ABSTRACT
At present education research seems to be experiencing a widespread crisis, created by demographic pressures, the effects of a global market on scientific knowledge, the pressures of neo-liberal managerialism and the competition of public and private research organisations, as well as the increasing importance of EU funding criteria and regulations that give education research a new shape. These are significant pressures which affected the responses of the authors in this book, and which have shaped my overall view of the contemporary value of this book. However, has there ever been a history of education and education research which is free of self-perceived crises (Keiner and Tenorth, 2007)? The idea of progress and enlightenment is systematically inherent in education, science and research as is the experience of its failure. The educational focus upon individual upbringing and societal reform, and the perception of the present world as imperfect, necessarily leads to disappointments when the usefulness of education research results and the success of educational interventions are evaluated. Indeed, since education research started to become institutionalised at universities from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, it not only contributed to changing the world via education but also began more and more to contribute to its own disenchantment about its value and effects. With this in mind, the chapters in this volume can be perceived both as a reaction to ‘external’ pressures and as a consequence of ‘internal’ self-reflection. The chapters are part of this constant process of disenchantment and ‘rationalisation’. However, the disciplinary self-observation the chapters represent might be rather dangerous. Today, political systems demand ‘applicable’ and ‘useful’ knowledge in order to justify decisions scientifically and, at the same time, hide their own weaknesses and produce ‘cover’ for politically justified decisions. From this point of view, scepticism, doubt and questioning – constitutive for modern science and research – is perceived more and more as ineffective, a non-productive outcome of the academic discipline. Other concepts, i.e. usefulness, accountability, applicability, prognostic capacity,
efficiency, power, impact of knowledge, evidence-based research, have gained in importance. This has also meant that new beliefs could enter the academic arena: belief in management according to economy, belief in learning instead of education, belief in applied rather than basic research, belief in decoupling research and teaching, belief in market-driven competition according to benchmarks and performance indicators, and belief in high-quality and useful outcomes of research, measured by using de-contextualised organisational correlates. These new concepts and beliefs have generated new contexts for research in new alliances between universities and business, and new ‘quasi-research institutions’, sometimes linked to universities, which are all mobilised by national EU funding policies. These shifts have led to a struggle over the power of definition and the application of criteria for research quality. Attempts at governing education research via policy, administration and management can only refer to infra-structural conditions. They aim at securing and improving the ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’ of research and research products (publication) without being able to define and justify the respective criteria of high (or low) quality. In this respect, then, disciplinary self-observation may gain in importance as an instrument to productively contribute to this struggle. The definition of scientific quality is a matter to be decided by the self-governing disciplinary community itself. The discipline analytically and systematically defines the quality of research on the basis of a (content-based) discipline’s systematic procedures and/or the discipline’s experts, the peers. Our concern to analytically and empirically strengthen and reconstruct education research sufficiently, however, is confronted with the problem of a rather heterogeneous discipline, both in epistemological and sociological terms. This problem increases when different nations and research cultures are considered and attempts at comparison are made (Keiner and Schriewer, 2000; Hofstetter and Schneuwly, 2002); for example, is it correct to denote the German ‘Bildungsforschung’ as ‘educational research’, and the German ‘Erziehungswissenschaft’ as ‘education research’? Is, then, the term ‘education research’ sufficient to also denote the French ‘science de l’éducation’? Though English-language publication and citation indices (using primarily English references) are dominant, we lack sufficient cross-linguistic translations and signifiers which can express different meanings of the term. Against this background, this volume of chapters on the disciplines of education is an important attempt to observe and assess education research ‘from within’ and to analyse and compare different disciplinary structures within diverse intellectual and research cultures: it is useful in its aspiration to discern different disciplinary shapes and to discuss and to define our differing expectations of research quality. The following sections take the significance of the chapters for granted and, taking an outsider’s point of view, acts as a commentary addressing their issues from several directions. First, it looks at scholarly associations of education research on a German and a European level and their contribution
to disciplinary self-observation. Second, it asks how education research is conceptualised as a unit to be investigated. Third, it suggests some distinctions which probably could help to comparatively relate education research experiences in the UK to other (European) countries and cultures. Fourth, it offers one possibility in using comparative aspects in order to investigate different education research cultures and their consequences when dealing with crises. Fifth, it discusses the problem of ‘disciplinary autonomy’ and the degree of self-governance as a possible aspect of comparative observation and issue of education research policy. Finally, it considers ‘Europe’ as a possible future for integrated research upon education research. Although Disciplines of Education primarily addresses education research in the UK (see also Lawn and Furlong, 2007), many of the recent problems discussed in the chapters are much more widespread and not only restricted to the UK.
