The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education

Cheryl E. Matias

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429614927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education approaches theory as a method for doing research, rather than as a background framework.

Educational research often reduces theory to a framework used only to analyze empirically collected data. In this view theories are not considered methods, and studies that apply them as such are not given credence. This misunderstanding is primarily due to an empiricist stance of educational research, one that lacks understanding of how theories operate methodologically and presumes positivism is the only valid form of research. This limited perspective has serious consequences on essential academic activities: publication, tenure and promotion, grants, and academic awards. Expanding what constitutes methods in critical theoretical educational research, this edited book details 21 educationally just theories and demonstrates how theories are applied as method to various subfields in education. From critical race hermeneutics to Bakhtin's dialogism, each chapter explicates the ideological roots of said theory while teaching us how to apply the theory as method.

This edited book is the first of its kind in educational research. To date, no other book details educationally just theories and clearly explicates how those theories can be applied as methods. With contributions from scholars in the fields of education and qualitative research worldwide, the book will appeal to researchers and graduate students.

1
Critical race hermeneutics

A theoretical method for researching the unconscious of white supremacy in education

Ricky Lee Allen

Introduction

All human communication requires interpretation (Habermas, 1985). A person initiating a linguistic exchange uses mechanical processes, mainly sounds or movements, in an attempt to convey a particular message, with a certain imagined meaning. Yet, they have no control over how the audience makes meaning of the message. Individuals on the other side of a communicative relationship receive sensory stimuli that their brain makes sense of through language, which, as a symbolic representation of the world, may hide as much as it reveals to the interpreter. Moreover, both parties have their own socially and psychologically constructed desires, investments, and motives, which may or not be apparent to one another, or even to themselves.

The same applies to academic research and those who engage in its dis-cursive construction. As a venue for human communication, all educational research is interpretive. Researchers endeavor to convey the meaning they make of surveys, interviews, and bodies of research literature. They also engage in conflicts over interpretation through their studies of social and education phenomena, conflicts that drive subsequent research paradigms along with the politics of research funding and publishing. Tensions over the racial meaning of things are ever-present in the production of educational research, which takes place in academic institutions that are organizationally divided not just along racial identity lines but moreover into ideological camps that wage interpretive battles over race.

For those in the educational research community, none of this is breaking news. Rather, it is the stuff of normal, everyday talk in the hallways and offices of the academy. Thus, it is quite perplexing that educational researchers, who are clearly self-aware that they are immersed in daily struggles over racial interpretation, do not place central importance on hermeneutics, which is the study of the theories and methodologies of interpretation (Morrow & Brown, 1994), in debates about research methodology. Broadly, hermeneutical scholars seek to reveal the presuppositions that guide interpretive processes (Gallagher, 1992). Importantly, the field of hermeneutics, particularly in more critical approaches, instructs us that interpreters are typically not conscious of their hermeneutical presuppositions (Habermas, 1989), meaning that many tend to see interpretation as little more than “common sense” or “differences of opinion.” Why is the avoidance of hermeneutics so pervasive, even among those who might benefit from a critical study of it, such as those doing work in critical studies of race? What are the consequences of avoiding the study of hermeneutics in educational research, particularly as it relates to racial power? Who benefits from the avoidance of a critical approach to the interpretation of race in a white supremacist social system? Is this part of a white supremacist academic desire to constrain racial interpretations for fear that a focus on a critical version of a racial hermeneutics might let the proverbial “cat out of the bag” in the production of educational research?

This chapter traces the intellectual lineage of hermeneutics, offers critical race hermeneutics (CRH) as theory and methodology, and applies CRH to education in ways that pedagogically models how researchers can engage in educational research anew.

Background: hermeneutics and education

Generally speaking, the present-absence of the field of hermeneutics in educational research, a situation where hermeneutics is implicitly practiced by everyone but explicitly addressed by almost no one, is concerning since the field studies schooling, an institution predicated, consciously or not, on hermeneutical theories and activities. In other words, hermeneutics in educational research is out of sight, and out of mind, whether the research focuses on race or not. Shaun Gallagher’s (1992) Hermeneutics and Education is one of the few book-length theoretical studies of hermeneutics in educational theory and practice. As Gallagher argues, schooling is fundamentally hermeneutical (see also Leonardo, 2003). The everyday activities of schooling are largely based on learning to interpret texts discursively, which can include making meaning of written passages, mathematical equations, historical narratives, classroom dialogues, or everyday social interactions. Teachers act in ways to guide, or even control, how students learn not only to interpret texts but also what counts as “proper” meanings and “correct” interpretive approaches. Although race and structural white supremacy are not Gallagher’s focus, it is easy to see how educational control over interpretation is chained to white racial power. From a critical lens, domination necessarily employs a hermeneutical imposition that regulates the interpretive process, ensuring that meanings that support the interests of the dominant group are legitimated over others (Leonardo, 2003; Leonardo & Allen, 2008; Roseboro, 2008).

Gallagher’s discussion of the politics of hermeneutics in the classroom is instructive, even if constrained by an inattention to structural white supremacy. For example, Gallagher argues that conservative and moderate hermeneutics are the two most common approaches used in schools. In conservative hermeneutics, the educator teaches that the meaning-making process should be focused on “accurately” arriving at the “original intent” of the author, thus ascertaining the correct or commonly accepted interpretation (e.g., the intent of the “Founding Fathers” when interpreting the U.S. Constitution through an ideology of whiteness). Conservative hermeneutics often works to persuade students to think of authors’ alleged intentions as the (racialized) “natural order of things,” thus it often supports long-standing rationalizations of social inequalities as just (e.g., rationalizing racial hierarchies). Or, educators very often employ a moderate hermeneutics rooted in a phenomenological approach that emphasizes the relative nature of interpretation. In this mode, students are taught that interpretation is perspectival, that people have different cultures and experiences that shape how they understand texts, and that the goal of interpretation is to come to a consensus understanding, or a “fusing of horizons,” for making sense of and, moreover, evaluating current social interactions and group relations.

However, Gallagher fails to problematize how conservative and moderate hermeneutics operate dialectically as the interpretive norm in schools, both working together hegemonically to exclude and occlude critical approaches to hermeneutics in the curriculum. In addition to an inattention to white supremacy, Gallagher problematically supports a moderate hermeneutical approach, one that leaves students without a sophisticated interpretation of how oppressive social structures, such as white supremacy, work through the nexus of discourse, ideology, and the unconscious in classroom and social dialogues. In fact, seemingly “open” dialogues rooted in moderate hermeneutics often become sites of further repression and injury due to an intentional pursuit of “consensus” (i.e., social stability due to alleged “slow-but-steady progress”) over the more revolutionary desire to profoundly interrogate the racial ideologies that constitute racial hierarchies, whether the dominant consent or not (see Leonardo & Porter, 2010).

K-12 schools are not the only ones engaged in hermeneutical politics; so are the colleges of education that research them. In the post-Civil Rights Era, students and faculty of color have challenged research interpretations mired in an ideology of whiteness, thus increasing hermeneutical conflicts over racial meaning in the ivory tower (Collins, 1998). Sometimes those caught up in interpretations driven by structural white supremacy attempt to negate those making critical racial interpretations. Other times, those who are uncomfortable with critical racial interpretations become passive aggressive by becoming an “enforcer” of the normative rules of research methodology. For example, rather than more directly discussing their disagreement with the researcher’s critical racial interpretations, they instead resort to pedantic attempts to discredit the work by questioning the implementation of methods, such as sample sizes, search schemes for literature reviews, interview protocol questions, etc. (see Matias, 2019). While a critical race researcher’s work could benefit at times from improved process details, the enforcer’s intense preoccupation with methods is not proportionally in step with the overall level of the detail’s importance relative to other crucial aspects of the work, such as the racial insights that are made. Also, a critical race scholar may be told by a qualitative researcher, for example, that their critical race analyses are an “imposition on the data,” and thus on their participants, and not consistent with the subjectivist orientation of qualitative methodology. In this scenario, the rhetorical move of invoking the norms of methodology is an act that conceals the deeper problem around theories of interpretation and the important role they play in maintaining white supremacy through methodological silencing. Armed with a critical race approach to hermeneutics in educational research, critical race scholars would be more empowered to engage directly and meaningfully in methodological conflicts that are fundamentally hermeneutical.

Moreover, much work is needed to develop a critical hermeneutical approach to race studies. The established field of critical hermeneutics provides many insights upon which to draw (Leonardo, 2004). Critical hermeneutics developed out of the larger field of critical theory, an insightful paradigm that developed in the 1930s (mainly to understand the rise of Nazism) that synthesizes Marx’s approach to social structures, Freud’s notion of the unconscious, and Weber’s insights into the rationalization of status hierarchies (Jay, 1996). Critical hermeneutics seeks to intervene by exposing the problematic historical (and geographical) imaginaries often deployed to mystify interpretation (Thompson, 1981). However, it suffers from an inattention to structural white supremacy (see Allen, 2001; Leonardo, 2013; Mills, 1997). Conversely, while critical race theory clearly makes structural white supremacy its focus, it has not paid explicit attention to the field of hermeneutics, even though CRT often works implicitly to systematically reinterpret the word and the world through processes similar to critical hermeneutics. So, in this chapter I introduce critical race hermeneutics (CRH), which uses critical race theory (CRT) to revise the best aspects of critical hermeneutics, creating a methodology for the theoretical study of race and white supremacy in education. In short, CRH is a study of how communication is distorted by a white supremacist social structure, turning discursive exchanges into everyday forms of racialized material, psychic, and symbolic violence. It seeks to show how language and communication is a site of conflict and domination, a place where white supremacy not only operates ideologically but also where the structure of white supremacy is, itself, reproduced. CRH works to interpret, more so, reveal the unconscious of the objective reality of white supremacy in subjective forms.

Introducing critical race hermeneutics as a theoretical methodology

In 2010, I created a graduate course called “Theoretical Research” to address two main issues. First, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) had begun to demand a methodology statement in conference proposals for theoretical scholarship. Second, the absence of a course on theoretical research methodology was implicitly teaching graduate students in my department that the only legitimate methodologies were the traditional empirical paradigms (i.e., quantitative and qualitative), a common practice in most colleges of education. Students wishing to do philosophical or theoretical dissertations had no research methodology courses that aligned with their interests, effectively diminishing the production of critical theoretical scholarship. I felt emboldened by AERA’s 2009 statement that outlines the legitimacy of theoretical scholarship, so I decided to teach a course that would show how critical theory can be practiced as a research methodology. I had been reluctant to teach critical theory as a methodology because I knew that it paid little, if any, attention to structural white supremacy and colonization (see Leonardo, 2013). Yet, I also knew that my approach to doing theoretical scholarship on race was greatly informed by critical theory, which I learned during my doctoral studies. As I taught the course, I quickly realized how central critical hermeneutics was to students’ understanding of critical theoretical methodology. Many said that it felt awakening and empowering, but I felt conflicted because I knew that critical hermeneutics, despite its benefits, is racially problematic. Since I am a scholar of CRT and critical whiteness studies, I could readily share with students my race critiques of the readings and revised possibilities for application to critical race studies. I wanted to have students read published literature on hermeneutics and CRT, but CRT, as a field, had (and has) not developed an explicit CRH body of literature. This chapter helps to fill this void. Due to space constraints, it is more of a snapshot than a full treatment. Also, to maintain academic honesty, I will move back and forth between critical hermeneutics and CRH to show the sources of my thinking.

Jürgen Habermas is the scholar most associated with critical hermeneutics. His take on it links to the field of communication studies. He presupposes that a theory of interpretation must recognize the centrality of communication to the human experience. Rather than thinking of humanity as merely a collection of people, it can be meaningfully understood as a “dialogue,” one that is, and has been, constructed time and again through countless communicative actions (Habermas, 1985). Power and domination have tragically ruled the quality of communicative actions of “humanity” in ways that dehumanize and oppress, comprising what Freire (1970/1993) calls anti-dialogical action. Emphasizing the historical role of race in human dialogue, CRH sees how human experience is shaped by the power dynamics of communication in global white supremacy, a regime where racialized anti-dialogical actions work to reproduce the structure of racial hierarchies. CRH seeks to unveil racially normative meaning making in dialogues controlled primarily by whiteness, and secondarily by those with more relative power in racial status hierarchies. Borrowing from Geuss’s (1981) description of critical hermeneutics, CRH is about not only the alleged “proper” interpretation of racialized texts but also the critical interrogation of the underlying presuppositions, theories, and ontological claims that contextualize the politics of interpretive racial domination.

In critical hermeneutics, the primary belief is that interpretation is derived, consciously or not, through how one theorizes history, that is, through the way one imagines how social and political history is made (Geuss, 1981; Habermas, 1989). Critical hermeneutics grounds interpretation of texts in what sociology refers to as conflict theory, rather than functionalist theory (see Feinberg & Soltis, 1998). Like critical hermeneutics, CRH believes that textual interpretation is best understood through conflict theory, though one that sees white supremacy as the historical (and geographical) context. Meaning making in a white supremacist context is driven by how interpreters theorize the history of racial hierarchy, how it came into being, how it changes or persists, and how it creates dehumanizing conditions. But before discussing CRH’s conflict theory composition, it is important to describe functionalism’s problematic approach to racial history. From a functionalist lens, one akin to Gadamer’s (1989) popular approach to hermeneutics, society has had, or even has, racial problems, but nevertheless it is essentially good and imagined to always be moving toward racial progress. For example, a liberal functionalist interpreter may concede that, yes, some bad things happened at the start of U.S. society, such as slavery and genocide, but then rationalize that those things are in the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Author biographies
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: “Researching under the mortal realities of pandemic life”
• Introduction
• 1 Critical race hermeneutics: a theoretical method for researching the unconscious of white supremacy in education
• 2 The postdigital challenge of critical educational research
• 3 Aspiring to a sociogenic phenomenology: a theoretical method in emancipatory research
• 4 A fused theory of biopower and political vulnerability as a theoretical method to investigate ‘difficult knowledge’
• 5 Uncovering internalized whiteness through Critical Race counterstories: navigating our experiences in the state of Texas
• 6 Phenomenology of racial embodiment: method and the study of white humanity in education
• 7 Visually mapping totality: Fredric Jameson’s Greimassian square
• 8 Cultivating culturally situated theorizing in educational research: challenging imperialistic curriculum and training
• 9 Synthesizing theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative research: metasynthesis as a methodology for education
• 10 Agential realism: applying Barad’s ontology to reconceptualize teaching and learning mathematics for social justice
• 11 Toward a transgressive decolonial hermeneutics in activist education research
• 12 Thinking with habitus in the study of learner identities
• 13 Theorizing with assemblage: context and text in youth studies
• 14 Using critical race spatial method to understand disparities in controlled choice plans
• 15 Critical chronotopic analysis for disrupting whitewashedness in TESOL teacher education
• 16 Postformal method for critical education research
• 17 Black lives mattering in and out of schools: anti-Black racism, racial violence, and a hope for Black imagination in educational research
• 18 Beyond the individual: deploying the sociological imagination as a research method in the neoliberal university
• 19 Unapologetic Black Inquiry: centering Blackness in education research
• 20 Paying emotional tolls: politics, poststructural narrative theory, and research on race and racism subjects for emotional well-being
• 21 Meditations on experience: the politics and ethics of “not-knowing” in educational research
• Index