This symposium opens up the black boxes of disciplinary methodologies to explore some of the conundrums encountered in education research. It provides reflexive accounts of the tensions and dilemmas that confront researchers in three different areas: comparative research, learning analytics and secondary analysis. Together, they argue that these points of tension offer generative spaces for interdisciplinary engagement and collaboration, particularly with respect to research design.

Although education research as an activity is now well networked and globalized, paradoxically, it has also become quite insular. Complex material-semiotic devices of tagging and membership, such as the declaration of Field of Research codes and keywords; membership of Special Interest Groups; and increasingly specialized journals have isolated different epistemic communities from one another (Knorr Cetina, 1999; Stengers, 2011). Often, methodological decisions are open for discussion only within specific epistemic communities; and even there, they may be taken for granted and become invisible as tacit knowledge and routine practice (Latour, 1999).  Because definitive accounts with significant findings are more likely to be accepted by peer reviewers than equivocal accounts with contingent findings, we are encouraged to ignore the conundrums we confront, and to produce unqualified and confident accounts.

This year, Network 28 asks us to consider: Can we live together? Have we the ‘right’ equipment to live together? This symposium interprets this question as one that pertains not only to Europeanisation, but more broadly to knowledge making and research: Can researchers from different traditions learn to talk to each other? Can we use the differences in our methodologies and our conceptual and theoretical resources to reflect on our own practiced ways of doing research? Can our collective experimentations of ‘life together’ in education research be reassembled to become more inclusive, by being more ‘modest’ (Law, 1994)? We believe that it is possible, and moreover that it is imperative for us to attempt this.

To begin this project of living and learning together, this symposium draws together scholars from different traditions – classroom research, learning analytics and secondary analysis – into exploring the conundrums they confront in their research and the methodological strategies they use for negotiating these conundrums.  In combination, the three papers draw on evidence from multiple countris (Australia, China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand and USA) as well as simulated data. This symposium explores phenomena that would be of relevance and interest to European and international scholars.

Paper 1 focuses on the act of comparison as this is undertaken in international cross-cultural comparative research and highlights the tension between the demands of validity and comparability through seven specific methodological dilemmas.

Paper 2 is situated in the new and growing field of Learning Analytics.  Drawing upon simulated data in typical MOOC datasets, it explores the tension between model-driven and data-driven analytical approaches, focusing on different sources of variation.

The generation of large datasets has led to an increase in secondary analysis to provide answers to policy questions. Paper 3 explores the dilemmas and complexities encountered in secondary analysis, and the consequences of the compromises made in resolving these dilemmas for policy and practice.

Together, the papers propose that research would be strengthened rather than weakened when its vulnerabilities, compromises, tensions and dilemmas are opened up and offered as points around which interdisciplinary engagements with method and practice can be organised. By providing insider accounts in a transdisciplinary forum, this symposium aims to generate discussion around the ‘politics of method’ (Steinmetz, 2005) in contemporary education research.

In the spirit of learning and growing together, the Discussant will engage in a dialogic exchange with each participant and then invite audience questions and wider discussion.

Knorr Cetina, K. (1999). Epistemic Cultures – How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Law, J. (1994). Organising Modernity: Social Ordering and Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Steinmetz, G. (2005). The politics of method in the human sciences : positivism and its epistemological others. Durham ; London: Duke University Press. Stengers, I. (2011). Comparison as a Matter of Concern. Common Knowledge, 17(1). 48-63.