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When Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba published Naturalistic Inquiry, they formalized the effort to challenge the stranglehold quantitative methods had on education research (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). They were not the first to complain about the marginalization of qualitative methods, nor were they the first to advance the fundamental arguments behind their work, but they ushered in an era of exponential growth for qualitative inquiry. The battles over method have ebbed and flowed in the years since. The expansion of qualitative research was met by hostility from those in places like the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) such that the landmark publication Scientific Research in Education (SRE) was a flashpoint in the early 2000s (National Research Council, 2002). For research to be considered research at all, so this logic went, there must be measurability, replication, generalizability, etc. If you wanted grant money, you tailored your research method to meet these expectations.

SRE faced serious backlash at places like AERA. Scholars denounced what they viewed as a monolithic restriction on inquiry (Howe, 2009). They were correct. Curiously, however, those who wailed the loudest at being marginalized are now some of the same people doing the marginalizing. This exploratory essay considers how and why humanities research is excluded, co-opted, or othered in methods courses and methods course offerings for education research at an R1 institution. R1 institutions are the highest designation in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education in the United States. R1 is one of three designations for doctoral degree-granting institutions, and means that the university must have US$50 million in total research and development spending and 70 doctoral research degrees. An R2 designation indicates that an institution has at least 20 doctoral research degrees and at least US$5 million in total research expenditures.

While not generalizable (ironically?), concerns have also been raised by philosophers of education that philosophy is not taught or is rarely taught as a research method in colleges of education (Norris, 2021; Norris, 2024, in this issue). As though there are only two kinds of research—quantitative and qualitative—this paper asks why humanities methods are so rare in an R1 education research core. The short answer might point to numbers: there simply are not that many graduate students in history and philosophy of education. The longer answer, however, arguably involves scholarly turf wars waged within the politics of inquiry. This paper proceeds in three parts: (1) brief overview of the history and politics of the methods wars; (2) explanation of a research core and the courses constituting it at Georgia State University; and (3) the view from the outside looking in: peering over the qual and quant gate to see that philosophy is already there, but denied credibility, acknowledgment, and/or understanding.

In its conclusion, the essay argues that erstwhile allies in qualitative (and quantitative) research should re-visit the value of philosophy—free-standing (i.e., not appropriated by, for, or within qualitative or other methods)—and validate it as a legitimate and important research method, itself (American Philosophical Association, 1996). Legitimizing philosophical methods specifically, and humanities research more broadly, would add to the options for doctoral students in the social foundations of education (and beyond) and would better integrate philosophy in education research writ large.

Brief Historical Overview

The concern with whether education research is scientific is not new. Ellen Lagemann (1997) points out that the formal study of education did not begin until the turn of the twentieth century, with the establishment of university schools and departments of education and the institutionalization within them of an aspiration to create a “science of education” (pp. 5–17). Federal attempts in the US to define education research as scientific first appeared in the Reading Excellence Act in 1998 (REA), providing funds for “scientifically based reading research,” which

(A) means the application of rigorous, systematic, and objective procedures to obtain valid knowledge relevant to reading development, reading instruction, and reading difficulties; and (B) shall include research that (i) employs systematic, empirical methods that draw on observation or experiment; (ii) involves rigorous data analyses that are adequate to test the stated hypotheses and justify the general conclusions drawn; (iii) relies on measurements or observational methods that provide valid data across evaluators and observers and across multiple measurements and observations; and (iv) has been accepted by a peer-reviewed journal or approved by a panel of independent experts through a comparably rigorous, objective, and scientific review.

pp. 105–106

REA requires grantees to develop, select, or implement reading programs grounded in its definition of “the best science” (Eisenhart & Towne, p. 32). What this legislation defines as the best science is one based on narrow theories of experimentalism, quantifiability, and generalization—that is, scientism. Yet it is important to note that, while George W. Bush’s administration intensified these efforts at establishing a science of education, REA was passed under Bill Clinton’s presidency. The movement toward scientism transcends political ideology.

After REA, draft legislation was introduced in the summer of 2000 by U.S. Representative Mike Castle (R-Del) that pertained to the reauthorization of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI). The proposed “Castle Bill” sought to improve education research by requiring that federal dollars be spent on “scientifically valid research” and proposed standards for “scientifically based quantitative” and “scientifically based qualitative” research (Eisenhart & Towne, pp. 32–33). The bill as such never came to fruition, but it sparked a great deal of debate about scientific education research and arguably led to the establishment of the National Research Council committee that drafted SRE.

The National Research Council (NRC) is the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which was established by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and is now an honorific society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research and, according to its self-proclamations, is “dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare” (“National Academy of Sciences,” n.d.). The NAS eventually expanded to include the NRC in 1916, the National Academy of Engineering in 1964, and the Institute of Medicine in 1970. The NRC was commissioned by the United States Department of Education (DOE) to write SRE. In the fall of 2000, at the invitation of the DOE’s National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board, the NRC assembled the Committee on Scientific Principles for Education Research to address the question of what constitutes scientific research in education. The committee’s mandate was to review and synthesize recent literature on the “science and practice of scientific research in education and consider how to support high quality science in a federal research agency” (National Research Council, 2002, p. 22). The committee then translated this mandate into three questions that organized its study: (1) What are the principles of scientific quality in education research? (2) How can a federal research agency promote and protect scientific quality in the education research it supports? and (3) How can such research-based knowledge in education accumulate? (National Research Council, 2002, pp. 22–24).

It was, however, the passing of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) that brought the issue of scientific education research to a head. NCLB contains more than one hundred references to “scientifically based research,” which it defines, similarly to REA, as “research that involves the application of rigorous, systematic, and objective procedures to obtain reliable and valid knowledge relevant to education activities and programs” (No Child Left Behind Act, 2001, p. 1). As with REA, NCLB privileges scientism over scientific inquiry, establishing that experimental methods provide the best evidence of educational effectiveness. This legislation begat more legislation that explicitly sought to recreate education research within its narrow scientism, specifically the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA).

ESRA similarly defines “scientifically based research standards” as those that: “(1) apply rigorous, systematic, and objective methodology to obtain reliable and valid knowledge relevant to education activities and programs; and (2) present findings and make claims that are appropriate to and supported by the methods that have been employed” (Education Sciences Reform Act, 2002, p. 5). ESRA is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it defines scientific research narrowly as experimental in nature. Secondly, it was the first explicit attempt to establish a science for education research, unlike REA and NCLB, which arguably were concerned with larger educational issues. Thirdly, ESRA replaced OERI with the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which is in charge of funding education research, and it determines funding based on a narrow vision of science.

Unsurprisingly, qualitative researchers were up in arms about such reifications of scientism. Jeremiads proliferated from figures ranging from Thomas Popkewitz (2008) to Elizabeth St. Pierre (2006) to Patti Lather (2010), among many others. One of the reasons for the fraught lamentations was the concern that SRE was part of an attempt to define education research in scientifically narrow ways, which would not only dictate what would be funded but also normalize and homogenize the broader field of education, arguably in terms of scientism. Consequences of this shift entail revising the language we use to talk about teaching and learning, and possibly teachers and students (Baez & Boyles, 2009). I also argue, however, that much of the criticism misses two central points: (a) professionalization and expertism exacerbating turf wars in higher education; and (b) implications for philosophy in research core course offerings.

As Steven Brint (1994) points out, those who claim knowledge-based or data-based authority increasingly eschew any claims to representing vital social or public interests, so that now expertise is a resource sold to the highest bidder in the market for skilled labor. In the case of emerging social scientists, the need for increased resources opened them to cooptation by those who control the resources, and the latter will almost always support experts who deliver something of value to them (Silva & Slaughter, 1980). Such expertise only enhances the “technical skills” logic of elites or of the social-control structures of society (Rossides, 1998). This logic is apparent in the arguments put forward by those who claim that making education research scientific in the ways the federal government deems legitimate is important because it holds the purse strings (Eisenhart, 2005; Eisenhart & DeHaan, 2005). This logic is also part of the discourse around what counts, or should count, in the doctoral research core at issue in this paper. Said differently, even those who may be sympathetic to humanities research hegemonically reinforce privilege, wittingly or not, while lamenting privilege. There are structural factors, too, that reify the kind of formalism that precludes legitimizing humanities scholarship. Whether it be credit hours, enrollment data, or course proposal requirements that favor positivist mindsets, making space for humanities research is a grinding and messy slog.

Research Core Courses at Georgia State University’s College of Education and Human Development

At this point, I am shifting from the general, and I think generally agreed, narrative of the research methods wars toward the particulars of an R1 university. Specifically, I sketch the outlines of the research core at Georgia State University’s (GSU) College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) to indicate the historical expansion of, and tensions around, what constitutes a research core, whether a “core” should exist at the graduate level at all, and what, if any, representation or inclusion of humanities methods is warranted or desired.

What is now the CEHD at GSU began as a school in 1965 (Georgia State University, 2024). At the time, “foundations of education” was a widely understood, if not fully appreciated, moniker for departments that offered courses in history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and so on. At GSU, the department known as FED (Foundations of Education) eventually included three units: educational psychology (EPY), social foundations (SF), and research, measurement, and statistics (RMS). Similar variations existed across the country, so there is nothing particularly special about FED at GSU. As the university grew, originally as the business school of the Georgia Institute of Technology to R2 and then R1 status, more attention was paid to issues like rigor and rankings. At least partially as a result, the research core had its origins in the late 1980s and took more formal shape in the 1990s. The general claim was that research methodologists would improve the quality of dissertations. Given that the core developed just after Lincoln and Guba’s Naturalistic Inquiry is notable. My point is the role of normalization. Significant attention was originally paid to the five-chapter dissertation format: Chapter 1 lays out the problem (including research questions, rationale, significance, limitations, etc.), Chapter 2 is a literature review, Chapter 3 is the methodology, Chapter 4 is the narrative about/detailed explanation of the study, and Chapter 5 includes the findings of the study and implications for further research. Accordingly, the “five-chapter format” reifies an approach to dissertations that, while arguably useful, also risks formalizing exclusion. That is, qualitative research elbowed its way in by, to some extent, adopting (if not also adapting) the five-chapter format. Further, those of us in the humanities who may not write five-chapter dissertations are faced with the constancy of alternative justification. We must repeatedly explain why there is no separate literature review and why an entire chapter devoted to methodology is unnecessary. This burden, whether defensive, explanatory, or something else, is a necessary consequence of normalization—and adds to the burden of continually justifying why we exist, and why we should.

Early tensions were evident when faculty from the Social Foundations unit pointed out that historical and philosophical dissertations do not typically follow the five-chapter format. Further tensions appeared when counseling psychologists offered a two-chapter format; essentially the first part of the dissertation was a traditional outline and the second part was a published article. As qualitative research increased in the college, tensions further mounted regarding the research core offerings, which had largely been research, measurement, and statistics courses: think Stat I, Stat II, and so on. Through much discussion, and some gnashing of teeth, the core was changed to include an overview course that detailed multiple research methods. This initiative resulted in an arguably novel experiment whereby six professors taught the course together, each representing their specialty and enlivening debates about the methods and the politics of inquiry. What is important here is that the “survey” of research methods included many different methods, thus exposing students to the fact that there are multiple approaches in research, including humanities research. That course was short-lived but prefaced a two-track core: qualitative and quantitative. The core was originally nine hours, growing to fifteen hours, or five courses. Setting aside the personalities involved in the various meetings about what does or does not constitute research core courses, at least two issues continue to plague the core: expertise and flexibility.

Here is the crux of the problem: How does the core maintain rigor and credibility while also adapting to the changing landscape of research methodology? One line of reasoning supporting expertise is to continue to have the RMS unit teach the core courses. Faculty are trained as qualitative and quantitative (and mixed methods) methodologists and they sit on numerous doctoral committees as the dissertation’s formal methodologist. I support this position, not least because the RMS unit is in my department, the Department of Educational Policy Studies (EPS). What I mean is that EPS offers mostly core courses. Our “bread and butter,” as it were, is teaching core courses. Those familiar with the politics of teaching core courses will know that there is usually a trade-off. Those of us who teach core courses agree to teach larger sections and a greater diversity of students in exchange for the guarantee that there are core courses to teach. It is also important to note that core courses are valuable because they bring students from different majors into conversation with each other around topics they might not otherwise explore. Without this diversity of class constitution, students become siloed in the echo chambers of their sub-specialties and are not structurally required to grapple (i.e., via required courses) with other students, other ideas, and, perhaps most importantly, specifically those ideas that challenge their worldview (research and research methods included). Beyond the institutional, fiscal, and theoretical justifications, I also support the research core because I know my colleagues in RMS are experts. They research research methods, to turn an awkward phrase.

An irony of expertise is stealth appointments. While my colleagues’ methodological expertise has historically rarely been questioned, it is far more commonplace in 2024 to have faculty in other departments claim expertise in, say, ethnography, mixed-methods, or qualitative research more generally. This means that other departments are emboldened to offer their own methods classes and continually challenge to have their courses count toward the core. The issues of expertise and flexibility recur.[1]

And this brings me to the uncomfortable reality that those of us who do historical and philosophical research must face. As close colleagues with those in RMS, SF is continually marginalized or overlooked altogether by the very colleagues we support. When, as frequently happens, my RMS colleagues are questioned about where history and philosophy fall in the qualitative–quantitative binary, we are told that the qualitative course Qual I references those methods, but that nobody in the qualitative strand of RMS is an expert in history or philosophy, so there is little to no examination of them. For this essay, I am setting aside the question of whether historical and philosophical research are qualitative. They are not. In the GSU context, qualitative methodologists and SF scholars have nonetheless historically been more aligned—hence the title of this paper: “With Friends Like These…”

To clarify the fifteen hours of the research core: Students take either Qual I or Quant I (see Appendix A). After that course, they take a two-course sequence in research methods and two courses in advanced research methods. At the present time, there are two advanced research methods courses in humanities: Historical Methods in Education Research and Philosophical Analysis and Method. For SF students writing history, strictly speaking, they must take four of their five courses outside their research (method) focus. The same applies to students in philosophy of education. Relatedly, because Qual I and Quant I do not explore historical and philosophical methods, most students are unaware that they are options for dissertation research at all, thus limiting the number of students who might be interested in advanced historical and philosophical methods courses (thus risking the courses not making at all—an irony I’ll return to shortly). The only available solution is to develop more historical and philosophical methods courses, but with the increased risk that the more of these courses offered, the fewer students there will be to take each of them, since Qual I and Quant I do not legitimize them as research method options in the first place. The structural preclusion should be clear: by not providing expert exposure to, or validation of, humanities methods, students are left unaware of the existence and legitimacy of such methods, thereby limiting the number who might take courses on them and thus providing a built-in justification for not offering such courses, which is to say low enrollment. The vicious cycle continues.

The View From the Outside Looking In: Peering Over the Qual and Quant Gate

I have spent over thirty years making the point (certainly not original to me) that philosophy is already latent in every dissertation. To the degree that dissertations contribute new knowledge to their fields, they are at the very least epistemological enterprises and necessarily philosophical.[2] I also demonstrate how any topic in any department benefits from conceptual analysis and cogent reasoning. Research questions are illustrative. Logical flaws (e.g., question begging, hasty conclusions, overgeneralization, etc.) tend to be plentiful and if I had more time, I would attempt the demonstration I repeatedly gave to the doctoral fellows’ association on campus. There I would invite any student to state their topic and would dialectically tease out the importance of terminological and conceptual clarity, logical consistency, structurally sound arguments, legitimacy of sources, and so on. Suffice to say that those of us in philosophy would do well to craft a meticulous justification of and for humanities and philosophical research—both as a stand-alone project and one that is already integrated in dissertations and theses (American Educational Research Association, 2006).

Symbolic of the problem at GSU is the following recent example. I proposed a new methods course in the humanities (see Appendix C). The goal was to offer SF students doing humanities research another option in the second set of required courses before they are eligible to take advanced research methods in history and philosophy. There are confusing elements that I do not have space to share in detail regarding internal course offerings versus core course offerings, the timeline for proposals, the turf-language tensions on forms, and more, but the upshot is that the proposal was essentially denied by a committee that included no humanities scholars.

Nonetheless, their review is helpful to show the problems I noted above. I include it in detail below, and then highlight selected issues relevant to my concerns.

The EPS Academic Affairs Committee has reviewed the proposal. We are requesting revisions before moving the proposal forward for a full faculty vote.

Here are the committee’s comments:

  1. The focus of the course seems narrow, and the course description is not clear whether this is intended to be a research methods course or a social foundations course. The course description does not describe [a clear research] method and the syllabus does not indicate clearly the development of … a research method.

  2. The course title includes “Research Methods”, but the course description and the selected readings do not clearly reflect a research methods course. …

  3. … Research methods are covered in the qualitative methods three-course sequence as well as in some of the other qualitative methods courses like Case Studies. … What is the course offering that is unique and not covered in other courses in the EPS department? We recommend delineating in the proposal where the other courses fall short, especially the existing history and philosophy courses in the department.

  4. Will there be an adequate demand to warrant such a course? Will it be able to be filled regularly?

  5. The requirement of seven textbooks may appear to be excessive to students. Is that a typical reading load for this type of course?

If you would like to submit a revised proposal, please respond to the committee’s comments. I also recommend using track changes in the proposal document to help facilitate a quicker review of the revised proposal. I suggest submitting the revised proposal as soon as possible because I believe the last day the committee can send an approved proposal for a faculty vote is September 23rd.

Where to begin? Let me start with the legitimate critique offered by the committee. There is one. Only. Whether the course should be a research methods course or a SF course highlights the point above about whether it will be in the core or count toward the core. The former requires a college committee vote of a particular sort; namely, the sort that would risk undermining the core, providing another opportunity for positivist chest-pounding by iniquitous grant-seekers, and legitimizing those in the college who want to substitute “their own” courses for core courses. That point is granted.

Conceptually, however, the “feedback” is internally contradictory and, frankly, offensive. Either the course is too broad and must be more specific (#2) or it is too narrow and unworkable (#1). In addition, (#3) the committee appears to know what humanities research elements already exist in qualitative courses, but only to the degree that they are “covered.” There is no acknowledgment that history and philosophy extant are central to qualitative methods courses. The review also sets up a kind of Meno’s paradox: either there are already “enough” humanities research methods in qualitative courses (so we don’t need a new course) or to substantiate a stand-alone course it must be demonstrated that what is “covered” is not already “enough” (so we can’t know what we need to know in terms of humanities research in the first place).

Indicating the structural bias noted above, the fourth criticism also assumes low enrollment. What makes this structurally biased and hegemonically circular is that without the required qualitative and quantitative courses validating humanities scholarship as legitimate, they preclude students from engaging in such work, ensuring the very low numbers the committee now uses as a cudgel against offering a humanities research course. They do not ask, “If we acknowledged and legitimized humanities research, could we have an ‘area of growth’ in the department?” The final point of structural bias is symbolized in number 5: “The requirement of seven textbooks may appear to be excessive to students.” That the committee is not made up of any humanities scholars is painfully obvious in calling the required readings “textbooks.” While not limited to humanities courses, it is not uncommon for such courses to have multiple books—primary sources, not “textbooks”—and students eager and willing to devour them.

Overall, then, the feedback is illustrative of much if not most of the problem: social scientists and qualitative researchers “framing” the conversation and expectations in ways that overlook or marginalize humanities thinking, broadly construed. The only element missing that would make the point glaringly obvious is if the committee were to suggest including a “rubric” for “assessments.” Nowhere in the commentary is there language supportive of or for humanities research. In fact, the language used is deficit language applied to humanities courses, not RMS courses. Of the many frustrations I note, none is more concerning than the structural exclusion of philosophical inquiry. It is as though the dismissiveness, nay, mockery of philosophy as a field is a calculated strategy to keep questions at bay and secure the “turf” constitutive of quantitative and qualitative methods courses. In a cruel irony indicative of such calculation, it should be noted that after the SF proposal was rejected, another proposal—from qualitative research faculty in RMS—was accepted. The course? “Narrative Inquiry.” Coopting the biographical inquiry course is as opportunistic as it is insulting.

So where does this leave the central problem of this essay? Unchanged, regrettably. Doctoral students approaching education research from the humanities are structurally denied content that would make their inquiries stronger and more meaningful. More broadly, methods courses in the humanities are limited to two, and the required introductory courses in Qual I or Quant I do little beyond gesturing to history and philosophy as existing, much less as viable and worthy areas of study that doctoral students should pursue. As indicated by the feedback from the departmental committee that rejected the proposed course, humanities scholars also face being misunderstood, at least, or parodied, mocked, and marginalized, at worst. Within the superstructure of the core, this state of affairs is regrettable but also understandable. Without a core, any faculty member in any department can appoint themselves an expert and teach whatever they want, thus setting up a quagmire between academic freedom, intellectual competence, and practical viability.

In sum, philosophers are a diverse and fickle lot. We rarely agree with one another, even within the small spheres of similar interests we might share. Accordingly, a clear danger in what I am offering is that I might be committing some of the same sins as my departmental colleagues: casting the net too broadly and essentializing humanities research, if not qualitative and quantitative research, too. On second thought, this last point is not a danger in my department, as humanities research is not acknowledged enough to be essentialized in the first place. Still, I think philosophers of education should give more attention to such matters as indicated in this paper and I urge us to insert and expand philosophical research methods as central to higher education.