The Paradigm Wars and Their Aftermath A “Historical” Sketch of Research on Teaching Since 1989

Abstract

Raging during the 1980s, the Paradigm Wars resulted in the demise of objectivity-seeking quantitative research on teaching—a victim of putatively devastating attacks from anti-naturalists, interpretivists, and critical theorists. Subsequently, the interpretivists' ethnographic studies flourished, enhancing the cultural appropriateness of schooling, and critical theorists' analyses fostered the struggles for power for the poor, non-Whites, and women. Two alternative versions of the aftermath are also conceivable. Pragmatism and Popper's piecemeal social engineering offer paths toward a productive rapprochement of the paradigms, one guided by the moral obligations of educational research.