Educational Research

An Unorthodox Introduction

Gert Biesta

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350097971
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350097995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

With so much technical information about research methods it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture of why we carry out educational research and where and how research might contribute to the improvement of education. Educational Research: An Unorthodox Introduction steps you through the wider social and political contexts of educational research, focusing on fundamental questions such as what education actually 'is' and what it is for. In doing so, the book raises questions that more 'orthodox' introductions to the theory and practice of educational research often leave aside. Gert Biesta covers a range of key issues which permeate any educational research project, including the roles of theory in research, what it means and takes to improve education, the nature of educational practice, the history of educational research and scholarship, the connection between research, professionality and democracy and what the social and political dimensions of academic publishing are. Each chapter includes a set of questions to stimulate further discussion.

1

Theories, Fashions and the Need for Pragmatism

At some point in the research process the question of theory emerges. Sometimes this happens early on, when researchers are looking for meaningful ‘frames’ for their research. Sometimes it happens ‘midway’, when researchers meet the challenge of how to ‘make sense’ of the data they have collected. And sometimes it occurs towards the end, when the question arises what the meaning of everything that has been found or constructed actually is. Theory is, therefore, an indispensable and inevitable part of research. But it is easy to get lost in the many theories and philosophies that are available. This chapter addresses this problem by means of an argument for pragmatism or, to be more precise, an argument for being pragmatic. Being pragmatic means nothing more than that any search for answers should always begin with posing a question, particularly the question ‘What is the problem?’ Such a pragmatic way of proceeding can help to keep control over the research process, and not let it be directed by theories, particularly not by the latest theoretical ‘fashions’. Being pragmatic is also helpful in staying away from ‘confessional’ forms of engagement with theory, where researchers feel forced to confess themselves to a particular theory or theoretical position, rather than asking first what theory is actually supposed to do in and for their research.

Introduction: Being lost in other people’s theories

I recently had the privilege of being the external examiner for five PhDs in education. The PhDs were written in different languages and emerged out of quite different academic cultures and traditions. The reason I was invited as external examiner most likely had to do with the fact that each of the PhDs made extensive use of theory, including some of the theory I have engaged with in my own work. What struck me was that all of these PhDs struggled with a similar issue, namely what to do with theory. In some cases, as I put it in one of my reports, it looked as if the authors had got a little lost in other people’s theories.

The struggle with giving theory a proper place in one’s research is not only a common problem in PhD projects but also an issue in the work of more experienced researchers, which often has a tendency either to be significantly undertheorized or, like some of the PhD projects I examined, to be significantly overtheorized (see Biesta, Allan & Edwards 2011). The question this raises is how one can find the right balance in engaging with theory in educational and social research. And this is a particular challenge in a time in which there seems to be a real proliferation of theory from such different disciplines and fields as philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, social theory, political theory, cultural studies, feminism, post-colonialism, indigenous studies and so on, both at the level of ‘object theory’ – the theory we use in research – and with regard to ‘meta-theory’ – the theories about research.

The question here is not only about which theory or theories one should use to inform one’s research but also about what one expects or hopes theory will ‘do’ in one’s research. And perhaps there is even a bigger question as to why one should engage in research at all. In this chapter I wish to make an explicit case for pragmatism in the engagement with theory in educational and social research. This does not mean that I will express a preference for pragmatism as a theory or a philosophical position – to believe in pragmatism is actually the most unpragmatic thing one can do (see Biesta 2009a) – but rather that I will suggest that questions about theory in research should always be approached in a pragmatic way, that is, in connection to the question ‘What is the problem?’ – or, to be more precise: ‘What is the question to which theory is supposed to provide the answer?’

On fashions, confessions and ‘con-fashions’

The pragmatic approach I am advocating in this chapter can be distinguished from what we might term a confessional approach to the role of theory, one where the first step would be to ‘sign up’ to a particular theory or theoretical ‘school’ in order then to start doing the research. Such position-taking often takes the form of a kind of confession, such as in statements like ‘I am a qualitative researcher’ or ‘I am a post-structural feminist’. While it is true that one can never start from nowhere and that in this regard there may be some sense in laying one’s cards on the table, this shouldn’t mean that one should do this in a confessional way, that is, as a matter of literally taking the position.

One important reason for this has to do with the fact that theories and philosophies are not so much positions one can ‘occupy’ as that they allow us to do certain things. Although the metaphor of ‘tool’ has become a little stale, it remains useful to see theories and philosophies as tools we work with, rather than as positions we take. Seen in this way it becomes visible what the problem is with confessing oneself to a theory. The first judgement, after all, is never about which tool one should use, but about what the issues are that need addressing, as it is only then that we can begin to ask which tool might be useful for addressing the issues. To compare it with carpentry, while a hammer can be a very appropriate tool for some tasks, it is entirely useless for other tasks, which shows that confessing oneself as being a hammering carpenter would seriously limit one’s ability at being a good carpenter.

A further problem with a confessional approach has to do with the fact that if one thinks of theory and philosophy as something one can confess to, one immediately objectifies theory and philosophy and forgets that many and perhaps all of the theories and philosophies that are around – many of which, over time, have turned into identifiable ‘positions’ – were actually developed in order to address very particular problems. To disconnect theories and philosophies from the context in which they were developed and in which they were meaningful, runs the risk of making them into a ‘thing’ rather than seeing them as the specific outcomes of very specific processes. While the objectification of theory and philosophy can be a useful way to ‘map’ a particular field or to make sense of the different ‘moves’ within a particular discussion, it ultimately disconnects the ‘product’ from the ‘process’ and thus hinders the intelligent use of theory and philosophy.

The case for pragmatism therefore always comes with the suggestion that any theory, philosophy or theoretical or philosophical position one encounters should be (re)connected with the particular context in which it emerged and, more importantly, with the particular problems those working on the theory or philosophy sought to address. It comes, in more plain language, with the duty to understand the history or origin of the tools one encounters, so as to be able to make intelligent use of them.¹ It then becomes possible to see, for example, that the now often demonized split between mind and body that can be found in the work of René Descartes was not a matter of taking a particular position or articulating a particular theory about the mind and the body. Rather the idea emerged in the context of a much more complicated and much more urgent discussion about the question of human freedom and human responsibility in a situation in which modern science was pushing a picture of the universe as mechanistic and operating on deterministic laws of cause and effect. While one may disagree with the particular solution Descartes sought for safeguarding a space for human freedom and human responsibility, one can at least begin to appreciate why a split between mind and body provided a possible and quite meaningful response to those issues.

Similarly, while it has become fashionable to criticize the Kantian idea of ‘rational autonomy’ as too rational, too autonomous, too self-sufficient, too disconnected and, perhaps even, too male, his was an attempt to articulate the qualities a person would need at a time when European monarchies came to an end and questions about what it would mean to be a citizen emerged within the context of newly developing democratic societies. Rather than being obedient to the monarch, such citizens needed to be able to make up their own mind. Also, while the work of Vygotskij has become popular in many quarters, we should not think of his endeavour as an attempt to develop and defend ‘a sociocultural position’, but rather as an attempt at answering the question of the role of social interaction in the development of higher mental functioning.

To look pragmatically at theory – which thus requires to ask the question of what a particular theory or philosophy was developed for, which means to trace it back to the context in which it was developed and to reconnect it to the particular problems that those working on the development of the particular theory or philosophy sought to address – is even more important in those cases where theorists themselves begin to forget what it was that motivated their work in the first place. A recent example of this tendency can be found in what is now often referred to as ‘actor-network theory’ or ‘ANT’. This ‘theory’ originated in the context of an attempt to provide a non-sociological understanding of asymmetries in power and an influence in science and technology in order to overcome the problem that sociological analyses always ended up having to claim superior insights in the workings of science and technology (see Latour 1987). Yet over time, and partly also through the adoption by others of the insights developed in this context, ANT lost its connection with its context of origin and in a sense became the very kind of sociological theory that it sought to replace (see, for example, Law & Hassard 1999; Latour 2005).

Problems with being non-pragmatic

There are, therefore, a number of problems with a non-pragmatic engagement with and use of theory and philosophy in research. One is that if we disconnect a particular theory or philosophy from its context of origin, we end up giving it a status it never sought to have. Doing so runs the risk of putting us in a position in which we use theory-as-truth rather than as-a-specific-answer-to-a-specific-question, which, by the way, is a more precise and more specific approach than the idea of theory as a ‘lens’ or ‘perspective’. It really is about reconnecting theory-as-answer to the question the theory was an answer to.

The risk of a non-pragmatic engagement with theory – theory as a position one confesses to – is also that it makes us susceptible to theoretical fashions without being able to provide a rationale and justification for the particular theory or philosophy we use. In this regard it is at least remarkable that so many research projects in education, not least PhD projects, have, over the past two decades or so, opted for ‘a sociocultural perspective’, while, more recently, suddenly everyone seems to be taking an ‘affective’ approach, or a ‘post-human’ or ‘new materialist’ one, often without having even the faintest idea about the complexities of ‘old’ materialism or all the important reasons and subtle debates under the heading of ‘humanism’.

Operating in a non-pragmatic way not only makes it more difficult to actually justify one’s selection but at the very same time pushes us in the direction of a confessional approach – and here it is also important to keep in mind that PhD students are often pushed or even forced in the direction of such a theoretical confession by more experienced researchers who have located themselves within a particular position, rather than that they operate pragmatically – a phenomenon that can particularly be found in the language of ‘research paradigms’. A non-pragmatic stance with regard to theory thus leads to a situation where theory has control over us, rather than where we have control over the theory or theories we decide to use. That, once more, shows how a non-pragmatic approach prevents us from engaging with theory and philosophy in our research in an intelligent way.²

Theory, the very idea

Although the word ‘theory’ is easily used – and, so far, I have used it myself in a rather loose way – it is not entirely easy to identify what it refers to, not in the least because the meaning of the word has shifted significantly over time. If we go back to the Greek origins of the word – which, of course, always raises the further question where the Greeks got their words from – theory (θεωρία) had to do with spectatorship: being a spectator of a performance or a festival, including religious festivals; being an official envoy to a festival; consulting an oracle or making a journey in order to study something. Here we can see that the meaning of theo ry is firmly located within the domain of the empirical, as it is about direct experience and witnessing. With Plato and Aristotle, however, theory (θεωρία) became connected to the domain of the non-empirical, that is, of Platonic forms and Aristotelian universals. Theory (θεωρία) thus became understood as knowledge of a permanent and unchangeable reality ‘behind’ the empirical world of change, flux and appearances.

The distinction between empirical and theoretical knowledge gained further prominence with the rise of the world view of modern science in which the main role of theory became that of the explanation of causal connections between empirical phenomena. The need for theory had to do with the insight that while correlations between phenomena can be perceived, underlying causal connections are invisible. Theory was therefore needed to account for or speculate about underlying processes and mechanisms. Here theory transformed into what Gaston Bachelard (1986, p. 38) has called ‘a science of the hidden’.

With the rise of hermeneutics and interpretivism in the late nineteenth century, theory also become a device for understanding, that is, for making intelligible why people say what they say and do what they do. The role of theory here is that of deepening and broadening everyday interpretations and experiences. The primary interest of critical theory, developed by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School working in a tradition going back to Marx, lied in exposing how hidden power structures influence and distort such experiences and interpretations. The ambition here is that the exposure of the workings of power can contribute to emancipation (see Carr & Kemmis 1986; Biesta 2010a).

The shift from theory as empirical to theory as non-empirical hints at one of the key roles theory plays in contemporary research, namely its role in the analysis and interpretation of empirical data. But while theory plays a crucial role in making data ‘intelligible’, it is important to see that theory does not just come at the very end of the research – when all the data have b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Prologue: The Orthodoxies of Educational Research
• 1 Theories, Fashions and the Need for Pragmatism
• 2 Making Education Better
• 3 ‘What Works’ Is Not Enough
• 4 The Practice of Education
• 5 Configurations of Educational Research
• 6 Education, Measurement and Democracy
• 7 Knowledge Reconsidered
• 8 The Political Economy of Academic Publishing
• Epilogue: Too Much Research?
• References
• Index
• Copyright