Teachers’ Epistemological Assumptions about Educational Inequality in Four Societies: A Holistic Reading Strategy for Examining Sociocultural Epistemologies

Abstract

Conventional approaches to analyzing cross-national data on teacher knowledge have often failed to recognize qualitative variations across and within different countries. A dilemma confronted by researchers is how to avoid the essentialization of cultures while benefiting from cultural intuition by attending to general national patterns. If researchers focus on exploring the diverse subjectivities of respondents, they are not likely to observe general national patterns because subtle nuances in meaning make it challenging to deal with data with broad categories. There may be too many subtle meanings. However, if researchers focus on general national patterns, they may lose the hidden scripts of the data, as little attention is paid to nuanced meanings. Our data suggest that a holistic reading approach examining different types of semantic foci can be an alternative method for dealing with such a methodological dilemma. This study provides an illustrative example analysis based on this alternative analytic approach.