To mark the publication of the third edition of A Good Book, In Theory: Making Sense through Inquiry, authors Alan Sears and James Cairns explain the impetus behind the new edition, as well as the changes they have incorporated for students and instructors.
Writing the third edition of this book feels a bit like a turning point in a relationship. First time through, there is all the excitement of a new romance, trying things out for the first time. Second time through, you try to incorporate everything you learned the first time to make fewer mistakes. And on the third pass, it feels like you are establishing a long-term relationship, based on a different kind of love.
So what is this love that keeps us coming back to A Good Book, In Theory? Well, like a lot of long-term relationships, we’d have to begin by saying it works. We both use the book in our own teaching, and are convinced from our interaction with students that it is a useful resource for them in navigating the world of theoretical thinking.
In our experience, university education too often turns into information transfer from teacher to student. Textbooks are resources in this process, packed with information for students to digest. Scholarly articles are harder for undergraduates to digest, but we give them some to chew on even if they end up spitting a lot back up.
The most important thing, however, is not the information students take in, but their development of the abilities required to process it. This is certainly true in theory courses. Five years after graduating, students who finish their formal education with a BA are unlikely to remember the names of particular theorists, let alone their specific contributions. For most people, knowledge that is not integrated into everyday life practices tends to fade.
That does not mean, however, that they will retain nothing from their theory education. If theory profs have been successful, grads will have developed new capacities to unpack the ways information is framed in its everyday uses, whether in meetings, media, or messaging from politicians. Grads will also have reflexive abilities to understand their own positioning and perspective in relation to others they encounter.
The development of these capacities to process information and analyze the environment is often beneath the surface in post-secondary course design and assigned readings. The information transfer part is front and centre; the processing abilities part is hidden. In A Good Book, In Theory, we try to reverse that, emphasizing the development of theoretical thinking skills. We have both used the book a lot in our teaching over the years, and we have heard feedback from others who have used the book in courses and from former students. We think it does a lot of what it was designed to do.
Indeed, one of the surprising sources of feedback over the years has been the number of graduate students who have found the book useful in figuring out the role of theory in their own research. While they knew a lot of theory from undergraduate and graduate courses, they did not know how to use theory in their own research projects. They had stored theory as content rather than thinking theoretically as method.
In this book we have sought to activate theory, locating it as a central feature of methods. The book is designed as an invitation to theoretical thinking and an argument that theory, despite its abstraction and difficult language, is incredibly practical.
So we keep coming back to this book. And, like any longer-term relationship, including even the best of them, we can always find room for improvement. In this case, we have tried to make the book more useful in the third edition by making three major changes:
First, we made more of an effort to locate formal theorizing as part of a specific way of knowing through a contrast with Indigenous knowledges. We quite deliberately do not position theoretical thinking within a social science frame as the essential way of knowing that trumps all others. Rather, we show the power and integrity of Indigenous ways of knowing, which reveal quite different truths about humanity and the world we inhabit. We do this both to make sure the book makes a modest contribution to the project of decolonizing the university, and to help students learn theoretical thinking as a method, with its own strengths and limitations.
Second, we have changed the way we mapped contrasting theoretical perspectives. The previous editions of the book focused very specifically on the contrast between social order and conflict theories, highlighting the distinction between these perspectives through repeated applications to specific issues. In this edition, we have added in a more developed post-modern perspective, which is cast as a critique of both conflict and social order approaches. While we continue to apply these three main theoretical perspectives throughout the book, we no longer focus these applications so narrowly on one key contrast.
Finally, we have tried to update examples and to keep the book topical. The argument that theory is essentially practical works best with students when they are genuinely engaged by the specific processes of inquiry documented in the book. We have made some changes in these, because the most engaging point of entry into events keeps shifting. This is not to say that we always need to be running to catch up to the latest issues, but a book with a specific goal of inviting students into theoretical thinking through engaging with the world around them will suffer if it seems other-worldly.
So that, in a nutshell, is why we are carrying on our relationship with A Good Book, In Theory. We look forward to hearing your feedback about the third edition. We hope it will prove to be a useful educational resource, in theory, introductory, and methods classes, as well as other courses that seek to hone theoretical thinking skills.
-Alan Sears (Ryerson University) and James Cairns (Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford)
If you are an instructor who would like to consider using A Good Book, In Theory in an upcoming course, please email us to request an examination copy.
