Social Construction of Reality - Bad Request

communities of knowledgeable peers” (p. 54). He goes on to state that, indeed, “what we
know is a conversational artifact…it means that knowledge is what we can explain to one
another’s satisfaction” (p. 118). Preskill and Torres’ model for evaluative inquiry is
predicated upon dialogue and enlarged via other pathways which are themselves largely,
though certainly not exclusively, conversational: reflection, asking questions, identifying
and clarifying values, beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge. Indeed, it is important to
note that dialogue and conversation can, in fact, take written forms as well as spoken.
Written language is another vital expression of communication. It manifests its
presence for individuals as both consumers and producers, much the same way verbal
language does. Language materializes as text to be read. Bruffee (1999) explains “by
reading, we acquire fluency in the language of the text and make it our own.
…conversely, we make the authors we have read members of our community” (p. 8). We
encounter such texts in a variety of circumstances. Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) iterate
the variety of forms that language can take, both in the spoken and written form as it
reifies knowledge: “schemata, mental models, beliefs, and perceptions…metaphors,
analogies, concepts, hypothesis” (pp. 8, 64). They explain that it is primarily through
writing that language is able to convert tacit knowledge into knowledge that can be
articulated. Starratt (2003) explores the relationship between knowledge, meaning, social
activity and notes that when learners set out to inquire, to solve problems, it “involves
multiple texts, experiments, and perspectives in the generating of meaning” (p. 37).
Electronic surveying. The function of this section is to provide an overview of the
uses and applications of electronic surveying, particularly as it fits within the qualitative
design of this study. There were two factors specifically related to this study which
39