40.013 - PDC22: Research Toward Equity and Justice: The Gordon Paradigm of Inquiry and Practice

Session Type: Professional Development Course

Abstract

This professional development course introduces both the career work and contributions of Edmund W. Gordon as well as what we have come to call the Gordon Paradigm of Inquiry and Practice. The Gordon Paradigm of Inquiry and Practice represents a shift in research on the education and human development of marginalized groups and the socially constituted “other” or “different.” This has been a paradigmatic revolution away from scholarship that has understood difference to be based on biological determinism, social deficiency, or culture of poverty to a rather Marxist educational and cultural psychological lens on human learning and development of all persons. The Gordon Paradigm has not adhered to disciplinary boundaries but instead has been purposefully transdisciplinary, theoretically promiscuous, and methodologically agnostic. In other words, The Gordon Paradigm has been marked by a particular type of intellectual hunger, habits of mind, and scholarly orientation that is a perspectivist posture toward knowledge production for social understanding, with the paramount concern for trying to better the lives of the marginalized.

Sub Unit

• Professional Development and Training Committee

Instructors

• Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman, The University of Pennsylvania

• Louis M. Gomez, University of California - Los Angeles

• Stafford Hood, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University

• Edmund W. Gordon, Teachers College, Columbia University

• William T. Trent, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• David Wall Rice, Morehouse College

• Eleanor Armour-Thomas, Queens College - CUNY

• Carol Camp Yeakey, Washington University in St. Louis