The work that I did with David consisted mostly of consulting as a team with colleges and universities throughout the United States on curricular matters. They often found themselves at the end of a long day of consultation, sitting in a conference room with many sheets of flipchart paper hanging on the walls.
During one of these end-of-day reflections in which David and I always engaged, we both noticed that diagrams drawn with magic markers on the flipchart pages were quite similar to the diagrams we had drawn on many other flipcharts working with different disciplinary groups in other educational institutions. We began to realize that there were three fundamental ways in which issues were being addressed by the academics with whom we were working.
The first way was viewing their curriculum as a monad (a single theme or issue) from which the total curriculum emerged. The second way was based in dualism: identifying and building on a fundamental tension engaged in the field on which the curriculum was being built. The third way concerns a three-fold analysis (in the form of a triangle or lens) that led from clarity to diffusion and then back to clarity and then back to diffusion and so on.
Epistemological Pyramid
David and I came to recognize that these three ways in which to conceive and construct a curriculum were actually Paradigms! It seems that paradigms exist not only in scientific realms but also in areas of diagnosis and design. We went further in our analysis and identified a process for working with academic teams. We noted that specific Models seem to emanate from (or help to modify) the fundamental paradigm.
Furthermore, the models are often imported from other fields. When they are imported, these models bring with them some underlying assumptions, ideas, and perspectives from their original field. With the models in play and with one or more underlying paradigms informing and reinforcing these models, a community (such as an academic department) can produce specific Practices (what Kuhn called “normal science”).
We began to refine this Epistemological Pyramid by identifying and describing three assumptive levels.
Paradigms in a particular field or discipline tend to be:
- Few in number,
- Quite simple in construction, and
- Very powerful.
For example, we can point to the analytic tradition found in many physical, biological, and behavioral sciences: we break things down into their fundamental parts to better understand them, and then we reassemble them. David always pointed to the “smashed frog” critique in biology: when we dissect a frog in biology class, we might find out how the frog’s leg works and how the frog’s brain is connected to other parts of its body via the spinal cord. However, we can never bring the frog back to life. The parts can never be reassembled to create a living organism. This failure to create life remains a mystery and relates to what some philosophers and scientists refer to as “emergence” (the unexpected creation of new, higher order phenomena by integrating several lower order phenomena: the whole can’t be predicted from the parts).
