Multi-Vocal research

Multi-vocal research often embodies the perspectives of diverse sets of authors such as academics, journalists, policy makers, classroom teachers, and parents. This method of writing aims to democratize research in curriculum studies by incorporating multiple perspectives rather than placing in relief the perspectives of a privileged group or dominant epistemic traditions. The term multi-vocal literally means many voices. In the context of curriculum studies, it is used to describe a form of research that represents multiple perspectives. First-person point of view is commonly combined with third-person omniscient narrative to represent a range of positions (often contradictory) on a single issue, phenomenon, or theme. The reading path of multi-vocal research is not arranged conventionally, but is often recursive, makes use of montage, performance, sidebars, white space, visual images, sound-tracks, and found objects. Experiments with multi-vocal research range from book reviews to theoretical arguments, conference presentations, online reports, and ethnographies.

The turn to multi-vocal research in curriculum studies can be traced to poststructuralist principles as well as to two key academic figures: anthropologist Victor Turner (19201983) and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin (18951975). Turner's study of the multiple meanings assigned to a symbol during ritual practices emphasized the multi-vocalic nature of symbols. A single symbol could have more than one referent and, in fact, often does. Turner found that symbols worked during ritual practices to bring together seemingly disparate meanings or themes simultaneously and can only be understood in context and according to the meanings that a community endows it with. Drawing on Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, Turner developed a practice and theory for interpreting symbols that explored the manifest (obvious), latent (partly aware of), and hidden (unaware of) meaning embodied in symbols. The principle of the multi-vocality of symbols resonates to the intentions that often accompany multi-vocal research, especially the intent to portray the insights and understandings that challenge dominant values, beliefs, and policies.

Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher, literary critic and semiotician, emphasized the significant role that social context plays in generating meaning. His scholarship offers a substantive and elaborate conceptual critique of the limits of binary structures and the social, ethical, and aesthetic relevance of creating texts that create a dynamic interplay among many conflicting radiants of meaning. Rather than relying on the principles of a binary system such as openness-closeness, moral-corrupt, sickness-wellness, intelligence-ignorance, Bakhtin emphasizes the importance of creating more complex, multilayered meanings that capture nuance, contradictions, and sustain engagements with indeterminate meanings, for in the context of multi-vocal research, understanding is recognized as inherently incomplete. Bakhtin's suspicion of totalitarian, single-voice, synthetic, monologic forms of representations resonate as well to the ethics that accompany much of the esteemed multi-vocal research in curriculum theory. The central idea is that no one voice should subsume another and that the dynamic interplay of opposing forces be represented in order to further a more just society. Thus, multi-vocal research is rooted in a desire to represent voices that have historically remained beyond the pale in the annals of educational research. Multi-vocal research often seeks to represent those who are marginalized, perceived as untrustworthy, or exceed normative categories for wellness, intelligence, and integrity.

...