Practice Methodologies in Education Research

Julianne Lynch, Julie Rowlands, Trevor Gale, Stephen Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367193829
• eBook ISBN: 9781000699692
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Practice Methodologies in Education Research offers a fresh approach to researching practice in education. Addressing a major gap in research methodology scholarship, it highlights how integral practice theory is to the transformational agendas of education research, introducing a theory of activist practice methodologies informed by expansive theories of practice.

With contributions from leading education researchers drawn from across the world, the book confronts onto-epistemological dilemmas for doing research that arise from taking practice theory seriously, including the theories of Bourdieu, de Certeau, Deleuze, Haraway, Latour, Taylor, and Vygotsky. A defining feature of the chapters is their activist axiologies and their experimental approach to researching practice in education, in fields as diverse as educational leadership, schooling, higher education, adult and workplace education and training, professional practice, and informal learning.

Practice Methodologies in Education is essential reading for education academics and postgraduates engaged in critical research using practice theory.

Chapter 1

An outline of a theory of practice methodologies

Education research as an expansive-activist endeavour

Julianne Lynch, Julie Rowlands, Trevor Gale & Stephen Parker

Abstract

This chapter introduces the notion of activist practice methodologies, illuminated through a focus on education research that is informed by practice theory and framed by an explicitly normative regard for education. It identifies and responds to some of the topographies of expansive practice theories; some of the onto-epistemological challenges these topographies create for researchers; and the relationship between methodologies and axiology, especially within education research where social justice values collide spectacularly with policy discourses around competition, the market and particular framings of evidence. Thus established, this chapter outlines key features of research that deploys theories of practice in pursuit of normative ends, developed in conversation with other chapters in this collection. We theorise that within education research, methodologies informed by expansive practice theories are derived from research axiologies that are activist in intent and that these methodologies respond to the onto-epistemological challenges of those same theories. In our account, activist practice methodologies are invested with normative ideals, specifically to advance social justice—in this case, in and through education. This work often involves novel arrangements of theory, new approaches to data, and experimental approaches to research writing. Amid the onto-epistemological angst thrown up by expansive practice theories, activist practice methodologies do not give up on method but persist in developing new ways to apprehend and engage practice. Five interrelated aspects of activist practice methodologies are discussed: activist axiologies, re-constituting the ethical subject in research practice, theory as method, more-than-representational data and restive accounts of research.

Introduction

The introductory chapter to our previous volume—Practice Theory and Education (Lynch et al. 2017a)—noted that in commenting on the practice turn (Schatzki 2001) some scholars allude to methodological trends and challenges in practice research. We also drew attention to Miettinen, Samya-Fredericks and Yanow’s (2009, p. 1314) discussion of a ‘methods agenda’ within practice theory and what Wilkinson and Kemmis (2015) dubbed ‘philosophical-empirical inquiry’. The suggestion we take from these references is that, just as we can talk sensibly (although with caveats) about practice theory, in the same way we can and should talk about practice methodology—the research practices that emerge from practice theory and in response to the challenges practice theory provokes.

In this chapter, we take up this challenge to outline a theory of practice methodologies for education research. Implications for such methodologies derive from a consideration of how practice theory interfaces with the axiology of education. We discuss how particular conceptions of the purpose of education research are informed by, and inform the use of, practice theory, and we tease out certain methodological logics and directions that follow. We argue that practice theory—focusing on elaborating the complexity of practice and being consistent with what Biesta (2015) referred to as non-technological conceptions of education—is most often deployed in the service of research agendas seeking to support social transformation, where change is understood as both a constant (definitional) feature of practice and one that resists notions of linear, instrumental change. This intersection of practice theory with the axiology of education research throws up philosophical dilemmas that demand experimental approaches to methodology; that is, they motivate researchers to try out non-conventional approaches ‘to see what will happen’ (Thrift 2008¹). Some of these dilemmas and possible ways forward are identified and discussed in this chapter, in our exploration of approaches to: working with practitioners, repurposing empirical data, working with the interrelations of theory and practice and representing practice and research into practice.

As we see them, the methodological ways forward are framed as five interrelated aspects of what we name activist practice methodologies: activist axiologies, re-constituting the ethical subject in research practice, theory as method, more-than-representational data and restive accounts of research. This builds on the work of practice theory scholars (e.g., Green 2009a, 2009b, 2015; Green & Hopwood 2015; Miettinen, Samya-Fredericks & Yanow 2009; Reckwitz 2002; Schatzki 1996, 2001, 2012; Thrift 1996) who have elaborated the tenets of practice theory; what we refer to in this chapter as expansive practice theory. Some of these scholars have pointed to methodological implications and agendas, but they do not elaborate these beyond discussions of the methodological dialectic between close-up empirical work and philosophical inquiry (Jonas, Littig & Wroblewski 2017). We begin that expansive-activist work in this chapter.

Topographies of expansive practice theories

Conversations about relations between practice theory and methodology are especially important in education research where practice theory is so central to how practice is understood and where much practice theory has been developed. Regrettably, education research that is focused on practice is also where such conversations are too often absent. More often, particular research traditions are evoked and particular research practices are deployed without explicit engagement with tensions between research practices and the theoretical resources of practice theory. Many factors contribute to contradictions and slippages between how practice theories conceptualise practice and how research into practice is undertaken. The naming of practice theory² is not helpful in this regard. Practice theory scholars (e.g., Green 2009b; Lynch et al. 2017b) have noted the slipperiness of the word practice, which can be taken up in so many different (and sometimes antithetical) ways. Practice theory—as a conceptual category—does not include all theories of practice, but this is not readily apparent in the term or to those researchers who are not already familiar with practice theory scholarship. In this chapter, we want to avoid misapprehension by avoiding a simple use of the term ‘practice theory’, instead referring to expansive theories of practice as a way of being more precise in our meaning. To be clear on this, below we revisit the onto-epistemological topographies of expansive theories of practice: those features that support the notion of a constellation of social theories, which despite their often significant points of difference, together ‘form a broad family of theoretical and philosophical work for which the notion of practice has become something of an organising principle’ (Green 2015, p. 1). We then consider the methodological challenges these onto-epistemological topographies create for researchers, especially in the context of the axiology of education research and possible responses to them.

Expansive theories of practice are distinct from narrower conceptions of practice found in structuralist, liberal-humanist, rational-economic, techno-rationalist, representationalist and neoliberal capitalist research traditions.³ By way of contrast, below we sketch out some interrelated features of expansive theories of practice that help to articulate the distinctiveness of this approach. These features draw across the writings of theorists such as Bourdieu, de Certeau, Deleuze, Haraway, Latour, Marx, Charles Taylor and Vygotsky, who in their own work speak to these points. While we do refer to examples from particular theorists, our intention is not to note all theorists who contribute to these understandings or to map the differences that are in the detail between theorists, but instead to crystallise those features that make expansive theories of practice recognisable.

In expansive theories of practice:

• Practices are extra-individual (Trowler 2014). They do not belong to or emanate from individual human agents, and they prefigure individuals’ engagement in them (Bourdieu 1990a; Schatzki 2001). Kemmis et al. (2012, p. 34) invite us to consider practices as living entities that exist beyond those who engage in them and beyond any singular manifestation of practice. For practice theorists, practices are the primary units of the social (Green 2009a, 2009b; Miettinen, Samya-Fredericks & Yanow 2009): they ‘contain their own conditions of intelligibility’ (Hodge & Parker 2017, p. 40) and social worlds are understood as effects of practices and vice versa. Practices are intelligible because they implicate a nexus of artefacts, ideas, people, places, tools and other practices that coordinate people’s engagements in them (Smith 2017, p. 31).
• Practices are enacted as situated, embodied ‘doings’, ‘sayings’ and ‘relatings’ (Schatzki 2001, p. 56), and it is these enactments of practices that are the focus of empirical inquiry by researchers informed by practice theories. ‘Doings’, ‘sayings’ and ‘relatings’ are unique in their manifestation—‘starting with the ongoing of people’s actualities means that nothing is ever quite the same as it was before or will be, though many if not most changes may be imperceptible’ (Smith 2017, p. 23). Some researchers refer to their focus on actualities as a rendering of the everydayness of practices; notably de Certeau (1984, pp. ix, 96) in his ‘science of singularity’ where ‘everyday practice’ is synonymous with ‘lived practice’ and where ‘everyday stories’ (p. 122) are stories of practitioners actual undertakings.
• Practices implicate and are constituted via complex arrangements of, and relations between, human, non-human and discursive materials (e.g., Fenwick & Edwards 2010; Haraway 1992; Kemmis & Grootenboer 2008; Schatzki 2001). Discursive materials—including ideas and accounts of ideas—are positioned by practice theorists as part of the real and as having more-than-representational force (Law & Urry 2004; Lynch et al. 2017b) as they operate in relation with other entities.
• Practice is not simply actions and not all actions are practice (Gale et al. this volume). Mechanical reactions that are pre-programmed and predictable in a Pavlovian sense are not practice in the way we understand it here (Rowlands & Gale 2017; Schatzki 1996). Engagement in a practice is purposeful and meaningful; however, it is not subject to rational, conscious control. The futurity of practices reaches beyond the singularity of sense-making and conscious anticipation, to include the unthought, affect and forces operating beyond the level of human perception (e.g., Bourdieu 1990b; Taylor 1992). For example, Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus rejects a dichotomy of mechanical determinations and conscious will; instead, it provides space for both the perpetuation of a practice and for spontaneity and improvisation (Bourdieu 1976). Thus, practices activate human capacities and generate potential futures, even though they are not subject to rational control.
• Practices involve past, present and future. Moreover, conceptions of temporality are central to understandings of practice as a theoretical category (Pickering 1995; Shove 2009) and to understandings of particular practices (Johnsson 2012; Reckwitz 2002, p. 255). Practices are both temporally structured and constitutive of lived temporalities (Schatzki 1996, 2009; Shove 2009). Practices are frequently associated with routine activities, with purposeful actions performed repeatedly (though with difference) (Schäfer 2017). Johnsson (2012, p. 52) refers to this as the ‘tempo-rhythm of practice’. Thus, spatiotemporal considerations involve more than the historical situatedness of enacted practices: there are iterative, relational interactions between practices and space and time (space-time).
• Practices change via an ongoing dialogic interplay between reproduction (via repeated routine activity) and production (via the insinuation of difference). Reckwitz (2002, p. 255) located the potential for change in the everyday enactment of practices when he wrote: ‘The “breaking” and “shifting” of structures must take place in everyday crises of routines, in constellations of interpretative interdeterminacy and of the inadequacy of knowledge with which the agent, carrying out a practice, is confronted in the face of a “situation”’. Kemmis et al. (2012) also note that practices involve dialogic relationships between existing arrangements and emerging circumstances (Kemmis et al. 2012).

Dilemmas pertaining to ontology (theories of being and reality) and epistemology (theories of knowing and what constitutes knowing) are taken up explicitly by expansive theories of practice. The term onto-epistemology refers to the inseparable relation between ontology and epistemology. That is, although we can provide distinct definitions of ontology and epistemology, they are not independent considerations. Indeed, the privileging of the onto- emphasises the encompassing of knowing into being and underlines the position of the researcher as productively stuck in the world—which happens as soon as you start working with expansive theories of practice—and the processes and productions of research as part of and affecting the world. Thus, onto-epistemology suggests that epistemology is subsumed by ontology. Accordingly, within expansive theories of practice, knowledge production practices are necessarily implicated in what is known—in what is taken to be real—and indeed in the real itself. That is, what is known is a function of knowledge-making practices and what is known interacts relationally with practices (e.g., Law & Urry 2004). This contrasts with representationalist approaches to research, where concepts are intended to correspond with the real (Haraway 1996; Rorty 1979; St Pierre 2019), and where knowledge about the real is thought to be somehow separate from it—what Schatzki referred to as a ‘spectator view of knowledge’ (cited in Green 2009a, p. 50). In expansive theories of practice, researchers and the concepts and representations they develop are positioned within the meshwork of the practices that they study, which raises questions about the purpose and value of research and its outputs. Methodologies derived from expansive theories of practice, therefore, position theory differently to positivist approaches derived from realist ontologies. Activist practice methodologies, which we elaborate further below, do not seek correspondence between concepts and the empirical world. Instead, they take their understanding of practice from their engagement with practice and its imbrication with theory and look to see how concepts might be put to work in the world.

Practice axiologies in education research

Axiology goes to the heart of why we characterise practice research as an expansive-activist endeavour within education research. In his paper on cultures of education research, Biesta (2015, p. 12) describes a number of splits within the field of education research:

… splits in contemporary educational research are partly of an intellectual nature, where they have to do with differences in theoretical orientation and methodological outlook … In addition, there is a clear political dimension, in that different schools, approaches and styles of research are based on particular beliefs and normative preferences about what educational research is, what it ought to be and what it ought to achieve (which includes beliefs and preferences about the relationship between research and policy and the relationship between research and practice).

Biesta goes on to describe a particular split between a techno-rationalist view of education as governed by cause and effect relationships and a view of education as comprising communication and meaning making ‘in which questions of cause and effect actually have no place’ (Biesta 2015,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• 1 An outline of a theory of practice methodologies: education research as an expansive-activist endeavour
• 2 Corporatised fabrications: the methodological challenges of professional biographies at a time of neoliberalisation
• 3 Researching teacher practice: social justice dispositions revealed in activity
• 4 Digital research methods and sensor technologies: rethinking the temporality of digital life
• 5 Practices within positions: a methodology for analysing intra-group differences in educational fields
• 6 Principles, procedures and applications of dialectical methodologies for the study of human practice
• 7 The challenge of Bourdieu’s relational ontology for international comparative research in academic governance practice
• 8 Social imaginaries in education research
• 9 Morphologies of knowing: fractal methods for re-thinking classroom technology practices
• 10 Unpacking practice: the challenges and possibilities afforded by sociomaterial ethnography
• 11 What is an inaugural professorial lecture? Exploring academic practices through diffractive listing
• 12 Tactics of resilience: playing with ethnographic data on classroom practice
• Index