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The Stories Educational Researchers Tell About Themselves

Department of Educational Psychology and Foundations, College of Education, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0607. His areas of specialization are the philosophy of social and educational inquiry and the sociology of education

In 1990, in the pages of Educational Researcher, McKenna, Robinson, and Miller and Edelsky engaged in an intensely argued debate over the research on language instruction. In this article, I revisit this important exchange because it remains the most important starting point we have for an attempt to characterize and clarify what is behind the increasing fragmentation of the educational research community. My claim is that the balkanization of our profession is a result of people engaging different vocabularies to tell different stories about research and the work of researchers. In examining this claim, I also examine what happened with the different vocabularies used to discuss qualitative research over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s. Finally, I end with a brief comment about what the proliferation of different vocabularies and different stories might mean for our profession.

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