Values and the Disciplinary Status of Distance Education |
In reading the debate on whether distance education is or is not a discipline (Journal of Distance Education, 4,1), the issue which seems most compelling is: what are the shared purposes and presuppositions which give this debate its significance?
First, it seems that one would need to be already committed to the value of the field of distance education to see this issue as important. This commitment, expressed by Professor Devlin with the claim that: "distance education is the first educational development in two millennia to liberate human potential on a mass scale" allows Professors Holmberg and Devlin to concern themselves rather exclusively with abstract issues regarding theory construction and disciplinary status.
But for many educators (including, I would hope, some of those involved in distance education) what distance education is good for remains to some extent an open question. For all the apparent flexibility and increased accessibility of distance education programs, there is, presumably, a price to be paid for the loss of face-to-face interactions between student and instructor and between students. Establishing what this price is, how it can be avoided or minimized, and how to make the best of the strengths of distance education is crucial to the advancement of the field. No doubt, Devlin and Holmberg would agree with this very general claim but would want to go on to say that these questions can only be scientifically addressed (in the only manner they consider worthy of a discipline) through the development of theoretical constructs. Devlin says, "familiar concepts must be raised to the levels of constructs for dispassionate analysis." Holmberg's reaction is to state that he shares "wholeheartedly ... Dr. Devlin's view that values have no scholarly status." But this is, of course, to fall into the long recognized contradiction which has plagued positivist approaches to human understanding. Specifically, it is to rule out of the realm of scholarly discourse all values, and therefore the values espoused or implied by the authors themselves. It is to reduce their own value claims regarding distance education, disciplinary status, and epistemological distinctions, to mere matters of opinion, mere subjectivities.
If these values are not grounded in scholarly inquiry and justified according to intellectual standards, why should we accept that Popper's ideas about science (for which Holmberg expresses admiration) have more value than Habermas' (which Holmberg rejects).
This brief response is not likely to settle beyond dispute all issues to do with the place of values in fields of practice, such as education, or in the human sciences. What I do want to point out is that many of the ways in which we care most about advancing the field of distance education involve practical reasoning and wise arbitration between competing values. Professor Devlin deplores the fact that "other branches of education have paid a terrible price for divorcing theory and practice, content, and method." If distance education is to minimize this price, it will be at least partly a result of tempering enthusiasm for theoretical constructs which have so often lost contact with the ordinary language in which we raise concerns about education and educational practices. It will certainly not be as a result of ruling out of the realm of scholarly debate the values and purposes which guide practical decisions about how to conduct distance education in ways that are educationally productive and morally responsible.
It would be imprudent, I suggest, to link the advancement of the field of distance education exclusively to formalization in theoretical constructs and attempts to falsify them. Popper himself is well known for the claim that prediction (and therefore science, under his definition) is only possible for systems that are well-isolated, stationary, and recurrent. So, even on his account we have reason to be skeptical about this program for an enterprise as fluid and context-dependent as education is. Further, emphasis on the disciplinary status of distance education, especially when this is interpreted as its status as a social science, is likely to undervalue the knowledge of those who practise in the field as opposed to those who theorize about it.