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- Dr. James Paul
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. James Paul
LB: I know you remained active in a scholarly way, even though you had administrative responsibilities. You had your own research and writings. I’m sure you wrote many articles and some books during that time. What would be the highlight of that?
JP: Well, one highlight was a big collaborative project that actually came out of one of the collaborative research groups. We wrote and edited a book on integrating special education services. I don’t remember how many, but I want to say 40 different people participated in the writing. These were faculty and doctoral students and public school people. It was a little bit like herding cats, to get this many people going in the same direction in a single document. I was very happy about that book. Harper & Brace published it. I was happy about it primarily because it reflected the substance of the work going on that was really connecting people around ideas and issues. There were a lot of other books, one on the foundations of special education. That was a collaborative project that was supported by the Florida Department of Education, and we were able to get a lot of people involved in that. There were really two books that came out of it. I don’t know how much detail you want me to go into on this, but special education, like other areas of education, was grounded in psychology. Special education began to move away from the disciplinary grounding in psychology in the ‘60s. The leaders in special education were psychologists until the ‘60s when people like me started getting doctorates under the guidance of these leaders in the field. And so, with the funding that came available in the ‘60s, a lot of people got their doctorates in special education. Then, more and more of the research was done by people like me, and after awhile, the people doing the research were referencing special education research with fewer references to research in psychology.
That’s good in one way because there’s a kind of linear growth development to that. On the downside, though, the knowledge base of special education was increasingly distanced from the foundational knowledge bases in clinical, experimental and social psychology. Psychology is just one of the disciplines, but the primary one as I see it, from which special education became separated. One of the projects that produced one of the books was to try to revisit and update some of these foundational knowledge bases. We got several leaders in psychology, like Urie Bronfrenbrenner, Howard Gardner, and others to work with us to consider questions such as what is it in the study of intelligence, or assessment, or work with families that psychologists are working on now that we may have missed in our work in special education.
One book focused on the foundational knowledge area and the second one on applications. The one on applications was written by special educators who were leaders in these various areas in the field of special education, reacting to the updates of knowledge bases in psychology. The real payoff with the whole thing was, with the support of the Florida Department of Education, was to gather policy leaders in Florida for a dialogue conference with the writers of the applications material. The purpose was to create a conversation that made it possible for policy leaders to ask questions that were pertinent to their work, and for the leading researchers in these areas to respond and also to ask questions of policy makers about issues that needed addressing in research. Those were two of the projects.
My own work really has been more in ethics and in philosophies of research. I did a book on ethics, and I’m beginning another one on ethics and teacher education. I think this is an area that is not substantially addressed in the teacher education curriculum.
I am also very interested in philosophies of research. My belief is that education researchers have had relatively narrow research preparation that basically includes two or three courses in statistics and a course in research design. Predictably, the kinds of research questions you can ask are within the constraints of the epistemological perspectives of those courses. In the latter part of the 20th century, the conversations about research philosophies were opened up considerably, and the whole positivist hegemony in educational research was challenged for a number of reasons and from a number of places, especially by scholars in the humanities who, since the ‘60s, were helping us to understand perspectives and stance-based criticism of knowledge and method.
I believe doctoral students need literacy about knowledge, to know something about the nature and history of knowledge as a context for their studying method. I truly do not care if our doctoral students become qualitative or quantitative researchers, it just doesn’t matter. What does matter is that they become good researchers in one genre of research and that they have informed respect for other genres. In the ‘80s and into the ‘90s, the literature on research philosophies was confused and confusing, and some it was just very nasty in tone. My belief is that one should know how to do research in at least one genre, but should respect the research traditions of others. Each research has its own tradition and agenda. I’m interested more in a respectful conversation about approaches than about debates about who’s right and who’s wrong. The book I just finished, published by Prentice Hall & Merrill, was on the philosophies of research and criticism in education and the social sciences. I teach a doctoral seminar on that subject that is required of our students and is being taken by other students in the College.