Research and the Theoretical Field - Pauldowling.me

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‘postmodernist/poststructuralist/social-constructivist discourse’. Essentially,
this seems to be because it is a weapon that backfires along the lines of the
argument that Moore and Muller make about voice discourses in 2-5 above.
This being the case, its seductive powers must be resisted. The seduction
presumably lies in the explicit challenges to prevalent patterns of domination
and oppression that are made in much of the work that these critics are
challenging. Michael Young makes a similar point in the context of
educational studies:
... there could be serious consequences if, during their training, intending
teachers learn not only that all curriculum knowledge is socially constructed, but
that it inevitably reflects the values and interests of the dominant class. For
example, it could appear to follow that the same claims to objectivity could be
made for the everyday mathematics of the street market as are made for the
mathematics of the text book. From a postmodernist perspective, the only
difference between the two types of mathematics would be that the latter reflects
the dominant perspective shared by professional teachers and mathematicians.
The limited scope, beyond a very specific set of contexts, of street or what has
become known as ethnomathematics, can be easily forgotten. This kind of
sociological approach to mathematics can undermine the curriculum rationale for
teaching formal mathematics at all. The issue is, of course, not just concerned
with mathematics; it applies to all curriculum subjects. If, in literary studies,
students learn that there are no criteria for claiming the superiority of Jane
Austen over Neighbours or Home and Away, then the only basis for selection of
texts for the English literature curriculum that we are left with is the white middleclass
biases and prejudices of teachers or curriculum policy-makers, on the one
hand, or what students want, a kind of consumer approach, on the other. It is the
possibility that a sociological view of knowledge might actually influence the
ways that teachers think about how and what they teach that makes the
knowledge question so much more problematic in the sociology of education
than in intellectual fields such as cultural and literary studies, which are far more
insulated from any practice external to themselves.
(Young, 2000; pp. 528-9)
Writing with Rob Moore a year later, Young gives us some indication of why
he thinks that Jane Austin should be considered to be superior to Neighbours
or Home and Away:
There are good reasons why we still want people to read Jane Austen's novels,
which are not weakened by the narrow community that she wrote about. Her
novels are situated in time and context, but they are also timeless in the issues
that they explore. One can make a slightly different kind of argument for keeping
Newton's laws of motion and Mendeleev's Periodic Table on science syllabuses;
both are examples of knowledge that remains powerful and transcends its origins
in a particular social context.
(Moore & Young, 2001; p. 450)
Moore and Young are arguing for what they refer to as a social realist
approach that grounds objectivity in the practices of legitimate communities or
networks of experts; so that which physicists as physicists regard as ‘true’ is
‘true’. This view, they claim, stands opposed to ‘postmodern theories’. Oddly,
a similar kind of claim can also be made by a prominent postmodernist literary
critic, here is Stanley Fish:
I assert, and assert without contradiction, that post-modernist accounts of how
disciplines come into being are correct, but that such accounts, rather than telling
RESEARCH & THE THEORETICAL FIELD