I’ve written before (Preece, 2022) about the nature of the thinking, debates and extent to which we have been able to apply Kuhn’s ideas in education – and there’s a link to lots of that content here, because I think it’s helpful to contextualise.
But I guess my big question is this – are we on the edge of a paradigm shift? With the transformation of the educational landscape, structurally symbolised by:
- A new Government, and new Education Secretary
- A Curriculum & Assessment Review
- Proposed changes to OFSTED
- A ground-swell change in use of Edu Twitter as a social media platform shifting voices and emphasis
It feels like there could be a moment where some of the big frameworks and landscape markers shift a little – and I’m not sure if this is the moment of evolution, or the combination makes it a more revolutionary phase of where we’re at!
I’d be fascinated to see people’s thoughts!
The Structure of Scientific Revolution: Creating Paradigms
How did the idea of ‘paradigms’ come to exist, and do they apply?
Some years ago, on returning to blogging, Joe Kirby argued that teachers lead the “scientific revolution in education”, showing the stages of adoption from 1999’s “What Works Clearing House” approach (DfE, 2010) towards the ResearchEd movement (Kirby, 2021). He cites a linear development of key articles, implicitly suggesting progression of knowledge accumulated, and points towards a range of schools and thinkers who have grown in the “cognitive science” era (Boxer, 2019; Sealy, 2020; Willingham, 2009).
Whether directly intended or not, Kirby’s article echoed the language of Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 philosophical and sociological work on the “Structure of Scientific Revolution” and the progress of scientific language and progression thinking that have come to be applied to the cognitive science “paradigm” in modern pedagogical discourse.
The philosophy of science is as critical and contested a topic as any other disciplinary debate. Before Kuhn’s work, the widely held view of science was dominated by a philosophy of how it ought to be done (the “scientific method” exemplified by Popper), and a narrative of progress towards a ‘truth’ through consistent and logical progression by incremental steps. As new experiments were conducted, they built up on to the old truths, and built towards a better understanding of the world. Naughton (2012) argues for this as a positivist ‘Whig’ interpretation of science and historiography, often written by those outside the scientific community.
Thomas Kuhn did not come from outside the community. Born in 1922 in Cincinnati, he studied Physics at Harvard, graduating in 1943 before a short period of war service where he studied radar. Returning to Harvard post-war, he completed his PhD in 1949, and was elected to the university’s Society of Fellows. His path to studying quantum mechanics might have been fixed, were it not for an appointment to teach a course on science for humanities students, as part of the General Education in Science curriculum intended to ensure a broad education for all Harvard graduates (Naughton, 2012).
In preparation for the course, Kuhn read old scientific texts in detail for the first time, and his encounter with the work of Aristotle changed his mindset. He had hoped to understand how much mechanics Aristotle had known, given how his work had inspired Galileo and Newton, but was completely dismayed to learn that Aristotle appeared – by the present standards – to know almost nothing. Kuhn later wrote that “Aristotle appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but [to be] a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well. About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation” (Kuhn, 1987). The inspiration of Kuhn’s work was to recognise what we would now consider to be contextual historiography – we must understand the cultural, intellectual and logical framework that created the intellectual tradition of Aristotle’s day, and to see the connection between that time and our own as “phases” and leaps, rather than a logical and linear progression.
Kuhn’s central thesis was that development in scientific knowledge and understanding happens in different phases. The first, he described as “normal science”. In this phase, the scientific community – who share a common intellectual language and framework of thinking – engage in “mopping up”. Much of the work in this phase of science is focused on solving puzzles thrown up by discrepancies by what we predict should happen, and what we observe or cannot observe. Anomalies tend to be resolved either by incremental changes to our knowledge, specific tailoring of the conditions, or by exposing observational or experimental error. As philosopher Ian Hacking succinctly describes it in his preface to one of the many revised editions of Structure: “Normal science does not aim at novelty but at clearing up the status quo. It tends to discover what it expects to discover.”
Kuhn argued that this normal science was often grounded in a particular achievement or publication, which the scientific community acknowledged as the foundation for a period of understanding. Many of the ‘classics’ of science have served as this foundation:
“Aristotle’s Physica, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Newton’s Principia and Opticks, Franklin’s Electricity, Lavoisier’s Chemistry, and Lyell’s Geology—these and many other works served for a time implicitly to define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners. They were able to do so because they shared two essential characteristics. Their achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve. Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as ‘paradigms,’ a term that relates closely to ‘normal science.’ By choosing it, I mean to suggest that some accepted examples of actual scientific practice—examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together— provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research. These are the traditions which the historian describes under such rubrics as ‘Ptolemaic astronomy’ (or ‘Copernican’), ‘Aristotelian dynamics’ (or ‘Newtonian’), and so on.”
(Kuhn, 1970: II, ii. 10)
Kuhn’s conceptualisation of these major foundational periods as “paradigms” has become a transformational language by which we now commonly refer to an intellectual or conceptual framework in a period of time.
In education, we’ve seen evidence of paradigmatic thinking in the descriptions of positivist progression of cognitive science in the discipline, and we can certainly see a proliferation of cognitive-science thinkers and publications that do exactly what Kuhn described in the “normal science” phase. Exploring the boundaries, implications and applications of the paradigm, we can see a clear sense in which the intellectual and conceptual framework of pedagogy is unified around a central thesis (e.g. Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory) or approach.
Historically, the recent publication of OFSTED’s Education Inspection Framework (Ofsted, 2019) and Subject Research Reviews (Ofsted, 2021) amplifies this paradigm through the inspectorate, and wider organisations such as the Education Endowment Foundation disseminate it through the non-research community into the practitioner space (Edovald & Nevill, 2020) creating a language and framework that is localised to the UK education system. These aspects of our education debate suggest accordance with the scientific frameworks proposed by Kuhn, and we could certainly make an argument for a “Gove” era of educational thought, for instance.
The Structure of Scientific Revolution: Challenging Paradigms
Do paradigms and structures apply to education? What challenges do we see?
But not everyone agrees – either with cognitive science, or with the positivist framework. There are different philosophies of education with numerous labels and sides. How can this be reconciled with a scientific method?
Studying the disciplinary history, Kuhn argued that paradigms will last for a period of time. However, over longer periods, the tensions and anomalies begin to accumulate beyond what is understandable and explained by the existing paradigm. Eventually, the scientific community will begin to test and question the paradigm itself, and the discipline enters a period of crisis, characterized by:
“a proliferation of compelling articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals”
(Kuhn, 1970: 91)
The crisis is only resolved by a revolutionary change in world-view – a paradigm shift – in which the old way of viewing the problem is replaced by a completely new one. The shift in knowledge is substantive, rather than incremental, and requires an adjusted frame of reference, often with new disciplinary content, understanding and intellectual frameworks. And, having shifted, the scientific community revert to their ‘normal science’, based on the new framework. This, Kuhn argued, would continue through time, with varying lengths of paradigmatic understanding depending on the discipline.
Kuhn’s retrospective study of his own discipline of Physics could easily identify the “revolutions” of Aristotle, Copernicus, Newton and Einstein as significant and demarcated paradigms towards a progression of disciplinary understanding. Not all disciplines have such clearly identifiable paradigms: it seems nearly impossible to claim that we do in education. The political shifts in Government or Minister might offer the closest approximation of such clear lines.
For many, the biggest critique of Kuhn’s work was in exploring one of the implications of this paradigmatic process. He argued that competing paradigms are “incommensurable” – in other words, there are no objective and quantifiable ways of assessing their relative merits. It is not possible, for example, to make a checklist to compare Newtonian mechanics (objects, planets) and quantum mechanics (dealing with sub-atomic level processes) in a rational way. Indeed, the nature of the historiographic approach suggests that this should not be possible, because the quantum knowledge is not something that Newton had access to. We cannot judge his thinking and compare his work against it, much like Kuhn’s exposition of Aristotle’s understanding of mechanics.
The challenge, then, is to understand what drives a particular paradigm shift to take place. If rival paradigms are truly incommensurable, the contentious implication was that scientific revolutions were based – at least in part – on non-scientific, humanistic and irrational grounds. A number of writers in the scientific community might object to this characterization, and the unwritten implication that the major changes were merely groundswell shifts in community thinking.
Competing Cultures? Education as Art or Science?
Is education a paradigm? Or are we competing cultures?
To accept Kuhn’s philosophy, there must be an underlying conceptual agreement with his perspective on science as “a truth”, that can be debated and wrangled in to a conceptual and observable paradigm that we can all accept and agree on. And yet, we have the potential to recognise a number of issues with this – particularly in the application of educational pedagogy.
This debate of values and epistemology is not a new concept, and an alternative framework to Kuhn’s has been proposed. In 1959, the physicist and author C P Snow delivered a controversial Rede Lecture in which he described the “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”. He referred to a gulf of mutual incomprehension, lack of sympathy and lack of engagement between “literary intellectuals” on one hand, and “natural scientists” on the other. Snow described how great scientists were happy to confess ignorance of literature and artistic engagement, ascribing little value to traditional cultural interests in the application of their work, while the humanities group had little to no insight into the edifice of the scientific world.
“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had … As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man”
Snow, 1959: 14-15
Snow’s lecture, which set out to show the problems of the gulf between cultures, explored the issues of how fixed epistemic understanding led to mutual distrust and polarised debate. The parallels between debates and perspectives in education and pedagogical communities may be drawn out in different threads, and it is ironic to note that Snow was heavily critiqued in a number of humanities spaces. It could be argued that education – with the personal values at the heart of the epistemology and perspective of the individual teacher, leader, or academic researcher – is a world of multiple cultures, not a positivist world of a “single scientific truth”
Where are we now?
Kuhn’s work, itself, began a new paradigm of scientific understanding: not of any particular discipline, but of the sociology of science and how knowledge was constructed in individual communities of practice. Researchers began to examine and debate the ways in which paradigms were created, discussed and explored. Science had lost the hallowed ‘sacred, untouchable product of the Enlightenment’ approach, and become recognised as the outcome of debates and discussion by people practicing the discipline.
Our challenge is that education and pedagogy does not possess a rich paradigmatic disciplinary history of its’ own. It has so often been shaped by political, cultural and social contexts, and by the influences from specific subjects and disciplines. Teachers will come into the profession having encountered their own disciplinary lenses first – whether as an Arts graduate or a Sciences graduate, your view of the world will inevitably have been shaped by your grounding, academic and personal views and perspectives. This makes it hard to effectively understand the education debates as a neutral observer: your values and epistemology will inevitably impact on your emergent philosophy of teaching.
Education is not a neutral act: the observable phenomenon is fundamentally a human experience, and our values and perspectives are just as important in driving our understanding as the observable features. Kirby (2021) recognised this challenge, arguing that “science won’t resolve divergences of values for those of us in teaching”. But are we truly within a scientific paradigm in crisis? Can we truly observe it at the time, or must it be identifiable in retrospective? Or are there alternative interpretations?
This is where I think the present situation finds us. With the Francis Curriculum and Assessment Review, an OFSTED shake up and other wider transformations on the educational horizon, including the wide spread movement towards BlueSky away from EduTwitter, one of the questions is whether we are undergoing the culture shocks of a wobble, or of a paradigm shift. We have shifted a community from one platform – with cultures, norms and algorithms – to another, which allows the emergence or change of people, thinkers and voices.
In some of the reviews and debates over pedagogy, curriculum and assessment we certainly see a number of debates taking place which might be regarded as characteristic of Kuhn’s crisis period – and the recourse to philosophy and debate of fundamentals will be familiar to many of us as we observe the communities of practice in which we participate. I joined one of the Curriculum Framework online webinars, and was struck anew by the fierce intent of people to express their particular opinion and take on what was essential to change – whether that was about assessment, particular skills, or approaches to issues like climate and sustainability education – which all seemed vital to them.
So, is this a paradigm shifting, messy science, or just a clash of cultures? Without a “mission statement” for what education is for, universally, in the UK – or even the constituent devolved nations – every pluralist perspective on the purpose, nature and approach to curriculum, assessment and intent can be valid. It would be difficult to argue that there is coherent framework thinking and a philosophical agreement – and in the webinars, getting a handle on that diverse and critical perspective was really important as a thought process.
Unlike other domains, I am not convinced that a single definable purpose for education is desirable – and yet, without it, I fear that many of the structural intentions and frameworks to bring about positive change will always create messy clashes of cultures without resolution.
Love to hear your thoughts if you have them!
References:
References available
Andrews (2021) Three lists: Why education’s ‘scientific revolution’ is failing and what we need to do about it. Accessed online at https://bernardandrews.wordpress.com/2021/07/12/three-lists-why-educations-scientific-revolution-is-failing-and-what-we-need-to-do-about-it/ on 30/08/21.
Boxer (2019) The ResearchED Guide to Explicit & Direct Instruction: An Evidence Informed Guide for Teachers, John Catt
Department for Education (2010): The Importance of Teaching: The Schools White Paper, accessible online: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-importance-of-teaching-the-schools-white-paper-2010
Edovald & Nevill (2021) Working Out What Works: The Case of the Education Endowment Foundation in England, ENCU Review of Education, 4 (1), 46-64
Kirby (2021) Teachers Lead the Scientific Revolution in Education: 44+ Seminal Articles, accessed online at: https://pragmaticreform.wordpress.com/2021/08/28/scientific-revolution on 30/08/21.
Kuhn (1962, 1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1970: 2nd Ed with postscript)
Kuhn (1987) in The Probablistic Revolution, Volume I: Ideas in History, eds. Lorenz Kruger, Lorraine, J. Daston, and Michael Heidelberger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), excerpt from pp. 7-22, available online: http://www.units.miamioh.edu/technologyandhumanities/kuhn.htm
Naughton (2012) Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science, The Observer, accessed online at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/19/thomas-kuhn-structure-scientific-revolutions on 30/08/21.
Ofsted (2019) Education Inspection Framework: Overview of Research, accessed online at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/963625/Research_for_EIF_framework_updated_references_22_Feb_2021.pdf on 30/08/21.
Ofsted (2021) Research Review Series, Geography, accessed online at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/research-review-series-geography on 30/08/21
Sealy (2020) The ResearchED Guide to The Curriculum: An Evidence Informed Guide for Teachers, John Catt
Watson & Busch (2021) The Science of Learning: 99 Studies that Every Teacher Needs to Know, Routledge, 2nd Ed.
Willingham (2009) Why Don’t Students Like School? Jossey-Bass
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