Research is generally regarded as falling within the scholarship of discovery. However, here authors and editors also explore the application of the paradigms to the scholarships more broadly, including the application of the paradigms to the scholarships of integration, application, teaching, and engagement. We have closely linked the concept of scholarship to policy directions in universities and in other bodies and agencies that influence or govern them. We conclude that the range of paradigms and scholarships available to academics provides a rich array of possibilities for the creation of new understandings and new approaches to scholarly work. The challenge we pose, however, is to encourage academics to be bold enough to work in different paradigms and scholarships from those that are “traditionally” associated with specific disciplines. We also discuss forces that militate against academics daring to be different.
TopParadigms Of Education Research: Patterns And Interpretations
We have focused attention in this book on six paradigms of scholarship and research – the positivist, neo-positivist, interpretivist, pragmatic, transformative and supercomplexity. In Chapters 1 and 2 of this book, we have provided detailed descriptions and discussions about each of the paradigms proposed. Such detailed descriptions are frequently missing in research texts and research methods courses, and here we set out to explicitly fill that gap and showcase the paradigm as the central determining element in research and in scholarship of all kinds. Such understandings, we claim, are critical for academics, research scholars and their supervisors, leaders and managers in higher education, and also for editors and editorial boards when determining the worth of submitted articles for publication.
A number of authors have advanced understandings of prevailing research paradigms in education and the social sciences (see Table 1). If we set aside classifications based on the distinction between quantitative and qualitative research (as we have done in Chapter 1, seeing quantitative and qualitative as relating to the nature of the data and data analysis tools rather than as the ontological underpinnings of research) then, while there are important conceptual distinctions reflected in the differing nomenclature employed, there is similarity in the range of research paradigms identified. Supercomplexity is a research paradigm that we have added, drawing on the work of Barnett (Barnett, 1990; see also Chapter 13). We have illustrated how each research paradigm reflects a particular ontology, epistemology, axiology, intent or motivation and related outcome. It has been shown that paradigms, as well as being organizational and analytical devices used to categorize research undertakings, can be concepts that transform thinking about oneself as a scholar, a teacher or a learner.
Table 1. Recent portrayals of paradigms in education and the social sciences
| Morgan (2006) | | | |
| Quantitative | Qualitative | Complementary | | | |
| Guba & Lincoln (2005) | |
| Positivist | Post-Positivism | Constructivist | Critical Theories | Participatory | |
| Mertens (2010) | |
[Positivist
Superseded] | Post-Positivist | Pragmatic | Constructivist | Transformative | |
| Teddlie & Tashakkore (2009) | |
| Positivist | Post-Positivist | Pragmatic | Constructivist | Transformative | |
| Ling & Ling (2017) |
| Positivist | Neo-Positivist | Pragmatic | Interpretivist | Transformative | Supercomplexity |