The Levels of Analysis within the Curriculum: Problematizing Methods

• In Event: Theoretical Approaches

Abstract

Internationalizing the curriculum to de-colonize it requires going much beyond the introduction of a few non-Western perspectives in a reading schedule. It is necessary to embrace epistemological, ontological and cosmological pluralism in teaching. However, for this to be effective within the political context of our discipline, we also need to reflect on what meta-theoretical pluralism means for our disciplinary understanding of the scientific method (i.e., how we conceptualize what constitutes and what does not constitute method), scientific rigor (whether non-positivist/empiricist methods may also be considered rigorous), and policy-relevance (which has traditionally been constituted within what Robert Cox has called “problem-solving theory”, thus discounting the policy-relevance of critical theory). In other words, teaching through pluralism is incompatible with valuing a singular empirical-level understanding of good science—i.e., the positivist/empiricist framework—in teaching.
While this debate has greater disciplinary significance beyond the classroom, the latter holds a special standing as a formative space that can incentivize either innovation or reproduction for the discipline as a whole. It is the place where future policy-makers and professors receive a first professional foundation. In this sense, course design that purposefully integrates pluralism at multiple levels—the philosophical, the theoretical, and the practical-empirical—is necessary if we are not to reproduce Western ways of thinking. If the first two levels are considered but the third ignored, the positivist mode of thinking will continue to superimpose itself, acritically, onto the added non-Western perspectives.

Author

• Rafael Alexandre Mello, Bates College