I enjoyed participating in the Metatheoretical Snowmen panel at ASIST 2011 in New Orleans organized excellently by Jenna Hartel. My role was to listen to the five minute presentations of others and then to react. The basic idea is that each panelist explains why one particular approach to explaining the information life of a snowman might offer useful insights, and as a process it is an entertaining exercise in which underlying theoretical stances are articulated. The usual suspects were presented: analytical-philosophic, cognitivism, critical studies etc. But I was surprised to see user-centered design proposed as a metatheory too.
The format is engaging but like many such carvings of the world, I find such presentations unnecessarily divisive and exclusive. I am not sure anyone really lives within one metatheoretical framework (though I should say that invoking the analytic-philosophical approach as a means to question everything tends to cross discourse levels in a way that ensures a certain ‘win’) but even if they do, the existence of one need not preclude the value of another. Yet in education and ongoing arguments about theory, we tend to set these approaches in opposition as if this is the only way they can be examined.
Try thinking about theoretical approaches another way. Do humans perceive? Yes, within pretty well defined principles of psychophysics. OK, so tick that box, the laws of perception apply to most of us. Are individuals susceptible to reward, reinforcement and punishment. Yep, those behaviorist rules apply to most of us too. Do humans think? Let’s hope so, and we can actually demonstrate this in most instances, so we are cognitive beings. Do we exist in a context of relationships with other people? Yes, we are social beings and we are part of a complex process of inter-related engagements and communications that shape our understandings and actions. Are their power relationships in society? I really have to answer that?
So, all of these perspectives apply to all of us some of the time — this is the beauty of existence. Choosing the level at which you decide to slice through the information life of people will reveal particular phenomena which are susceptible to analysis through some methods rather than others. What it won’t do is tell you all you need to know if you want to know it all. To really make progress, we need to make a vertical slice across these levels, examining the same human information actions at the physical, perceptual, cognitive, organizational, and social levels. That’s hard, but if you want to at least make progress, stop acting like one theoretical position can do it better than another, unless you want to bound and qualify the ‘it’ considerably.