Any inquiry into human behavior is inherently complex. Even with the tools developed in studying non-human phenomena, the quantification of human behavior is wrought with challenges, there is no true independent variable we can control. Conclusions we attempt to reach with the data we do have is laden with uncertainty. Whether a researcher picks a quantitative, mixed-methods, or qualitative methodology, escaping the complicated nature of human beings is difficult. Why not embrace this complexity? In some attempts that have been made in studying educational environments and learning, qualitative data provides something quantitative data does not, context. Describing the environment in which humans learn seems to be attempting to capture as many variables as possible. While many natural sciences scoff at the idea of qualitative data, stories of the lived experiences of students, teachers, communities are prominent in education literature. This is embodied in a direction some education researchers are moving, those orientated towards epistemology and equity.

In my fragmented understanding of epistemology, justified belief is subjective, what is sufficient and valid justification for a particular belief depends on your purpose in holding those beliefs; therefore, knowledge is situated in a social context and this context dictates your reason for holding such beliefs. This idea has been leveraged against the dominate ways of knowing and doing in science education. More concretely, this idea has been used to challenge who gets to decide what is sufficient and valid evidence, as well as how to collect such evidence. For the past 400 years or so, white men have been dictating what methodologies are valid and what is considered sufficient evidence. If a persons capacity to know is denied or questioned because they do not conform to white epistemologies – because of the context of their life – despite empirical fact, that person experiences epistemic oppression, or as Chanda Prescod-Weinstein described it, white empiricism (2020, p. 425-426). If you are skeptical this even occurs, then I suggest you read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. In this book, Robin describes the resistance she experienced proposing a valid methodology in collecting samples but was denied her capacity to know because it was not ‘real’ science.

A general response to this oppression is to elevate the status of other ways of looking at the world, without devaluing mainstream practices of science. Relational epistemologies are one such approach. A relational epistemology is a theory of knowing, developed from the literature studying Indigenous knowledge systems, that acknowledges all entities, human and non-human, exist in a reciprocal dynamic relationship (Pugh et al., 2019, p.427). It seems to me that relational epistemologies recognize the world is a complex place and each entity influences one another. So instead of isolating entities, the complexity of the world is embraced. Is this not a qualitative view of the world? Is this not valid?

An existentialist in crisis,

JLS

References

Prescod-Weinstein, C. (2020). Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 45(2), 421–447. https://doi.org/10.1086/704991

Pugh, P., McGinty, M., & Bang, M. (2019). Relational epistemologies in land-based learning environments: Reasoning about ecological systems and spatial indexing in motion. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 14(2), 425–448. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-019-09922-1