ABSTRACT
A classroom teacher is generally faced with numerous problems. The traditional approach is to provide the teacher with textbooks, worksheets, lab manuals and finally the lecture with the following guideline: this is what science has found and so you must learn and teach. An alternative approach to solve these problems would be providing the teachers an opportunity to do research based on the understanding that science is tentative, where different interpretations are offered and views held despite seeming refutation. This would provide the students and teachers an understanding of the dynamics of scientific progress (Niaz, 2009a) and a glimpse of “science in the making”. Teacher as a practicing researcher thus could provide the methodologists an insight with respect to what happens in the classroom. Consequently, researchers in teacher education first need to ask important questions that need answers and then come up with a combination of research genres that are appropriate (Borko et al., 2007). This is all the more important if we recognize the pitfalls associated with the traditional positivist view of the scientific enterprise, which clearly shows the need to go beyond and accept perspectives that align with postpositivism (Phillips & Burbules, 2000). In this context, Giere (2006) provides sound advice:
I wish to reject objective realism but still maintain a kind of realism, a perspectival realism, which I think better characterizes realism in science. For a perspectival realist, the strongest claims a scientist can legitimately make are of a qualified, conditional form: “According to this highly confirmed theory (or reliable instrument), the world seems to be roughly such and such.” There is no way legitimately to take the further objectivist step and declare unconditionally: “This theory (or instrument) provides us with a complete and literally correct picture of the world itself.”
