Contribution
Description: When examining the axioms and theoretical perspectives of educational research, the kuhnian concepts of paradigm and normal science are often applied to refer to the ever shifting epistemological and methodological trends in the human sciences. However, this point of view is usually internalist and limited to changes in theories, research questions and methodology. Thus the socio-historical framework of educational epistemology is very rarely considered as relevant. The purpose of this paper is to give an alternative account on educational research by criss-crossing the epistemological sphere with the social: i.e examining the social conditions under which a certain style of reasoning in scientific research emerges and becomes legitimate. (Rose 1996; Hacking 2002) This is done by creating an institutional context for educational research.The first coordinate in and institutional context is the basic notion that education is an applied science, and therefore it seeks to produce knowledge and practices which are applicable in institutional settings, namely the educational system. Thus it usually formulates its research questions accordingly, examining and developing various teaching methods and means of motivation. Second, the normative structure of pedagogical institutions makes the object of research visible in a certain way. The basic unit of educational research is an individual pupil and his/her learning efforts, which it seeks to develop. Educational research is embedded in this process by seeking to make the phenomena of learning, cognition, motivation or intelligence visible for an empirical analysis. It also stipulates and develops these concepts and categories in the favor of institutional practices (Rose 1996).Third, educational research utilizes and refines the same basic investigative techniques or styles of reasoning that are used in disciplinary institutions. An educational practice consists of visualizing the mental processes of an individual student by various standardized techniques of documentation and assessment. These are essentially means of making those processes easily comparable and governable. Educational research refines this technology in statistical and laboratory techniques. Moreover, it changes or disciplines the behavior of the research object by isolating it from its social surroundings and conditioning its behavior and thus producing a docile body for empirical examination and assessment - a procedure yet again similar to the disciplinary techniques in schooling institutions. Thus, being symmetrical to disciplinary techniques, educational research also constructs the objects it seeks to investigate. This makes it interesting to analyze the objectivity of educational research as the conditions of scientific investigation are similar to the conditions of the institutions where this scientific knowledge is to be applied (Hacking 2002; Foucault 1991; Latour 1986)
Methodology: A foucauldian framework of investigating knowledge production in the human sciences. I'll be referring to works of Michel Foucault and some foucauldian historians and philosophers of science such as Ian Hacking and Nikolas Rose, who discern the social origins of the human sciences and their investigative practices.
Conclusions: A pivotal argument in this paper is that the styles of reasoning i.e. the investigative methods and seemingly a priori assumptions and categories of the human sciences were once born and governed in various disciplinary institutions and are still conditioned by an institutional framework. Given the aforementioned coordinates we can also examine the objectivity of educational research in an interesting way. As we accept that scientific observations are underdetermined, we can thus analyze the influence of institutional interests and power structures of educational research.
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