into our explanations through the reciprocal spiral of exclusion and inclusion. So where do we begin.
Research is grounded in autobiography, even if unacknowledged. Research--the systematic and rigorous examination of experience--begins with the systematic and rigorous examination of the political and social commitments of the researcher. For whom do we work? Whose interests are best served by our explanations of the world? What questions do we include and what questions do we exclude in order to focus on those interests? These are complex questions, as we have seen, requiring many layers of analysis as we move from the superficial to the infrastructural--the sub-theoretical level of domain assumptions and sentiments which both liberate and constrain our thought. Without autobiographical self-reflection the knowledge we produce is likely to be shaped and manipulated by interests we neither comprehend nor control.
But to know ourselves is not to change our behavior. Our reflections might leave us conscious, as well as conscientious servants of a world order which provides us with sufficient income, privilege and security. Professors and students alike might continue to ignore the political implications of their research, no longer because of adherence to academic "neutrality" or a homogenistic notion of "truth," but rather because of the decision to avoid conflict with those who provide salaries, grades, or status. At issue is an ethical question which each researcher must address: not whether to serve political interests, but which political, economic, and class interests to serve. The question brings to consciousness a possible choice between narrow self- interest and the interests of those without position, reputation, status, or privilege. Freire calls this possible fragmentation of self, "class suicide" (1978).
But for those of us who are not suicidal, but nonetheless see our solipsistic preoccupation with greater and greater clarity about less and less as nothing more than the insulation of existing practices from the onslaught of critical questions, what then are we to do? Given the pervasive interlocking of power and explanation, we do not ask how do we free knowledge from the influence of power, but rather how do we in collaboration with others--that is, democratically--participate in the creation of informed, reflective, and knowledgeable power. In addressing such a question, the task of research would be to engage in shared discourse through the exercise of shared power. This has been the underlying dynamism of Freire's pedagogy in developing nations: inquiry linked to political struggle and immediate gains through social reconstruction is highly productive of shared discourse, new knowledge, and literacy seen not as technical mastery over words, but as attaining a voice.
There are at least three tasks to which time and energy might be directed. First, further development of meta-research--research on research--is essential as a means of subjecting methodologies and the politics embedded within them to greater scrutiny. Second, researchers should expand their understanding (and occupation) of "open spaces" in which the alienating interests of power are not as dominant--spaces that are the result of contradictions within institutions and systems supporting the production of knowledge. Finally, divesting themselves of professional pretensions, researchers should encourage the further development of participatory forms of research which involve those without power who have usually been merely the objects of inquiry.
Research on Research
Research on research brings us into contact with the processes by which we explain our experiences and create meaning. Just as objects which are too small or too far distant require instruments to be seen, so do complex questions require tools in order to be addressed. Tools not only sharpen focus, they also distort, give false emphasis to insignificant detail, and force interpretations. Tools are limiting, as well as empowering. At times, the sharp focus itself might block our vision. Clarity, as Gouldner points out, sometimes depends on poor rather than good vision, blurring complex details in order to better see the main structure (1979, p. 8).
Tools are also limiting in another way. It has been noted that we shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us. The framework within which we operationalize our research limits the questions which we can reasonably ask. As the psychologist, Abraham Maslow, noted, "If our only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like nails." If our only tool for research is mathematical manipulation, then our "meaningful" experiences will be reduced to those that can be measured. The results might be statistically significant, but politically (and humanly) insignificant; the choice as to whether to be deeply interesting or accurately boring becomes a function of our tools.
The task of meta-research should ultimately be about expanding the tools at our disposal, knowing the limits and biases of each, drawing on multiple paradigms and disciplines, to achieve binocular vision and thus to gain perspective. The bureaucratic organization of knowledge by discipline separates research according to specialized and discrete tools which are possessively clung to by scholars. Exclusive ownership of these tools brings privileges which scholars seek to protect, much as carpenters and electricians seek to protect their privileges through closed union shops.
Disciplines are frequently defined according the methods employed in their attempt to explain the world. Crossing the barrier of a discipline can result in cynical rejection by peers on both sides of the barrier. A strategic compromise is the establishment of interdisciplinary alliances which bring together researchers from many fields to pursue common inquiries.
Occupying Open Spaces
The potential for such an alliance derives from contradictions within the social organization of the university. Academic departments of education, grounded in a psychological paradigm, have fine tuned research tools for the detailed measurement of educational systems and learning within those systems, but within the limits of that paradigm failed to produce compelling theories of learning outside the guided mediation of schooling. Even Alan Tough (1971), in his study of "independent" adult learning projects, was forced to operationalize his definition of learning as a form of do-it-yourself schooling. This is not to say that there is not readily at hand tools to deal with more transcendent and critical questions about learning and society. An increasing number of adult education researchers have dealt with these questions, and in doing so have moved outside the narrower confines of educational discourse and found open spaces sustained by alternate paradigms for the production of knowledge.
Open spaces for educational research have been created by critical theory (Hart, 1992; Apple, 1993; Mezirow, 1994; Welton, 1995), revisionist history (Schied, 1993), phenomenology (Collins, 1991; Stanage, 1987), ethnography (Thomas, 1993) and other cross-disciplinary approaches to explanation--each providing a frame of reference which places the researcher, her commitments and allegiances, in full view. Such frames, legitimized within academic disciplines, nonetheless provide open space for the juxtaposition and combination of disciplines which allows for diverse and, at times, divergent points of view. This binocular (or multi-ocular) vision leads to shared discourse across barriers and outside the limits our respective fields.
Participatory Research
Shared discourse is the result of a shared process of inquiry. Explanation of human phenomena--the assumed focus of educational research--needs to be grounded in the experiences of those it purports to explain, to involve a collaboration, if not a blurring of the distinction between the researcher and the subject of research. The "truth" of our discourse is less a function of the relationship between our propositions and the world than it is a function of the relationship between and among knowers. That is, our constructs find their validity intersubjectively, when they transcend the knowledge of a single knower.
Fact, empirically grounded in experience, measurable, and which a single researcher can replicate alone, is not the goal of research. The fundamental and ultimate concern of research is explanation--knowledge about the world which makes sense of experience and which is never simply reducible to statements of "fact." Influences of power and political context are always present, even when not objects of attention. The significance of new knowledge, the meaning-fulness of our research, rests on the thoroughness with which we have understood the intersubjective and political context of our discourse. The art of explaining is dialogical. It moves in propositional form through one frame of reference to another, from knower to knower, being modified, amended, revised, abridged, contradicted, focused, broadened in cross-disciplinary reinterpretation. It is heterogenistic, yielding many "truths."
The professional vested interest of academic researchers counters: some participants in this dialogue are better qualified to determine the truth of the matter, have mastery of more sophisticated tools of analysis, and bring to bear a far greater wealth of background resources. Clearly, making sense of the world is too important a task to be left in the hands of amateurs.
Judgments about better qualifications, more sophisticated tools, and greater resources are judgments of value which are, in part, assertions of power and privilege. To the extent that tools and resources have value, they are valued by all--perhaps even more by those who do not possess them. To the extent they are the accouterments of political position and privilege, they will require institutions and sanctions to preserve their alleged value. Community activists might not ask researchers for an original copy of their credentials, but they respect any person's ability to comprehend and explain complex matters relating to the issues of power and human rights with which they struggle.
Antonio Gramsci (1971) observed that intellectuality has been traditionally identified with an academic elite whose political attachments to their historic class are barely concealed. Nonetheless, intellectuality is an attribute of all. The fact that it is identified with an elite is merely an expression of powerful class interests which limit access to the university and the means by which intellectuality is legitimized. There is another manifestation of intellectuality which emerges among the thinking and organizing elements of every social class, which Gramsci calls the "organic intellectual," whose work it is to develop knowledge specifically related to the exercise of power within that class (pp. 5-7). Such intellectuals play an essential role in social movements for democratic change.
Adult education in the United States has in its historic origins an inexorable link with movements for social change. From the exhortations of Edward Lindeman (1989) at the birth of adult education as a field of study to the remarkable achievements of the Highlander Center in Tennessee (Horton and Freire, 1990), adult education has as a central theme the building of democracy through ongoing reflection and action. Consistent with this theme has been the development of "participatory research" as a concept which embraced the role of common people--whom Myles Horton called the "uncommon common people"--in the production of knowledge. This approach to research identifies adult learning, not as assimilation of the explanations of others--an emphasis within school-based education--, but rather as the production of meaning and knowledge. Adult education is research (Hall, 1977; Parks et al., 1993).
Adult education contains within its own pedagogical forms and social purposes the framework for redefining research in the face of power. To the extent that issues of power are articulated in situations wherein power holds dominion and by those who are held in its grasp, to that extent can explanations and meanings be developed which inform strategies for change. The aim of adult education for Lindeman (or of participatory research for Hall) is not to inform minds, but to transform society. It is this vision of researcher as educator which allows us to move beyond knowledge of the world, to an informed reconstruction of the social order.
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