ABSTRACT
The birth of educational research is both strongly related to the systematic collection of data by the state (something that could be referred as state-istics), as well as to the early experimental psychological laboratories, which were established by Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, William James at Harvard and G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins University in the nineteenth century. These psychological laboratories paved the way for the grounding principles of experimental psychology, and of experimental psychology as applied to education. At the beginning of the twentieth century John Dewey and Edward Thorndike formulated two radically different and enduring conceptions of educational science that shaped our contemporary education. While Thorndike wedded his behavioural psychology to the newly emerging techniques of statistical analysis to produce a technocratic theory of schooling and to inform industrial management, Dewey, by contrast, focused on constructing a form of science that modelled learning processes on the practice of a democratic community of students and teachers as problem-solvers. Thorndike’s and Dewey’s two competing visions, or ‘paradigms’, are still pervasive today. Thorndike’s vision remained dominant in educational research until the turn to practice, which followed the work of Wittgenstein, Bourdieu and others, and infused particular approaches into the social and cultural sciences in the 1970s and beyond. In teacher education, this turn also coincided with the early stages of the process of the merger, incorporation and integration of teachers colleges, and therefore of teacher training and education, with universities. This chapter thus focuses on the turn to practice in educational research, theories of pedagogy, and the recent move toward the state mandating of evidence-based policy and practice. Furthermore, it contextualises this turn to practice in educational research, theories and policy by examining the ‘birth’ of educational research in the English-speaking world, the historicity of the discipline of education, and the influences and legacies of the scholarship of Dewey and Thorndike.
