Metodologiczna rekonstrukcja warunków tworzenia wiedzy – wybrane zagadnienia
Methodological reconstruction of knowledge creation conditions – selected problems

Author(s): Danuta Urbaniak-Zając, Jacek Piekarski
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Education, Sociology of Education, Pedagogy
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: empirical research methodology; scientific criticism; research method
Summary/Abstract: The publication explores methodological questions concerning the creation of knowledge in pedagogy as a discipline rooted in social sciences and humanities, assuming critical reconstruction of the research process as a factor determining the quality of all research practices and considered both as a source condition and a substrate of methodological research. The first part of the publication offers a general characterisation of the perspective adopted by the author. It discusses problems concerning the status of decisions related to the choice of research methods, the issue of presence of the researcher in the research practice, and reflects upon the conditions and possibilities of formulating critical statements in educational sciences. It presents different modalities of understanding criticism, and explores the possibilities of practising “critical methodology” designed as a study of methods of scientific practice criticism in a changing cultural framework. In this part, the various models of criticism are reconstructed (dogmatism, conventionalism, and tactical discretion), as well as the cultural patterns emerging on their basis (inhibition, tolerantism, and presentism). In the second part, the “participatory research perspective” is reconstructed as a perspective related to the “meaningful presence” of the researcher in the research practice. A characterisation of participation as a result of “status mediation” associated with taking the perspective of observer, witness, and causal subject is suggested and the accompanying dilemmas with the related consequences for the construction of a methodological perspective are explored. An example of the use of the outlined proposals is self-description of research activity. The third part provides examples of critical reconstructions of the diverse practices that constitute the research workshop used in the process of empirical research.

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