This paper explores the idea of exemplarity in educational research and connects it with the concept of resonance. These are introduced as alternatives to the paradigm of evidence and ‘what works’ which seems to be omnipresent in educational research at present. The idea of exemplarity points to the particularity of educational practice. Each educational process or situation is particular and unique and education as a human activity thus lends itself poorly to evidence based methods, which in general are thought to be universal or make claims of regular causality. Neither universality nor regular causality applies well to educational practices, and therefore the question of what works must always be answered in a hesitant way. Exemplarity is a hesitant way of answering the question of what works, since it does not claim generalisability, but instead offers a perspective that can illuminate and resonate with possible courses of action and previous experience. The idea of resonance thus highlights how educators can be invited to lend an ear to practical experience and pedagogical thinking, and through these reflect and widen their knowledge and perspectives through exemplars that connect and resonate with their own experience. This, in turn, offers the possibility of retuning ones practice, and in the scope of this paper, of retuning educational research itself.

In the first part of the paper I will briefly sketch the debate on evidence based and ‘what works’ research and explain why I believe we need to retune educational research. In the second part of the paper, I will present the idea of exemplarity and its connection with educational judgement, and in the final third part, I will describe how we can use the concept of resonance to attune exemplars to educational practices.

Turning away from evidence and causality and moving towards exemplarity and resonance is a movement away from the hold that social and natural science inspired ideas have been gaining over the field of educational research. It is a (re)turn to a human science or Geisteswissenschaftliches perspective on how to think and theorise educational processes. By turning to these concepts, I have tried to offer an appropriately humble attitude towards the complexities of educational practice and the need for attention to particularity in educational research. It is an attempt to answer the legitimate question of ‘what to do’ in a manner that does not rob the one asking of the possibility of educational judgement. We can only answer this question by offering frames of reference and examples of educational judgement that continue to resonate with us in unexpected ways, and which open new avenues to our educational experience and imagination. In this way, we answer in an affirmative (yes we can judge this situation) way, without determining what will come, or to put it in other words, without trying to enforce determinate causality on practices that are not structured in such a way. We open a collective potentiality for thinking about educational practice and for imaging anew our work as educators. I believe we are in dire need of such imaginaries and that educational research as a whole is in need of a retuning - one that is sufficiently humble in the face of the magnitude of the matter.

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