Narrative assessment and the scientist-practitioner model

This is the third of a series of posts going back over some of my notes from my postgraduate studies in educational psychology in 2018. As a part of our course, we were asked to engage in Online Learning Tasks (OLTs), which generally involved reading one or more particular article/book chapter(s), possibly doing a mini-literature review, and then responding to the material on the course's online forum, often in the form of a "reflection."

One learning task asked us to provide a reflection on one of the various frameworks of practice within educational psychology, and also provide a summary of the famous Boulder (scientist-practitioner) model of psychological practice. However, I had already started having concerns about the amount of social constructivist material in our course content. This is an abridged version of the reflection I posted.

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I'm not sure how to put this...

During their study/reading, has anyone else noticed and/or been at least a little worried at the influence of postmodernist thinking on the ed psyc literature? E.g. the following from Annan, Priestly and Phillipson (2006):

"Practitioners who take a narrative approach to their work are guided by some key understandings. The social world is viewed as a socially constructed, negotiated system that does not assume any particular "correct" or "ideal" path. It does not hold an elusive, universal truth but comprises collective subjective realities at any moment in time." p 21.

The quote above, like many others I've seen, have been somewhat open to interpretation. The authors are describing a "social world." Are they merely characterizing mental constructs (ie the various values and beliefs people have within a society) or is this "social world" the only world they ascribe to - do they also grant the existence of an objective reality beyond socially constructed understandings? I'm honestly not sure, and I'm trying to be generous in my reading, but some postmodernist authors do make such anti-realist claims.

Other students have already provided great summaries of the scientist-practitioner model, so I thought I'd share a reflection on "science-practitioning" instead. Reading up on various frameworks, I keep coming back to worries that there is a lot about the ed psyc literature that is unscientific. For example, the same article by Annan et al (this just happens to be the most recent article I read!) provides 6 references to support their claim that "there is ample evidence to suggest that narrative approaches make valuable contributions." Scrolling down to the list of references... these all appear to be books providing descriptions of narrative practices, along with some illustration cases (aka anecdotes), e.g. "Talk that Sings" (Bird, 2004). Of course I can't be sure, not having read any of these. I may be way off base. I am not familiar with the state of the evidence-base for narrative inquiry. But surely peer-reviewed empirical research isn't too much to ask for here? Is there a meta-analysis we can refer to in order to judge this "ample evidence" for ourselves? Honestly, perhaps there is, but it's a reasonable request if we're in the business of doing science!

Clark (2013) provides an interesting - and scathing! - philosophical critique of educational theorizing and policy research in New Zealand. Check out this quote:

"There is also something deeply disturbing about requiring participating teachers to sign up to a declaration which explicitly rejects all causal explanations but one, as if this would somehow eliminate the material forces at play which structurally hold the differential attainment in place.  This is the very worst of academic indoctrination imposed by researchers committed to an academic ideology, where contrary views are simply not entertained, being rejected outright with no rational justification." p 251.

…boom!