Elaine Epistemological/Ontological Interview 429 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 58, Number 4, May 2024 429 On Epistemology in Researching the Teaching and Learning of Literacy, Literature, and the Language Arts Marjorie Elaine 1 University of California, Los Angeles Interviewed by Antero Garcia Stanford University Garcia: Marjorie, first of all, thanks for joining this conversation with me. Elaine: ank you for being willing to do this. I know you’ve interviewed me once before and it was fun. Garcia: When I talk to my students about epistemology, they have a difficult time. Indeed, all of the “ology” words put them off: axiology, epistemology, phenom- enology. To my students, these words are awful words that mean really important things to us, but are hard to kind of parse through. So when I talk to my students about epistemology, I describe it as a framing of “how” questions: How can we understand X, or how can we know if Y is right? Maybe I’m wrong, but at least that’s how I try to guide some of our epistemology questions. As much as our conversation is supposed to be about epistemology, I actually want to start with a “why” set of questions for you. Why do you study what you study? Why immigrant youth? Why language? Why have you been pulled to these spaces of inquiry for a large portion of your career? I feel like these are biographical questions, but maybe we’ll start there, if that’s OK. Elaine: Which in a sense is an axiological question, right? Another one of those “ology” words. Axiology is about our values: Why do we do what we do? What purpose or meaning does it have for us? What values do we hold for it? is, in turn, is bound up with epistemological questions, as well as with our personal histories of experiences in the world: experiences that can be understood in sociological terms (i.e., in terms of our social and structural positions), in anthropological ones (i.e., in terms of cultural processes and practices), and at the psychological level (i.e., our interpretations of our experiences, our sense-making processes, the sub- or unconscious motivations that drive us). I’ve thought a lot about why I was drawn to study the experiences of children growing up in multilingual and multicultural communities, people who regularly