CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF RESEARCH TRADITIONS: PARADIGMATIC AND NARRATIVE ORIENTATIONS

The objective of the research is to elaborate on changing research traditions in one of the institutions in Latvia. The choices of research traditions highlight changes towards more qualitative research traditions: collaborative action research and narrative research methodologies. Action research tradition opens new horizons for the research as an active, open - minded and cooperative research that affirms the importance of experimentation, and emphasizes a continual growth in researchers' awareness leading to ‘phronesis'. By the qualitative research methodology the authors attempt to explore the role of the researcher, what University researchers view as significant in framing their professional landscape as a result of the use of collaborative action research and other types of qualitative research. The results: Research highlights changes and tensions in researchers' willingness to accept greater ambiguity, uncertainties, and practice of exercising judgments within the qualitative inquiry tradition and teaching process instead of complete reliance on predetermined rules and procedures. Various tensions between paradigmatic and narrative orientations towards teaching and within teachers' lives are explored and ultimately seen as contributing in complex and ambiguous ways to researchers' professional knowledge landscape. The study also highlights the co - existence of both equally legitimate epistemological research traditions – positivism, and costructivism, as an alternative in educational research in Latvia. The evidence gained in this small scale study indicates to the emergence of the qualitative tradition grounded in constructivism.