Of Tooth Fairies and Rabbit Holes: On Seeking the Real in an Unreal World

• In Event: Of Life Real and Unreal: An Ethics of the Heart

Abstract

When I was a doctoral student, in the mid-1990s, I experienced a discomfiting period of profound paradigmatic disequilibrium, in which I lived contradictions and critiques I could not yet articulate in any coherent way. At a pivotal moment in the conceptualization of my dissertation inquiry, I happened upon the collaborative work of Lous Hesushius and Keith Ballard (1996) . In this text, the authors place epistemological shifts such as the one I was experiencing squarely in the context of broader shifts in intellectual paradigms. While this collective inquiry began as an exploration of experiences with shifting and alternative epistemologies, contributing authors report nearly always experiencing these epistemological shifts as preceding an accompanying shift in a broader intellectual paradigm, specifically, the shift from a “quantitative, positivist epistemological framework to a qualitative, interpretive one,” a shift that involves a “fundamental deconstruction and reconstruction of agreements about what counts as real and how we allow each other to claim knowledge” (p. 2). For Heshusuis and Ballard both, this shift in paradigmatic assumptions was not consciously embarked upon, nor was it brought about by any “systematically carried out intellectual pursuit” (p. 2). Rather:
When we started to consciously reflect on how we had changed our most basic beliefs, we had to acknowledge that we knew, before we could account for it intellectually, that we no longer believed in what we were doing or in what we were being taught. (p. 2)
Although I was unable at the time to articulate the source of my ambivalence during this experience, I now understand it as an epistemological (and even ontological) incongruence, which was itself part of the larger process of my own paradigmatic transition from positivism to interpretivism in my thinking—not just about teaching, or learning, but fundamentally about the ways in which we come to know and construct the world.

Author

• Alicia A. Broderick, Teachers College, Columbia University