Continuity and Communication Across an Epistemologically Heterogenous Research Community: A Response to Kellam and Jennings (2021)

Kellam and Jennings’s 2021 article offers a valuable reflection on the epistemological underpinnings and influences of qualitative engineering education research. They identify epistemological heterogeneity and attribute the blending of postmodern and critical with positivist aspects of research to an “epistemological unconsciousness” that is the positivistic historical bias of the field encroaching on qualitative research. As a researcher that finds myself in similar epistemological blends, I offer some alternative interpretations and two directions for alternative framing.

First, I note that in the scholarship on personal epistemology a trend towards epistemological resources has helped appreciate the continuities between camps and expert/novice hierarchies. Second, I note that scholarship of pragmatism offers a way of noting the continuities between research epistemologies. I suggest that the communicative power of researcher authors to convince scholars from contrasting epistemological perspectives is an important additional aspect to enhance Kellam and Jennings’s argument.