THE CEA FORUM - Winter/Spring 2017 - Epistemology Shock: English Professors Confront Science

Oct 15, 2026

Essay explores how English professors experience the pressure of scientism and science-based epistemologies in university and K-12 contexts. It analyzes demands for quantitative assessments, standardized testing, and grant narratives centered on executive summaries and measurable deliverables. The piece contrasts rhetoric and composition values of close reading, qualitative inquiry, and storytelling with calls for randomized control studies, data outcomes, and “validated” science. It questions how liberal arts educators can resist becoming instruments of objectivity within big data paradigms.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages22

Reading Time34 min

AccessFree to download

Epistemology Shock: English Professors Confront Science

The world of fact

Contexts and challenges for English teachers

THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2017 Epistemology Shock: English Professors Confront Science Ian Barnard Chapman University Jan Osborn Chapman University The shock of our title was precipitated by our diverse yet eerily congruent experiences as English professors teaching courses where we were confronted by students, colleagues, and dispositions entrenched in scientism, scientific disciplines, and a science-based understanding of the world. These confrontations, rooted in the continuing legacy of 18th Century Cartesian constructions of a mind/body duality, resonate with current STEM initiatives, with calls within our own field of rhetoric and composition for more quantitative scholarship to justify the field itself, and with the privileging of empirical research and science methodologies in the academy in general and elsewhere. An exhaustive list of examples of this encroachment would be impossible here, but the ones that impact our work most immediately include increasing demands for quantitative assessments ofthe programs and courses we teach; the exponentially accelerating imperatives of standardized testing in the K-12 schools that prepare our students; and the research grants we apply for whose applications insist on “executive summaries,”“deliverables,” and discussions of methodology, and assume equipment use as a major expenditure—concepts and research frameworks from business, science, and the social sciences that are often alien to our work as humanities scholars. And, indeed, these privilegings of science and scientific methodologies, these demands for numbers and “facts,” cannot be separated from the current denunciation of THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2017 “alternate facts” by liberals, however convenient it might be to imagine that some appeals to facticity are more righteous than others. These are the contexts that we recognize form and impact our places in the academy and our work as teachers based in an English Department but working with students in many disciplines. Although we do gesture to some pedagogical possibilities at the end of this article, our purpose here is not primarily to pose classroom solutions for this privileging of science methodologies—the result of a science/humanities duality—but rather to excavate the ways in which this disposition manifests itself in our classes and impacts our students and us as English teachers, challenging our disciplinary/disciplined ways of thinking, writing, reading, teaching; and to think through the implications and consequences of these challenges. As rhetoricians and scholars trained in the disciplines of English, and as college English teachers, we both value close critical readings of facts and figures; we believe that all discourse constructs and disseminates values, assumptions, and ideologies; we see qualitative research asan integral component of any project that claims to gloss human and non-human cultures; we connect reading and writing to understanding self and others, to empathy, to inquiry in a broad and open context. Yet the calls for “randomized control studies” suggest that such connections must be quantified, must be scientifically “validated,” that storytelling (whether fictional or nonfictional, novelistic or essayistic) as a means of making meaning is suspect, that “data” and“outcomes” and “measurement” is the only way to investigate and educate. Somehow, the very idea of liberal arts, of broadening a human being’s experiences and knowledge rather than“training” them for a profession, is suspect. What are our graduates going to do with a degree is THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2017 often the question. We, on the other hand, wonder who they are going to be. But is such a question even possible in this climate of big data and empirical studies and scientific methodologies? 1 And how do we avoid giving ourselves over to be cogs in a wheel that appears to be grinding every more steadily toward a focus on “objectivity,” tow

FAQs

What triggers the essay’s “epistemology shock” in teaching contexts?

It is triggered by English professors’ confrontations with students, colleagues, and institutional dispositions grounded in scientism, science disciplines, and empirical understandings of the world.

How does the essay describe the increasing pressure for quantitative work in education?

It points to demands for numbers and “facts,” quantitative assessments of courses, standardized testing imperatives in K-12, and grant applications requiring executive summaries, deliverables, and methodology focused on measurable outcomes.

What concerns do the authors raise about storytelling, qualitative research, and liberal arts education?

They argue that calls for randomized control studies and scientific validation cast storytelling and qualitative inquiry as suspect, while the very idea of broad liberal arts education becomes questioned in a data-driven climate.

Oct 15, 2026

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