Graduate and Undergraduate Studies

In Fourth Generation Evaluation Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln espouse a monist, cognitive rhetoric of relativism and subjectivism but practice a form of evaluation that takes a dualist social stance towards "observation data" and a quasi-monist/dualist stance towards "linguistic data. " Their conceptualization of evaluands, the objects of evaluation inquiries, is fully dualist. I argue that the appropriate metaphysic and methodology for constructionist studies in evaluation is, and must be, social dualist. Relativist and subjectivist rhetoric is not useful, but consensual methodology of evaluation proposed by Guba and Lincoln is useful. For over three decades there has been notable, continuing interest in the nature and forms of scientific inquiry. Dating from Winch's The Idea of Social Science (1958) and Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolt&ions (1962) there have been debates generating much heat, though perhaps not enough light, on how the study of human action and artifacts ought to be approached. Under the banner of "constructionism" (or "constructivism") a number of approaches within different disciplines, across different types of inquiry, have taken shape, holding to a basic view that the objects of human science inquiry are, in some sense, constructed by what persons (lay persons and professional analysts) do. Such approaches are usually contrasted to ones which take the objects of inquiry to be naturally occurring, objective, or more provocatively, "real." Within the field of evaluation the authors who have most forcefully and clearly drawn the lines of debate in this way are Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln in their book Fourth Generation Evaluation (1989).

The fornzation of the concept "sense making practices" in ethnomethodology receives attention. The referents and uses of the concept suggest that "sense making practices" form a family rather than a class. Thus claims abottt new family members rim a risk o f intelligibility. Finally, the search f o r rtniversully invariant properties is frrndamentally misguided. Family membership is a matter of family resemblance.

For any article or presentation there is the question of why speak, why communicate (and why listen and why read). This question becomes salient because of the more general question of how one should live. The question "how should I live?" can arise only within a collection of normative orders, a culture, where "how should one live?" is a prior question. How one should live, is how I should live. Scientific inquiry cannot decide this question, nor is there an answer in general to this kind of question. However, inquiry can deliver some of what we need to know in order to make reasoned judgments in particular situations about how to act to achieve some end. Part of what inquiry can deliver is knowledge that certain actions satisfy certain values. In the case of ethnomethodological inquiry, considered as actions in the world, a number of questions arise. What is the value of doing ethnomethodology (call it EM), and what is the value of studying and doing the things studied by ethnomethodologists? Here I wish to address four such questions, then turn to an illustration of the type of applied ethnomethodology which follows from the way I have answered these questions. My example of applied EM deals with the local rationality, the good sense, of practices employed by teachers in the recitation phase of group reading lessons at the Primary level.

A journal titled Teaching & Learning is perfectly situated by title and audi ence, as a place for reflections on the wide-ranging impact of a focus on learning within a Faculty of Education. As the new dean, I want to share ideas about learning that excite and animate us daily to become The Learning Faculty. In particular, I want to tell you what we are doing at the Faculty of Education to identify the characteristics of graduates that we most value. We need your ideas, as administrators and teachers, about the characteristics that teachers will need in the coming decades so that we, collectively, can ensure that graduates of Brock University pre-service and in-service degree programs are prepared to serve the needs of Ontario.