As someone who loves the label "Critical Theory-Neomarxist-Postmodern-Praxis Paradigm," I'd just like to thank Tom Reeves [21 Feb 96] for his dissection of various points of view for ID. I came to this field after doing literary criticism, and it was a huge shift in gears. Nobody has seemed terribly interested in deconstruction, here, which is understandable, since its applications to instruction (by "applications," I'm referring to whatever happens after the breakdown and analysis) are not immediately obvious.
I would be interested to see how some of these notions (examination of the field for cultural/gender/sexual bias; examination of over determined terms central to ID thought) play out in instructional design. Hopefully I can use Tom Reeves' references for his letter as a starting point--although if anyone takes a criticalist (hehe) stance and has experience doing instructional design, I'd love to hear from them.
For my own part, instruction looks like a pretty good place to exercise one's observations on mechanisms of culture--people are manipulated into all sorts of odd points of view and activities, thanks to social pressures, so why not use the same tactics to produce a more desirable effect? In other words, I'm not sure I see that the paradigms are necessarily at odds (or that, if they are, that contradictions are such a bad thing).
As I mentioned in a previous message, I'm a big fan of the idea that we make our own truth. How well these truths map onto the observable world is questionable--Hume leads us to believe that there will always be uncertainty between observation and knowledge, and I'm comfy with that. I don't see a particular conflict between the idea that knowledge is something we give to a learner, and the idea that knowledge is something the learner produces--they seem to be different depictions of the same method of production.
An example: In the Gorgias, Socrates leads a young student through the process of discovery, so that the student ends up with knowledge about the nature of a rectangle. Socrates doesn't ever offer a fact about the rectangle, only asks questions of the learner, that leads the learner to knowledge. Whoopee, discovery, yes? And yet, at the same time, it could be said that all the knowledge about the shape was being taught, because of its representation in a picture. (I believe Plato used the example to show that all knowledge is already up there somewhere in our heads, only needing to be brought to the surface; I don't buy that, though.)
That there will "always" be a context in which some materials are present for the learner, says to me that there's just no such thing as a "pure" constructivism; the materials teach, even if we're stepping back and trying to get the learner to do things on her own. At the same time, even in programmed instruction there is a lot of semantic mapping going on beyond the designer's control, so that predicting/planning a discrete number of outcomes seems hopeless (anybody done chaos theory as it applies to instruction?).
So, I'm wondering, what's the big deal? Is something at stake here that I'm missing completely? Treating the design as a science, though problematic, seems like a good idea to me, especially considering how self-conscious such an approach would have to be. I'm assuming that such a science would be honest and not presuppose that (currently?) unquantifiable construction variables don't fit into the design; also, I'm figuring that this self-consciousness would lead to a state of mind unlike other sciences, which demonize attempts to explore the region of knowledge in an "artful" manner.