56
community of enquiry beyond the thresholds of historical interplay of self-preserv-
ing power within a structure as Foucault would deconstruct (Foucault 1972 ).
Knowledge production is, thus, not a selfish and ostracizing exercise; it tends to
communicate, spread out, outreach, and become a shared oral and written tradition
of a civilization and époque, hence discourse.
A discourse, then, implies a process of production and dissemination of knowl-
edge. This section critiques a few idiosyncrasies of Asian education research in
general, which also affects higher education research. First, I conjecture what could
possibly be an “Asian methodology,” whether Asian education research could or
should have a distinct method. Second, I will examine the problem of “subjection
and submission” in the power relations (Foucault 1983 ) of Asian HE researchers
and research participants. It is based on my own experience in the field of humani-
ties and social sciences with no pretense to generalize and extrapolate to methodol-
ogy in natural sciences, which would usually follow some hypothetico-deductive
methods of the West.
Possibility of an Asian Methodology
A field with substantive corpus of subject matter and plausibly clear boundaries (the
first characteristic of our threefold principle of a field) can generate not only fresh
insights but also unique perspectives, frameworks, and perhaps research methods.
Could or should Asian higher education research have a distinctive methodology
called Asian methodology?
To my knowledge, there are two such major proposals in Asia. The first one is
“Asia as method,” that is, Asia as the paradigm for knowledge production suggested
by some Asian intellectuals in critical (cultural) studies and, second, a nuanced
empirical social science and education research methodology suggested by expo-
nents of Confucian heritage culture scholarship.
The former will be detailed throughout the rest of this chapter, but, in short, it is
a critical proposal to transform both knowledge structure and production with the
idea of Asia as an “imaginary anchoring point” that makes possible societies in Asia
become each other’s points of reference (Chen 2010 ). The latter, Confucian Heritage
Culture (CHC), has been described by the educational research community as a
group of Asian nation-states with their motherland and overseas population who
share Confucian values, which consistently reflect in their behavior and social prac-
tices, including learning styles and academic outcomes (Park 2011 ). This circle’s
Asian education research methodology calls for critical reflections on the kinds of
conditions that such a methodology should meet if it were to produce plausible and
fruitful researches and that are not misinterpretation-prone, methodologically trou-
bling, or of dubious validity.
A sine qua non condition for viability (survival of the fittest argument in global
academic arena) is a “compliance” issue with the conventional Western research
dynamics and philosophy of science. “Research dynamics” comprises the research
J. Park