Understanding Epistemological Anarchism (Feyerabend) in Research Reported in the Journal Interchange (Springer)

Interchange: A Quarterly Review of Education, is published by Springer in collaboration with the University of Calgary, Canada. It started publishing in 1970 and embraces educational theory, research, analysis, history, philosophy, policy, practices and a particular interest in science education. In November 2017, I made an online search on the website of Interchange with the key words “Epistemological anarchism” and “Feyerabend” (www.springer.com/10780). This gave a total of 15 articles published since 1982. All articles were evaluated on the same criteria (Levels I–V) as in a previous study (see Chap. 3). Following the guidelines based on Charmaz (2005), presented in Chap. 3, and in order to facilitate credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability (cf. Denzin & Lincoln, 2005) of the results, I adopted the following procedure: (a) All the 15 articles from Interchange, were downloaded and after evaluation were classified in one of the five levels, I–V (for levels see Chap. 3); (b) After a period of approximately three months all the articles were evaluated again and there was agreement of 95% between the first and the second evaluation. It is important to note that all the articles evaluated in this study referred to epistemological anarchism in some context, which may not have been the primary or major subject dealt with by the authors. Detailed examples from different levels are presented in the next section. A complete list of all the 15 articles from Interchange that were evaluated is presented in Appendix 5. Distribution of all the articles according to author’s area of research, context of the study and level (classification) is presented in Appendix 6.