The Postpositivist Temper

 

These four hypotheses and 19 related statements presuppose a provisional acceptance of a “duly-hedged synthesis” that literacy is appropriately defined as a transactional relation between learning to read and write and broader content learning stemming from topics within and suggested by print-based texts.  While both of these aspects of literacy are critical, neither is accepted as the foundational baseline of the definition.  If anything is, based upon the precepts I have lain out, it is the tension between the radical particularity of student need, interest, and aptitude and the broader cultural matrix that gives shape to that which achieves social and political legitimacy through which definitions and purposes of adult literacy education are mediated. 

 

In this respect, whatever value there is in adult literacy as an educational phenomenon, which, on my reading, is a great deal, I am also proposing that literacy, however it is defined, has a semiotic reference, which needs to be grasped as an ecological sign system manifested in a range of psycho-socio contexts (Barton, 1994).  This is the case, I am positing even if one defines literacy as mastery of reading and writing in which the technologies themselves possess cultural symbolic reference, which include, but also point beyond their literal meaning.  Consequently, there is no “autonomous” literacy outside a contextual frame, but a definition that is socially and culturally shaped all the way down (Street, 1988).  On this claim I am radicalizing the logical assumptions of the New Literacy Studies in accepting both definitions of literacy proposed in this paper in symbolically significant mediational terms as pointing beyond themselves into the realm of their cultural significance (Barton, 1994).

 

To move beyond these core suppositions of literacy (the “duly-hedged synthesis”), including the 19 bulleted statements would be the beginning of shifting into an actual research project.  That cannot be undertaken here, but what merits further discussion is the salience of postpositivist research design.  In the briefest of terms this mediating school seeks maximum precision consistent with the complexity of the problem under investigation in the quest for truth as a regulative ideal.  This is the core definition of “competent inquiry” in the postpositivist mode.  

 

In the scientific pole of this research design, there is a tendency to limit problems to those that are susceptible to “piecemeal social engineering” or “middle range theories” (Pawson & Tilley, 1997; Phillips & Burbules, 2000).  Such a limiting propensity contradicts the broader philosophical tenets of postpositivism in which research is designed in accordance to the needs of the problem under investigation, however complexly these may intrude into the cultural matrix, consequently, into the realm of values even at the level of political culture. The provisional statements about adult literacy education proposed in this paper require examination of highly specific (yet complex) matters, for example, on how adults at different levels of reading ability learn, or expand on their ability to read.  Some of the statements also require broad cultural interpretations on the construction of meaning mediated via a power/knowledge nexus within the context of the politics and sociology of adult literacy programs and networks.  On this assumption, the construction of literacy in the external environment feeds back into the field with obvious consequences for the ways in which programs are shaped and the ways in which literacy is defined in highly specific instructional setting (Demetrion, 2004).  This also requires highly competent postpositivist analysis if this school of research is going to gain the credibility it needs to achieve its mediational vision.

 

In the example provided in this paper, the quality of the research design (stemming from the core definition of literacy, to the four supportive hypotheses and 19 related statements) is in the competence of the set up, including the salience of the problem posed.  The issue is not whether the frame that I have provided could be improved, but the extent to which it lays out in detail, sequence, and scope, something of the dimensions of a significant problem and viable pathways toward its exploration and potential resolution at least in the Peircian sense of long-range cumulative research.  Assuming these to be relatively sound, at least for the sake of the current discussion, then the research to be undertaken needs to draw on whatever methodologies are required to probe into the relevant content. 

 

Fidelity to the scientific methodology is the key, as laid out, for example, in Popper’s six points, Dewey’s “patterns of inquiry,” and Rescher’s network model.  Critical in postpositivist design is a problem focus, the stimulation of imagination in the making of bold conjectures, attunement to the significance of provisional hypothesis formation in pushing an investigation forward, the correlative role of guided experimentation, and the capacity to discern which data in which contexts is relevant to the problem at hand.  Also needed is searing and, as relevant, comparative analysis of any given theory or study, acceptance of falsification as a core criteria as subtly defined by Popper and Dewey, a probing into alternative scenarios suggested by the data or a given hypothesis, a drive for problem resolution, and the search for truth, however provisional, as a regulative ideal. These ideals are embodied in Dewey, Popper, and Rescher, whose collective reflections make a substantial contribution to postpositivist design.  My purpose in this paper is less to draw out the subtle distinctions and potential points of conflict among these scientifically oriented philosophers, than to illustrate how their collective work contributes to the development of a broad-based postpositivist temper.  Any research project on adult literacy that stems from the framework provisionally laid out here will be credible to the extent that it follows along its pathways.