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Chapter 1
First words
Thomas A. Schwandt
“May you live in interesting times” – the expression conveying a wish of sorts – has long been meant to be ironic and something of a curse. Interesting times should be high quality times, good times – exciting, appealing, attention grabbing, stimulating – a kind of cornucopia of possibilities, all, at least, potentially something one would wish for. The irony is that such a richness of possibilities contains within itself its opposite – options that are repellent, boring, tiresome, mind numbing, and confusing – and a longing for simpler, less turbulent times. I was recently told that with the right software I am able to access 2500 television channels through my PC. In 1987, one of the leading publishers of qualitative methods textbooks listed 10 titles in its catalogue; in 2007 they listed 142. When I walk across the street from my office to the coffee shop, the menu board displays at least 30 possibilities for what a cup of coffee means. We now need specialized dictionaries to navigate multiple research languages – dictionaries of qualitative inquiry, social research methods, cultural studies, feminism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and social theory. We live in a time when the long taken-for-granted conceptual (e.g., family, society, identity, knowledge) and analytical (e.g., objectivity, facticity, validity) vocabulary of social research is no longer the reliable guide to making sense of social reality that we thought it was. The very idea of knowledge is differentially defined, authored by many, widely accessible, distributed, vetted and unvetted. We find it difficult to avoid being bombarded with information – when I recently Googled the phrase “knowledge production”, I found 161 million hits and 206 million for “educational research”. We live in a time when sweeping processes of political-economic globalization both substantiate performativity as the defining characteristic of knowledge and enable resistance to it, foster convergence on uniform models of the polity and political rationality and simultaneously create the very conditions of opposition to such homogenization. We are vexed with interesting times. The list of what makes this so is endless.
What being troubled in this sense means for ideas of knowledge production and educational research is not all that clear. For some, the troubling is a genuine affliction – disconcerting, disturbing, distressing and foreboding. For others, the troubling heightens their sense of the irony of navigating life and claiming that one “really” knows what is good, true, right, valuable, and so on. For still others, the uneasiness that comes from making problematic long-held understandings is viewed as potentially productive of new and different ways of knowing and being. Interesting times are by definition protean as are the ways in which we live in and make sense of those times as members of society (citizen, consumer, client?), researchers (discoverer, narrator, interpreter, critic, bricoleur, wanderer, reformer?), teachers (sage guide, information broker, cultivator of human capital, skill and drill instructor, nurturer of Bildung?), and so on. As a testament to living and working as educational researchers in interesting times, this book is about two things – what is written here and what is shown but not written.
What is written
What is written about educational research here is kaleidoscopic in its coverage of the objects of analysis that are in the viewfinders of the authors. In Part I of this book, authors tackle the intersection of the meaning of knowledge, its production, its justification, and its use(s) in a swirl of contemporary ideas and practices characterized by notions of accountability, quality, and scientific evidence. All of the chapters in this section, in a very broad way, are addressing the questions “How are ideas of (educational) knowledge and knowledge production being shaped in contemporary discursive practices that draw heavily on notions from business models of auditability, process re-engineering (streamlining, cost effectiveness, clearly defined outputs), performance management, and quality assurance? What are the consequences of such framing for institutional practices of educational governance and educational research? What happens to our ideas of knowledge as open-ended, speculative, reflective, and reflexive when this framing occurs?” Marilyn Strathern, thinking anthropologically, takes as her object of analysis the seemingly commonsensical idea that good and relevant knowledge must be useful. She argues for the view that we ought to demand of knowledge more than that it be capable of being accumulated, managed, and put to instrumental use. In her chapter one hears echoes of Clifford Geertz’s observation that progress in an interpretive science of society is marked less by the perfection of a knowledge consensus than by a refinement of debate and by an increased capacity to vex each other with our self-understandings. Jill Blackmore’s chapter is also concerned with what counts as legitimate knowledge. She offers a more direct critique of the ways in which the notion of educational research quality is being framed both socio-politically and epistemologically at present, particularly in what she identifies as the Australian policyscape. However, she speaks to the concerns of a broader community of educational researchers faced with systems of educational governance favoring evidence-based research as most relevant for decisions of policy and practice. Also writing against the backdrop of an “educational policy machinery” fueled by ideas of quality, utility, auditability, and accountability, Maggie MacLure fixes our attention on one of the knowledge production tools thought to be most generative of useable knowledge for education, namely, the systematic review. She unpacks how systematic reviews made by the EPPI-Centre at the University of London are planned, conducted, and reported. MacLure contends that such reviews are not simply of limited utility in informing educational policy and practice but also emblematic of a dangerously oversimplified, knowledge-product oriented view of what research and scholarship mean. An example of the effects of research framed in accountability discourses is illustrated in the chapter by Ian Stronach, Jo Frankham and Sheila Stark. They explore the framing of the problem of and solution to teenage pregnancy rates in the UK in an allegedly scientific discourse, and conclude that what often is promoted as scientific educational research is more like scientific kitsch. Noel Gough illustrates how what amounts to an agentless flow of quality assurance discourse in higher education works differentially to produce certain consequences and prevent others from occurring as it interacts with local practices. His chapter advises that we would be well served if we worried less about what a notion like “quality” (or evidence, accountability, or performance, for that matter) means and more concerned with how it actually works and what is accomplished in its name.
Part II of the book takes up the conversation about the work of educational research from another set of perspectives. Collectively, the chapters are less concerned with diagnosing the intellectual and moral-political landscape of the meaning of knowledge, and more focused on how the analytic tools employed in educational research must be redefined and used differently in research practices. By analytic tools here I have in mind both the ideas that fashion our ways of understanding what research and methodology mean as well as those concepts (such as innovation, teaching practices, writing, curriculum theory, and the like) that give shape to objects of study. Thus, Leonie Rowan discusses how the study of educational innovations ought to be retheorized to mean genuinely “transformative” responses to educational arrangements that lead to fundamentally new ways of conceptualizing notions of gender, technology, culture, and difference. The notion of an externally imposed educational accountability on teaching practice is criticized in the chapter prepared by Jennifer C. Greene, Walter Feinberg, Sarah Stitzlein and Luis Miron – a familiar tale. The import of their chapter lies in their reconsideration of the lived reality of accountability in the daily lives of teachers as well as in their suggestion that it is valuable to empirically explore a notion of democratic accountability wedded to the mutual, collective responsibilities of those with a stake in an educational practice. John Elliott’s chapter invites readers to reconsider human capital theory as the driver of educational curricula. Elliott explores an interpretation of Amartya Sen’s capability theory for human development and its potential for curriculum planning. Elliott argues that thinking of curriculum through the lens of capability theory requires a more deliberative, practical, and democratic approach to curriculum planning and design than that suggested by human capital theory. The penultimate two chapters in Part II take up the question of “being” a researcher, but in different ways. Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson are concerned with research as a practice of writing, and they explore what that means specifically for students engaged in writing their dissertations. John and Jill Schostak invite readers to radically reconceptualize the traditional image (and identity) of the researcher as rational, methodological, cognizing agent firmly in control of the discovery and production of knowledge.
What is shown
A common theme – written about but not directly explored in these chapters – is that traditional ways of conceiving of objects of analysis in educational (and social) research as entities (problems, events, processes, products, tasks, etc.) with definitive structures constituted by a set of components accessible to well-defined procedures of knowing is no longer a viable guide to doing research. Instead, the objects of research analysis – as well as the material, intellectual, and moral-political circumstances in which such analyses are legitimated, authorized, supported, and given value – are complex, complicated, indeterminate, contested, discursive spaces. Generating knowledge in and about such spaces challenges long-held ideas about the disciplinary model of knowledge production wherein the researcher follows a fairly agreed-upon set of ideas, values, methods, and norms defining the research enterprise; where researchers share common training in the skills and means of established research practices; and where mechanisms of peer review serve as quality control (Gibbons, 2000). It is to this theme and the relationship between knowledge and political action that Bridget Somekh turns her attention in the final chapter, “Last words: speculative knowledge”.
This book reveals other things about knowledge production as well. At one level, it is an entirely ironic production. Most chapters explicitly or implicitly criticize the business model of knowledge production that animates educational management and research practices concerned with quality, performance, accountability, and the added value of knowledge. In such a scenario, knowledge is a marketable commodity and knowledge outputs are considered justifiable only in terms of the needs they satisfy in a particular market segment. This book, however, depends for its success on precisely the fact that the publishers are able to promote it as a knowledge commodity to a particular segment of the academic market. Although, as contributors to this volume, we may see ourselves as simply reflecting on and adding to the evolution of our collective thinking by pursuing good work and ensuring its effective dissemination to our particular scholarly community, we are complicit in a process of supplying knowledge products to an industry which serves consumers (van der Linde, 2001).
Finally, this book reveals a struggle with being writerly or readerly, to borrow an idea formulated by Roland Barthes (1970). Some of the contributions strive to present their knowledge obliquely or implicitly, thereby inviting the reader to establish her or his own connections and participate in the construction of meaning. Others are clearly more “readerly” contributions in which the knowledge content is more neatly defined, clearly packaged in a linear argument and thereby place the reader in a more reactive and consumptive position. In other words, the contributions show a tension between producing knowledge that is interesting and unexpected, speculative and fragmentary, aimed more at raising questions than solving problems, and with only incidental utility, on the one hand, and producing a kind of authoritative knowledge that diagnoses and treats, on the other hand.
In the circumstance of producing educational research knowledge in interesting times, the book could not be otherwise.
References
Barthes, R. (1970) S/Z, London: Cape.
Gibbons, M. (2000) What kind of university? Changing research practices, Mousaion 18(1): 28–40.
van der Linde, G. (2001) Alternative models of knowledge production, Mousaion 19(1): 53–61.
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Part I
Analysis and critique of contemporary audit cultures and performativity in educational research
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Chapter 2
Measures of usefulness
A diatribe
Marilyn Strathern
Contemporary social anthropology engages with agendas it regards as ‘other people’s’, whether from within the academy or from among their subjects of study, at the same time as it also responds to demands from national and international agencies. This chapter, first delivered as a keynote lecture at the conference from which this book sprang, takes up some recent developments in anthropological thinking to raise some questions about what is implied in the accompanying idea that good knowledge is ‘useful’ knowledge.
She would be a fool who tried to demonstrate the uselessness of everything she knew. And for an occasion to which I have been invited as a keynote speaker I fervently trust I shall not make a fool of myself. I do however want to put in a plea for plain speaking. There is much to be gained from acknowledging uselessness – and today’s world of knowledge producers and knowledge managers might benefit from knowing why. I also thought the issue might resonate with some of your own interests in applied research.
We run at once into the oxymoron. She would be a fool who tried to demonstrate the uselessness of what she knew, for there is nothing that cannot be useful if by that we mean putting knowledge to human ends. But I do not propose to revel in the revelation that apparently useless knowledge is useful after all, or conversely, how useless our little schemes turn out to be when we try to be relevant to everything. Rather, the question that these categories prompt is how we make or judge things to be one or the other. As values, they are unequally weighted. I wish to borrow from the positive inflection1 that accompanies the concept of usefulness to give something of a positive cast to ‘uselessness’. Hence the subtitle: ‘a diatribe’.
At the same time, I also wish to say something about what could have been a second subtitle: ‘an anthropological view’. I would be a fool indeed to argue that social anthropology is a useless subject. In fact, many of my colleagues would count that as betrayal. They would regard it as very stupid indeed – not only research funding within the academy but reputation and jobs outside depend on the perception that it is ultimately worthwhile, and its worth includes its usefulness. They would also think I was under-selling it, and (worse) reinforcing the ignorant stereotypes that many hold.
For I think it would be true to say that when people (non-anthropologists) hear about the scope and ambitions of the discipline (its aims and objectives!) they think it must be relevant to everything – but then, when they look at what anthropologists do, are often confused and disappointed. Anthropology comes out neither with grand statements about the human condition nor with findings about behaviour as recognisable rules of thumb. Instead it just seems to make complicated things more complicated. Its preoccupations are thus read as arcane, somehow not of this world, and so forth.
In fact a complaint of social science as a whole, that it makes problems rather than solves them, is especially true of social anthropology. (To my ears, of course, this shows consonance with its subject matter: ‘societies’ themselves are problem-creating mechanisms, or, rather, every problem solved in social life generates new ones. Anthropology might present this as fundamental to the human condition, but it is hardly the kind of insight ordinarily welcomed under that rubric.) Yet I am afraid that – perhaps in the spirit of Ian Stronach who asked me to come here – I am also being a bit mischievous, since I am taking a liberty with yourselves. I am afraid you might think it a bit irrelevant to your concerns if I talk about anthropology, or can’t quite see the point of it in relation to your own agendas! So I am acting out the very issue I want to share with you.
The charge of uselessness is my starting point: not to deny it but to run with it. Let us agree there is much that is useless and irrelevant about anthropology and begin from there. Since it is an academic discipline, this means I am in effect talking about the useful/useless-ness of (a type of) knowledge.
Some problems
One would not be prompted to raise the question about the useful/useless-ness of knowledge, in the first place, if there were not some small indications that all is not well in the knowledge economy, at least in the UK.
Here, from many, are three expressions of anxiety. In an evidence-based era, first policy makers and now research councils tell themselves that knowledge that cannot be communicated is useless knowledge, implying that there is the constant danger of a productivity deficit. Remedy: to be productive knowledge must be transferable, have its ‘users’, that is, be consumed by others than those who produced it (or by producers in a different c...
