World View Theory and Science Education Research

People are purposive, intentional beings. People are creatures of habit and yet full of surprises. People can be quite unpredictable. For these reasons and many others, it is difficult to come to know people in the sense of having a causal understanding of human behavior, which was the modernist project in education. At least this cannot be done as scientists do with moving objects such as particle or projectile motion, for example, or even with the behavior of non-human animal species. What a person can do that an object cannot is to tell you about him or herself, thus helping you to get to know this person. This is of course a different kind of knowing and it suggests that getting to know a broad range of people provides an educator with exemplars of what people in general are like. “Interpretive researchers,” noted Cobern (1993a, p. 936), “do not expect that the procedures of experimental natural science can ever be used to produce general laws of education. Rather, one must come to a greater understanding of what meaning is and how it is created. Similarly, the classroom environment is not to be composed of causal variables which the teacher manipulates to foster learning, but an environment mutually shaped to fit the members of the classroom, both teacher and students.” My research takes it thus as axiomatic that the more educators know about students as people the better educators will be able to teach people as students in their classrooms. Among others, Fenstermacher (1979), Hawkins and Pea (1987), Lythcott (1991), and Shymansky and Kyle (1992) have espoused similar views.