Empirical Analytic paradigm

The empirical analytic paradigm in curriculum studies derives from intellectual traditions of empiricism and philosophical or conceptual analysis. Empiricism refers to derivation of knowledge from experience, usually by scientific inquiry, and the analytic tradition in philosophy gives careful attention to definitions of concepts and related dimensions of language. Thus, the empirical analytic paradigm in curriculum studies bespeaks this orientation applied to curriculum matters.

The curriculum field began at the onset of the 20th century with an orientation to inquiry that melded everyday problem solving with prescriptive philosophizing derived from an amalgam of philosophical traditions: realism, idealism, scholasticism, naturalism, and pragmatism. Based on these origins, curriculum inquiry prior to 1950 was geared primarily toward developing and revising curriculum for schools. In the 1950s, when normal schools, the main purveyors of teacher training, sought credibility in academe and joined with 4-year colleges and universities, they felt obligated to become more research oriented. Thus, they moved from what William Pinar has labeled traditionalists to conceptual empiricists. Conceptual empiricists utilized forms of inquiry from the empirical analytic paradigm. Enamored by successes in science and technology, they attempted to develop a science of education and more specifically of curriculum development and design. Thus, they patterned their inquiries after natural sciences and developed research, development, and dissemination models. By the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, scientist and curriculum theorist Joseph J. Schwab thoroughly critiqued this move to achieve intellectual credibility. He argued that these would-be researchers used a language of inquiry that did not fit the kinds of problems faced in curriculum. Using Aristotle's distinction between theoretical and practical inquiry, Schwab castigated advocates of conceptual empirical or empirical analytic inquiry as being too theoretic in the sense that theoretic meant starting from a problem source in the state of mind of researchers, one that defines problems across many situations based on similarities and ignoring differences that make the situations unique. He argued for practical inquiry that focused on actual states of affairs separately, not unwarranted generalizations. Similarly, he criticized the method of inquiry that can be characterized as induction and hypothetical deduction for fostering generalized knowledge and misguided attempts to derive laws of education akin to laws of gravitation or motion in physics. Instead, he advocated inquiry through interaction with situations and their contexts or milieus and said that practical inquiry is content with situationally specific insights. Finally, he criticized the end of theoretical, conceptual empiricist, and empirical analytic inquiry for seeking knowledge qua knowledge, or more sarcastically, for the sake of publication only, and he advocated ends of knowledge that provide ethically and politically defensible decision and action.

Schwab's critique of empirical analytic inquiry was shared by many, and in the 1970s, he warned on many occasions of the inappropriateness of [Page 333]mimicry of natural sciences. In fact, he contended that the mimicry was based on vastly delayed understanding. For instance, the statistical empiricism adopted and adapted by social scientists and educational researchers in the early 20th century was already outmoded for natural sciences, which had moved into more theory-oriented work, and by the time social scientists and psychologists took up theory, natural scientists had moved to situational analysis, which is akin to the practical inquiry that Schwab advocated for the curriculum field. Schwab also criticized the propensity for specialization that narrows perspective and is a strong feature of empirical analytic work. He declared that specialists in related disciplines (education, sociology, anthropology, psychology) are unaware of relevant knowledge among such disciplines. He considered it even more harmful that researchers in subdivisions within disciplines or areas of study are unaware of insights in adjacent subdivisions (e.g., cognitive, clinical, development, behavioral, and psychoanalytic psychology). Finally, he railed against the propensity of educational researchers to seek credibility at even the cost of integrity, instead of creating inquiry that fits the subject matter with which they need to inquire.

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