Fourth week: Educational approaches

From a point of view of a scientist, positivism will be the best perspective to use in all aspects of life, for a curious person, the interpretative paradigm will reveal all he/she wants to know, and for an activist, the socio-critical point of view will have all the keys to change the world. But should we need, as teachers, to choose one of them, or is it fair to select the best part of each one?

A positivist person will see education as quantitative data, will extract information from experimentation and will arrive to some real and general conclusions, always scientific and realistic. To do it, he will experiment, measure and quantify all kind of data founded during his/her investigation. whereas an interpretative one will ask, investigate, observe and find qualitative data to get closer to the feelings, emotions and needs of the community. Nevertheless, the one that will be inside the community, using all this information, and all the experience acquired during a long period of coexistence and making a change, will be the socio-critical person.

Then, it is not fair to chose only one of the approaches. We can select the veracity of the positivism, and obtain quantitative data to have an objective idea; use qualitative tools, such as interviews and observation to understand better the way of functioning from an interpretative point of view and use all this information obtained through the two different approaches to help us be involved in a change, getting inside the matter and helping it to get better, as socio-critics.

The process could begin by an analysis of the class: how many kids are there, who are boys and who are girls, which kids have good marks and which ones don’t… and so one. Once having this quantitative data, we could analyse deeper the group by making brief personal interviews or questionnaires to know how they feel, with whom are more comfortable with and other personal questions.  The, having all this information, we could change the necessary things we have discovered are going wrong or need an improval.

This process could be applied in many other fields,as we don’t have to discard all the possibilities that these three paradigms provide us and that can enrich our research in order to innovate and make things better.