Social Constructionism and the Sociology of Education:

The Conflict between Discourse and Reality

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to review the history of social constructionist research in the sociology of education and to identify the future problems to be discussed.

Responding to the Ontological Gerrymandering Critique by Woolger and Pawluch, we assume that claims-making activities exist but we have no concern about whether some putative conditions exist or not. According to this assumption, the framework to classify realism or constructionism is set to achieve the goal.

First, Yamamura and Tokuoka's achievements and their contributions to the history of constructionist research in the sociology of education, which started in the 1980s, are examined. We then classify the stream of constructionist research in the sociology of education into two research programs, namely, the study of constructing the process of educational problems, and the discourse analysis of educational problems. We discuss the character of each of the two research programs based on the above framework.

In addition, we classify the discourse analyses of educational problems into critical analyses of discourse, which assume that social reality exists independently of language, and discourse analyses which assume that language shapes social reality.

The latter thesis should be applied not only to everyday life but also to constructionist research itself. Therefore a new analytic concept to contribute to the development of constructionism is indispensable.