ABSTRACT
It is a well-known fact among educators that the epistemologies teachers espouse mediate the learning environments they create (Tobin and McRobbie, 1997). In my experience, the same can be said for graduate programmes in the social sciences. Thus, on several visits to German and French universities – specifically to research groups focusing on knowing and learning in the natural sciences – I found graduate students engaging in empirical studies without any prior preparation in the ways of how such research might be conducted; much like in the early years of anthropology, these graduate students simply went into the field and conducted their research hoping that what they did would lead to useable and useful outcomes. The situation in most North American universities is just the opposite. Graduate students frequently are required to take several courses in research methods or methodology prior to designing research and collecting data. When they actually attempt to begin their research, these students often do not know where to begin even though they have studied methods texts and done very well in the associated courses (Roth, 2005b). Typically, students in many North American universities say, ‘I want to do a quantitative study,’ ‘My research will be an auto/ethnography,’ or ‘I will do qualitative research,’ without actually knowing what they want to research and why this research might be of interest to anybody.
