Introduction

Research in the discipline of education  draws heavily from other social science disciplines as well as from the humanities and the physical sciences. This paper analyzes how issues of quality and utility can raise tensions and open spaces for new insights when differences are foregrounded, when assumptions are made explicit and when ameliorative aims cohere. A discussion of how a focus on disciplinary boundaries between education and other fields is pertinent to consideration of what constitutes educational research and what purposes it is meant to serve. Education, whereas situated in the larger sciences field, is seen as a practice-oriented discipline, i.e., an academic field meant to produce knowledge that is directly useful to the people on the ground. Whereas there are always productive discussions and tensions around making knowledge relevant or bridging the gap between theory and practice, such arguments become particularly pertinent to the field of education. However, does this focus on “practice” impact how quality is perceived and defined within educational research? Can (or should) educational research aim to strengthen educational scholarship and the field, even if it does not have direct impact on the lives of people? We examine and analyze these questions in this paper to examine to make visible the assumptions that shape the aims, purposes, and quality of educational research.

In order to examine our central questions, we explore how boundaries between education and other academic fields as well as across different sub-fields of education are demarcated. First we examine the overlaps and distinctions between Anthropology and Anthropology of Education. Anthropology of Education is a sub-field of education that relies heavily on Anthropology. Despite employing similar conceptual and methodological tools and having culture as the central issue of interest, these two academic domains are quite divergent in terms of their operations. For example, whereas anthropologists are pushing to further problematize what they see as the essentialist nature of culture (Abu-Lughod, 1991, Tanaka 2009), anthropologists of education are less willing to discard a concept that helps them to explain the issues of diversity inside and outside of schools (Levinson 1999). This divergence between the two apparently similar fields occurs because the central aim for anthropologists is to deepen the theoretical and academic knowledge of culture whereas anthropologists of education foucus on using culture to address issues of educational inequity (Gonzles, 2004). In this context, does a equity-based agenda for research impact how  the parameters of educational research might be defined?

Second we explore the contestations within the field of education over the nature and purposes of educational research through examining different approaches to multicultural education. James Banks’ scholarship has significantly contributed to the most prominent conceptualization of multicultural education in the US (Powers 2002). This approach emphasizes the need to make social justice central to the scholarship and practice of multicultural education (Banks & Banks 2004). Postmodern scholarship on multicultural education challenges this perspective by highlighting the hybridity of diversity and how every inclusion creates a new form of exclusion (Sidorkin, 1999). Despite expanding our theoretical understanding of the complex processes of inclusion/exclusion at schools, the postmodern approach remains limited in terms of its application to educational policy and practice on the ground. In this context, can the field of education encompass these two divergent perspectives as a reflection of productive academic tension? Or does the practice-oriented nature of the field of education translate into privileging Banks’ perspective over the postmodern approach?

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