Understanding the Nature of Structures in Education: Recent Developments

In this paper the author discusses how 21st century education researchers could and in his opinion, should approach the scientific description of the various entities that they might encounter. The word "entities" in pedagogical context refers to phenomena and structures such as "an education system", "education", "curriculum" or "motivation". For example, the entity, "an education system," consists of various elements such as schools, management structures, financing structures, support structures, curriculum and curriculum planning, physical facilities, learners, educators, community support, and many more. It could be said that it is relatively easy to describe these different elements of the education system and show how they all fit together to form an education system as a total structure. In this paper the author argues, however, that such a description would be scientifically indefensible for the mere fact that, in view of current scientific approaches, the description could be seen as simplistic and reductionistic. The paper begins with a brief outline of three basic epistemological approaches. This outline is then used as the basis for further discussion of how one could conduct research into pedagogical/educational structures in a manner that would circumvent simplistic and reductionistic descriptions. [For the complete Volume 13, Number 1 proceedings, see ED568595.]