Philosophy and Theory in Educational Research

Writing in the margin

Amanda Fulford, Naomi Hodgson, Amanda Fulford, Naomi Hodgson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138899179
• eBook ISBN: 9781317481638
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Philosophy and Theory in Educational Research: Writing in the margin explores the practices of reading and writing in educational philosophy and theory. Showing that there is no 'right way' to approach research in educational philosophy, but illustrating its possibilities, this text invites an engagement with philosophy as a possibility – and opening possibilities – for educational research. Drawing on their own research and theoretical and philosophical sources, the authors investigate the important issue of what it means to read and write when there is no prescribed structure. Innovative in its contribution to the literature, this edited volume enlightens readers in three ways.

• The volume focuses on the practices of reading and writing that are central to research in educational philosophy, suggesting that these practices constitute the research, rather than simply reporting it.
• It is not a prescriptive guide and should not be read procedurally. Rather, it is intended to illustrate the possibilities for this kind of research, and to suggest starting points for those pursuing research projects.
• Finally, attention is given to the ways in which conducting educational philosophy can be educative in itself, both to the researcher in writing it, and to its audience in reading it.

With contributions from international scholars in the field of educational philosophy, this book is a valuable guide for practitioner-researchers, taught postgraduate and doctoral students, and early career researchers in university education departments. Academic staff teaching research methods and seeking to introduce their students to philosophy-as-research without wishing to offer a prescriptive 'how to' guide will also find this book of particular interest.

Part I
Starting out

1
Starting Points

Amanda Fulford and Naomi Hodgson

It makes sense to begin with some introductory remarks about what this book is, and, of course, what it is not. We are clear that this is a book about research, and about the practices of research and researching in education. However, it would be right to ask if yet another text in this particular field is needed. Indeed, there are multiple texts that currently address these practices, many of which focus on specific age phases – for example, researching with very young children – or on how to research in particular contexts such as higher education. These tend to be written as textbooks, or handbooks; they are structured guides to support teachers and practitioners, postgraduate students, or new and early career researchers, to plan and implement research projects in the field of education. They are the kinds of texts that tend to be found on the reading lists of postgraduate research methods modules in universities.

But while this is a book about research, and the practices of research and researching in education, it is not another research methods textbook in the sense that we have outlined above. It does not, for example, guide readers through the processes of research, from selecting a research question, choosing a methodology and appropriate data collection methods, writing a literature review, collecting and analysing data, and writing up the findings. The research methods textbooks and research project handbooks both do these things very well, and so serve a valuable purpose for researchers. This volume, though, takes a different approach in four ways. First, it addresses a form of research that we will call ‘educational philosophy’. We want to avoid the over-simplistic dichotomy often drawn between empirical forms of research (where research typically proceeds through the collection and analysis of data from experimentation, observation, conversation, texts or artefacts), and philosophical/theoretical forms that are our concern here (where there is no ‘data’ as such, and the research tends to proceed through argument and use of sources). But we do want to focus on what might be considered distinctive about educational philosophy, while recognising that all educational research proceeds from questions about, or practical concerns arising from, education. Second, this volume focuses attention specifically on the practices of reading and writing that are central to research in educational philosophy. Moreover, it argues that these practices constitute the research, rather than that they simply support the research, and the reporting of the research through processes of writing up. Third, this book is not intended to provide a step-by-step guide for ‘doing’ educational philosophy. It is not prescriptive, and should not be read procedurally, as a definitive set of instructions for doing educational philosophy well. Rather, it is intended to illustrate the possibilities for this kind of research, and to suggest starting points for those interested in pursuing research projects in these ways. Finally, this book, while about research, is also about in research in education. But we do not understood this only as research about education – schooling, the processes of teaching and learning, and so on. We also give attention to the way in which conducting educational philosophy can be educative in itself (to the researcher in writing it, and to its audience in reading it). This is why we draw an important illustrative distinction between educational philosophy, and research in philosophy of education.¹

This volume makes an entirely new contribution to the body of work that already exists to inform researchers in education. It is not intended to replicate the model of the many published guides on conducting educational research, and to provide a version covering research in educational philosophy. Nor does it aim to provide a basic introduction specifically to philosophy of education as a field, focusing on some of the substantive issues with which the field is concerned (such as moral education, children’s rights, the curriculum, or the aims of education). We do not want to argue for the value of philosophy over other approaches to research. Rather, our aim has been to write a volume that is an academic reference work, that engages critically with the ideas of reading and writing in educational philosophy, rather than providing a ‘how to’ guide. The book, though, is not merely intended as a theoretical discussion of the issues. It has practical value in terms of identifying and illustrating a range of reading and writing practices for philosophical research in education, and outlines possibilities and starting points for educational philosophy.

We argue that philosophical matters underlie all forms of educational research, and that this exposes the false dichotomy between empirical and philosophical approaches to research. We claim that since the philosophical is inextricably woven into all forms of research, then philosophy cannot, and must not, be marginal to our practices of research. We make the case that philosophy, through its practices of reading and writing, is research in itself, and that such research can address the very practical issues facing contemporary education. We show that there is no ‘right way’ to approach research in educational philosophy, but we illustrate its possibilities, and the kind of questions and concerns that might form its starting points. Out text invites an engagement with philosophy as a possibility for educational research. It is aimed at practitioner-researchers, taught postgraduate and doctoral students, and new and early career researchers in education departments in universities. It is also written for academic staff who teach on research methods modules on postgraduate programmes, and who seek to introduce their students to philosophy-as-research without wishing to offer a prescriptive ‘how to’ guide.

Our book makes a number of key claims, which we set out throughout the three Parts of the text. Part I, ‘Starting out’ comprises three chapters. In Chapter 2, we consider the way that many existing research methods textbooks begin with a chronological overview of research paradigms. We provide a different kind of overview in order to show how certain questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, and our being human, recur in different traditions. We show how this illustrates the intersection of the philosophical with the empirical, and therefore how it is not helpful to continue to shore up a false dichotomy between the two. In illustrating how the intersection is a place of confluence, we show how the starting point for very different kinds of educational enquiry is in the same lived experience of education. In Chapter 3, we draw attention to the approach taken towards the empirical and the philosophical or theoretical in many of the research methods textbooks, and focus on how they discuss the place of philosophy in educational research. Here, we find that the approach tends towards either avoidance, or one that consists in seeing philosophy as an aspect of research that needs to be worked out at the outset, something that amounts to having one’s philosophical position settled. We then show that philosophy, rather than being marginal to research, can comprise the research itself, and discuss what philosophy’s ‘methods’ might be.

In Part II, ‘Reading and writing educational philosophy’, we illustrate the very broad range of approaches to research in educational philosophy by including examples from the research of 11 international scholars. Each contributor provides an introduction to a short extract of their published research, which is then followed by the extract itself. The contributors then analyse their extract, providing critical reflections on the specific practices of philosophical reading and writing that are evident, and that we might say constitute their ‘methods’ in the research.

Part III, ‘How to proceed?’, comprises two chapters that analyse in some detail the place of reading and writing in research in general, and in educational philosophy in particular. In Chapter 15, we discuss what we see as a difference in the place of reading in research. We describe the way reading is discussed in many of the research methods textbooks as ‘reading-for-research’. We contrast this with ‘reading-as-research’, which we argue is characteristic of educational philosophy. We then make a similar distinction between ‘writing-as-report’ (the purpose of writing that tends to dominate the research methods textbooks), and ‘writing-as-research’ in educational philosophy. In both these chapters, we make extensive reference both to examples from the textbooks, as well as to our colleagues’ contributions in Part II. In the final chapter of Part III, Chapter 16, we draw together the major themes of the volume as a whole. We use examples from other philosophical sources that illustrate the wider concerns with the relation between language and thought in particular philosophical traditions. We conclude by trying to lay out some of the starting points for research in educational philosophy, illustrating the kind of issues, problems, and concerns that tend to characterise its starting points.

Writing in the margin

In this introductory section, some attention needs to be given to what might be considered an unusual choice of sub-title for this book, and to indicating the reasons for the use of the phrase: ‘writing in the margin’. The concept of the ‘margin’ is an interesting one, and we indicate here three key ways in which it relates to points that we want to make in this book about research in educational philosophy. Let us explore each of these briefly. Think of the connotations of the plural form of the word (i.e. ‘margins’), and its sense of being at the edge or limits of something. We might talk, for example, of a person living on the margins of society, a piece of handwriting as being on the margins of legibility, or of a practice as being on the margins of safety. In all these examples, the sense is clearly that the margins relate to the very limits of acceptability, and so the term tends to be used pejoratively. This reading is supported by its etymology, coming from the Latin marginem, meaning ‘brink’, ‘edge’, or ‘border’. We might also talk of being on the brink of madness or of suicide and, in such examples, the borderline space is well away from what we might consider mainstream. But we can also think of the margins in another way. We are used to thinking of the margins as the blank space surrounding a sheet of paper or page of a book, and these call to mind images of borders, boundaries, and empty space. Often these are spaces of which we tend to be less aware; they exist, but only at the margin of our consciousness when we write on a sheet of paper or type on a screen. They are only given attention at the outset of our work when we might have to amend the size of the margins to serve a particular purpose; subsequently, they go unnoticed.

But how does the idea of ‘the margins’ relate to our project here? It is in the way that philosophical research tends to be seen; it is consigned to the margins – pushed to the edge – where it tends to go unnoticed. Philosophical research in education is marginal both to the discipline of philosophy (that is, where it exists, it is rarely situated within philosophy departments in universities), and to the field of educational research (where sociology and psychology provide the dominant disciplinary frameworks). Within the field of educational research, the focus on ‘what works’, and the proliferation of studies that claim to deliver measurable outcomes for children and young people, put that kind of work centre-stage. The corollary of this is that research that is more philosophical or theoretical in nature, tends to be pushed into the margins. This view needs little further exemplification save to draw attention to the lack of funding generally available for such work, and to what is denied by the orthodoxies that come from a narrow conception of research that focuses on what works in the classroom (see e.g. Bridges et al., 2009). So the margins are an important image for understanding the current locus of educational philosophy within the field of educational research more generally.

Following from this identification of research in educational philosophy as being in the margins, we want to argue strongly that this does not equate to such work being of marginal importance to educational enquiry. We will explore this point in more detail in Chapter 2. But even at this early stage, we want to emphasise that while some in the field of education might perceive philosophical/theoretical work research to be marginal to contemporary policy and practice, our aim is to demonstrate that this view is erroneous. We will show how philosophical concerns cannot be divorced from the practical and empirical in research on education. Moreover, we will argue that philosophy cuts in throughout research, and so it is always intersecting with empirical work. So while philosophy might be thought of by some as in the margins because they consider that its contribution can only be marginal, this volume starts from the view that it is, and must remain, central to all research in education.

Philosophy as research: re-thinking the margins

In highlighting philosophy as research in itself, and as constitutive of, not marginal to, educational thought, we debunk the idea that philosophy is merely an abstract concern, a ‘tinkering at the edges’ – or the margins. We will argue that it is not the case that philosophy has clearly marked-off marginal areas for research in education (such as conceptual clarification or discussion of issues of justification, value, and knowledge). Nor is it the case that philosophy is aimed solely at an academic audience, and that its research has little practical application to ‘life at the coal face’ in education, while mainstream empirical work deals with the ‘proper’ research that policy-makers and practitioners in education value. It is clear that research in educational philosophy can make a distinctive contribution to education, as Paul Standish points out in his introduction to philosophical approaches to research in education (2010). He shows how work in this field tends to be centrally concerned with issues of meaning and value in education, with conceptual matters, with the coherence of ideas or with the systematic establishing or refutation of a point of view. But these should not be thought of as exhaustive concerns; indeed, as Standish is keen to point out, pursuing philosophical enquiries open up from the very practical and diverse issues faced by those working in education. What this demonstrates is that research in this field is not desultory trifling with ideas at the margins of education, but rather a rich and critical engagement with central issues facing contemporary education policy and practice.

There is a further point that can be made about the notion of ‘margins’ that is relevant for our introductory remarks here. This imagines the margin in a positive, rather than in a pejorative sense. Imagine the margins around a sheet of paper, in a child’s exercise book, or on a student’s essay. These are the spaces where the writer, or a reader of the text, can annotate, make observations, embellish, reflect on, correct, or question the material. Known as marginalia, such comments have a long history, and are the subject of ongoing contemporary educational research (see, for example, Attenborough, 2011). One type of marginalia, known as scholia (from the Greek skholion meaning ‘explanatory note or comment’), was common on classical manuscripts. In some cases, scholia were so extensive that they became works in their own right, such as those of Thomas Magister, the Byzantine scholar who compiled scholia on the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Mantanari and Pagani, 2011). So where does this leave us with regard to discussions of the place of educational philosophy as research? By drawing attention to the existence of scholia, we are not saying that philosophy is somehow to be seen as a marginal note on, an addition to, other (empirical) forms of research. This would fail to recognise philosophy’s place in research and to demote educational philosophy again to the margins. Rather, our argument recognises one of the key characteristics of scholia: their iterative nature. They owe their existence to continual processes of thinking, revision, and development that show how ideas are never fully settled. But this is also the nature of educational philosophy (and of some kinds of research in this field that reject the obsession with certainty and proof that is so pervasive in much empirical research). As Paul Standish writes:

Sometimes [educational philosophy is] based on a precise question one sets out to answer, or provide a solution to, but it is often concerned with an area in which one searches with less clear a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Scholia
• PART I Starting out
• PART II Reading and writing educational philosophy
• PART III How to proceed?
• Index