The ‘performative’ state and the state of educational research (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Australian Educational Researcher, 2010
(AARE) in representing and constituting this field. The evidence for the argument is derived from AARE Presidential Addresses across its 40-year history. The paper documents the enhanced complexity and diversity of the field over these 40 years, including the emergence of a global educational policy field, theoretical and methodological developments in the social sciences and new research accountabilities such as the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) measure. Specifically, the paper suggests that the evidence-based movement in public management and education policy, and the introduction of the ERA, potentially limit and redefine the field of educational research, reducing the usefulness and relevance of educational research to policy makers and practitioners. This arises from a failure to recognise that Education is both a field of research and a field of policy and practice. Located against both developments, the paper argues for a principled eclecticism framed by a reassessment of quality, which can be applied to the huge variety of methodologies, theories, epistemologies and topics legitimately utilised and addressed within the field of educational research. At the same time, the paper argues the need to globalise the educational research imagination and deparochialise educational research. This call is located within a broader argument suggesting the need for a new social imaginary (in a post-neoliberal context of the global financial crisis) to frame educational policy and practice and the contribution that educational theory and research might make to its constitution. In relation to this, the paper considers the difficulties that political representations of such a new imaginary •21
Review of Education, 2019
This article was written to address a gap in the literature. Having taught a Masters in Educational Research course on the Nature of Educational Enquiry for many years I have not found a paper or book that quite captured the kinds of arguments that made sense to me about educational research. I wrote the article initially for students on this course and then considered that it might be of wider interest. Thinking about the assumptions of educational research is widely taken to be critical for how research is designed, carried out and what it has to contribute to education as a practice. The subtitle of the paper is about the other reason why I consider this paper to be important. It is that much thinking about these research assumptions does not connect with philosophical thinking, appearing as scripts, what is written by others, and not originating from the understanding of those justifying their research approach and assumptions. Implications for Policy This paper might prompt those who advise about and decide on educational research policy at national level to reconsider their assumptions about the nature of educational research. This might be government agencies but also charitable organisations. This prompt derives from the pragmatist perspective adopted in thinking about the nature of educational research. There are two key pragmatist influences hereavoiding the trap of sharp dichotomies and recognising the fallibilist nature of knowledge assertions and claims. Policy making about educational research can take account of these by understanding the diverse research interests that drive research and enquiry done by professional researchers and reflective teachers. The linked policy implication is that for evidence to inform educational practice this means being open to these
The structure of educational research
British Educational Research Journal, 2005
Educational research is widely construed as the scientific investigation of the causes of 'effective' teaching. Discussion of values and philosophical problems is condemned as descent into 'ideology'. Opposing this is a conception of teaching as phronesis where educational research and philosophy may be desirable, but have no direct relationship to practice. It is contended in this article that both of these views are misconceived. In educational research, empirical questions are secondary, values are central, and philosophical investigation is central to the determination of these. Philosophy, not social science, directly governs policy and practice; virtue governed by logic, not causation under natural law, is the principal explanatory concept. Educational research, then, is logically tied to practice. This sanctions not the authoritarian 'methods that work' project, but a pluralistic conception of research anchored in the autonomy of teachers and pupils. 'Educational research' The technicist ascendancy Teaching today is treated as a technology-an applied social science (Bennett &
2021
This project aims to provide a clear, comprehensive account of the state of education as an academic discipline in universities; as a field of practice; and as a significant and central element of social and political policy in the four nations of the UK. Reports from each stage of the initiative will equip stakeholders in every part of the sector with the most objective and powerful information on which to base their advocacy for, and their eforts to grow the size, influence and impact of, education. It will also be key to informing decision-making processes within BERA. Two elements are central to the initiative: • the definition of education as an academic discipline that shares characteristics with many other disciplines, including those that have been established for much longer in universities worldwide • the intersections between education and practice (including in teacher education and training), which in recent work has been articulated as 'close-to-practice-research'.
The impact of educational research: Teacher knowledge in action
The Australian Educational Researcher, 2003
In this paper I argue against a dominant view that social planning, supported by strategically located and tightly controlled research and development, is delivered from above and enacted downwards by the education system. As such the paper argues against a view taken by many theorists/politicians and reinforced by the major components of the educational bureaucracy. The Impact of Educational Research produces a warrant for an alternative form of thinking about the deeper forces of contemporary change including the ways that individuals are culturally formed and how they relate to each other. Understood this way, classrooms and schools are sites where new meanings and understandings are created and shared. The paper concludes with a call for consideration of new ways of understanding and discussing the context of change that educational research relates to. Background and introduction During the late 1970s Barry Jones, politician, academic and one time quiz game celebrity, spent several years studying, documenting and writing about what he perceived to be a social change of major proportions. In 1982 the result of this study, a book titled Sleepers Wake!, was published. This book has subsequently been reprinted and republished many times, the last edition appearing in the late 1990s. There is little doubt that the enduring interest in Sleepers Wake! is testimony to the fact that Jones has managed to document some significant cultural and political themes. Barry Jones's thesis in the book is as follows. Through the period of the 1970s Australia, typical of many advanced industrial nations, had been slow to adjust to the arrival of an information revolution that was reshaping the basic framework of the major industries in manufacturing and agriculture and, by implication, most aspects of daily life. Jones summarised his concerns, and basic thesis, in the following way:
Editorial—‘in praise of educational research’
British Educational Research Journal, 2003
We sought, for this 2003 special issue of the British Educational Research Journal, to celebrate some of the best recent education research. And, in our opinion, the eight papers in this issue suggest that we have been successful. All of the papers submitted in response to the call were sent via standard BERJ procedures to two expert referees and one of the editors. Referees were asked to comment on the quality and readability of the piece as usual, but were, in addition, asked to comment on their fit to the theme for this special issue. The responses about the fit to the theme for the eight pieces published here were unanimous. The papers represent some of the best of education research. Of course, these eight can only provide a snapshot of the work going on in education research, and they represent simply a subset of what was ready for publication at the time of this special issue. Some authors may, understandably, have been too modest to put their work forward for 'praise' (and it may be of interest in this context to note that two thirds of the authors are men). Several potential authors felt that their work was not yet quite ready, and others felt that theirs had already received sufficient attention. So the issue represents either new work previously unreported, or else summaries of programmes of work, spanning decades in some cases. Even so, probably the first conclusion to be drawn from this exercise is that we had no difficulty at all in filling this issue with responses to the call for reports of high quality studies. This is particularly significant in light of recent high-profile criticisms of the quality and relevance of (UK) education research. In his 1990 book 'In praise of sociology' Gordon Marshall argued that the best sociological research in the UK was rigorous, methodologically sophisticated, politically unbiased, of considerable value to society, and highly respected in the world at large. However, sociological research was, at that time, ridiculed by the media and politicians, and 'regularly caricatured as left-wing rhetoric masquerading as scholarship'. He therefore set out to demonstrate the importance of UK sociology for understanding society. The similarities with UK educational research in the 21 st century are noteworthy (and the word 'educational' could simply replace the word 'sociological' in the first paragraph). Similar issues and debates have arisen in many countries (see Shavelson & Towne 2001). As a field we have suffered blanket criticism from some informed, and some relatively uninformed, sources and have, as a consequence, acquired something of a public image problem. The OFSTED report by Tooley and Darby (1998) was critical of much educational research, but it also rightly praised many of the pieces it encountered in a brief sweep of the literature. However, the press, other reports and comments by OFSTED mentioned only the criticisms. Perhaps, therefore, educational
European Educational Research Journal, 2010
This article outlines and discusses a set of related developments in the governance, reform and privatisation of knowledge production in the field of education policy. It argues that knowledge about, performative knowledge, and knowledge for leadership knowledge are key facets of the new governance and ongoing reform of public sector education but increasingly are created and sold to governments by private sector and philanthropic organisations. In all of this public sector higher education institutions are being displaced as knowledge brokers, and at the same time ‘enterprised’ and ‘hybridised’, in a new education policy knowledge market. Increasingly the idea of a public/private divide in education is redundant.
Philosophy of Educational Research: New Epistemological, Methodological and Historical Approach
International Journal of Educational Excellence, 2020
The philosophy of educational research has traditionally been one of the least studied fields in the epistemology of the social sciences and humanities. However, a philosophical reflection on education itself, in the search for an ultimate explanation of what it means in the field of human evolution, necessarily implies knowing how to obtain information for its knowledge. This, in an epistemological context, implies analyzing the research methods used in the educational sciences. Throughout its history, educational research has experienced three stages of methodological evolution in its search for scientific effectiveness: (a) research without adhering to a particular model, (b) research applied to practice, and (c) research inserted into practice. The analysis of these methodological evolutions shows a history of great academic value, of fascinating philosophical debates, which every educator and educational researcher should know, and which nevertheless remains practically unexplored and unstudied in its entirety in the academic field.