Two Cultures: “Science” vs. “Research” (Reflections on Day 1 of the TCRWP Institute)

I’m still curious why this is called an “Institute.” Having spent my undergraduate years at the world’s most famous “Institute,” I may be particularly sensitive to the word, but it’s also, as Stephen King knows, just objectively uncanny.

I didn’t learn anything about that word, but I did get a better picture of how people here at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project use the word “science.” The answer is: they don’t.

I didn’t hear the word “science” once all day. On the other hand, I did hear, quite often, the word “research.” Several times, presenters talked explicitly and at some length about “research”—“Reading Research” or “Non-Fiction Research” or “research on the reciprocity of writing and reading.”

Mary Ehrenworth, the lead organizer of the Institute, gave an hour-long talk over half of which was an overview of the “research” supporting her approach. Interestingly, she presented this research not as specific studies or types of inquiry or categories of interest within the field, but as individual researchers within the field. When talking about “Reading Research,” for instance, she listed six particular scholars and discussed one or more of their books. Organizing the talk this way was interesting, subtly prioritizing both the book (over the “peer-reviewed paper” that is the lodestar of the “Science” folks) and also the human. Organizing a discussion of the research by researchers is a way of valuing the human and cultural nature of educational scholarship, and, the “science” people would say, completely ignoring the “scientific” nature of it.

I remember Mark Seidenberg--a cognitive scientist who is so annoyed by the TCRWP’s insufficient embrace of the “science” supporting systematic phonics that he more or less implies that the TCRWP’s Lucy Calkins is herself the reason Americans can’t read (ironically humanizing what is after all supposed to be an objective debate)—I remember Mark Seidenberg saying that there were two distinct cultures, and that Calkins and her ilk (the whole literacy establishment, including Allington and Beers and others) were part of an “educational culture” which was distinct from the “scientific culture” to which Seidenberg belonged. In Seidenberg’s view, the reason Americans lag in reading (if they do) is that educational culture is interested in culture and socialization and wholly uninterested in science. Based on what I saw today, I think Seidenberg is half right. The people here are not really interested in science.

Where I differ from Seidenberg is that I think he vastly overestimates the extent to which the “science” of education is settled or helpful. Part of this may be that the people here are focused on all of K-12 education, while he is for various reasons more focused on the basics of learning to read. Part of this is because scholarship around education is itself anxious about its status as “science” (you can see this even in the work of a researcher cited twice today, John Hattie, whose work claims way more than it delivers). But a lot of it is that, as an old poem has it, the human and social “sciences” are still in their infancies:

     No known way of human seeing

     Can clearly see the human being.

In any case, I'm looking forward to Day 2!