Â
1 Â
Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION We begin this article with the claim that current theoretical frameworks in education artificially splinter the holistic experience of teaching and learning. While perhaps oversimplified, the main challenge for us as researchers, theorists, and practitioners is that the three main driving perspectives create artificial and unproductive distinctions separate from how teachers and learners encounter educational experiences. This is especially true in the development of instruction, curriculum, and design of research questions, which are viewed by many as valid only if they are internally and externally consistent within a single epistemic and ontological frame. The disparate views of what makes up reality, truth, and knowledge and how we may know these concepts bring stakeholders in educational settings into conflict about the practices of teaching and learning. For the purposes of this article, we frame these views in the educational system language of Prawat and Floden (1994) and the larger field of social science as depicted by Bernstein (Bernstein, 1976, 1983). For example, many who take their perspective from the empiricist, Positivist, or objectivist epistemic stance claim truth and knowledge exist separately from the minds that perceive them and they may be fully understood through the senses (Hollis, 1994). Therefore, learners may read, observe, hear, or use other acquisitive means to know what is true and real as given them by a teacher, school system, and larger state and federal political systems. According to this view, researchers may only know whether learning