Including other ways of knowing in educational research

In this paper I provide a theoretical framework based on Jung's insights into the nature of unconscious knowing and dreams. Marshalling support from critical social theorists, I discuss the content and interpretation of several dreams and related this to academic research. The main challenges of including such a way of knowing is that the research data (dreams and inner work) can only be experienced and recorded by one person. Thus it is impossible to triangulate the research data collection, although rigour can be demonstrated if a properly documented dream journal is maintained. In the data analysis, it is possible to triangulate using multiple theoretical frameworks and to involve a person experienced in dream interpretation and active imagination. That said it could still be, as Bowers (1993a) asserts, that only woe awaits the researcher who dares to challenge the dominance of Enlightenment rationality in most areas of educational research.

C.A. Bowers has crowned over thirty years of vigorous research in education with several recent books cogently arguing for attention to ways of knowing other than narrow rationalism (Bowers, 1993a. 1993b, 1992). He contends that this limited way of knowing, associated with the individualistic secularism of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on ecologically unsustainable growth, leads us away from community towards nihilism. This is supported by a close reading of critical theorists (such as Habermas, Adorno, Horkheimer and Fromm) and postmodernists (such as Derrida).

Rallied by Eisner and Peshkin's call (1990, p.137) for 'incipient' and 'elusive' thinking in interpretive research, and with an existential interest in Jungian psychology, I have been exploring whether dream interpretation can be a way of knowing that can be included in a three year interpretive research project (Taylor & Campbell Williams, 1993). Krathwohl advises education researchers to "use your unconscious." (1994, p.29). Although this is strategic advice, one can instrumentally use the unconscious without respecting its processes. Erickson, in his work on qualitative research, points out that one of the insights of Freudian psychology is that "people knew much more than they were able to say." (1986, p.123). Dieckman (1993) reports using psychoanalysis in educational research in a recent ethnographic study. A form of psychoanalysis was used "as an initial procedural guard to check for researcher bias and raise the awareness of the researcher before entering the field of study." (1993, p.49, 50). Robert Early (1992, pp.15-20) actually collects and interprets students' dreams as an optional part of the curriculum in his college mathematics classes. It was not to students' dreams, but to my own that I was led for insight on an educational research project.