Research as a form of work: expertise, community and methodological objectivity

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the rapid rise of a new educational research orthodoxy in the UK and the USA. Central to that orthodoxy are the assumptions that method can ensure objectivity in research, and that more objective ‘safe’ research to inform practice is needed. But educational research is a field made up of overlapping communities of practice. This field has rules, but they are largely unwritten, and modify and change as part of a contingent tradition. Within the field, knowledge formation develops through the making of embodied judgements, which can only ever be partly rational, and are related to developing researcher identities. The new research orthodoxy entails deliberate attempts to restrict and modify practices in this field. This is unlikely to completely succeed, but centralised sources of funding for educational research make many researchers vulnerable. In resisting these tendencies, it is helpful to view research as contributing to better understanding, in ways that owe more to the quality of interpretations of the data than to the objective purity of any methods used.

Communities of Practice

“…Under these circumstances, the argument is that communities of practice might have the effect of wresting control of the research agenda away from professional, academic researchers and of emphasizing the value of practical knowledge at the expense of more esoteric, long-term, theoretical knowledge. Hodkinson (2004) echoes such concerns, although in his case it is because communities of practice are seen as forming part of a ''new orthodoxy'' in educational research in which there is the ''dominance of positivistic or empiricist views of research and the primacy of objectivist methods'' (p. 23). In either case, however, the negative connotations associated with communities of practice relate to circumstances where (a) communities of practice are advocated as the preferred basis for producing research knowledge and (b) there is a fairly clear distinction between practitioners (teachers) and researchers (academics).…”

Managing Meat One: perceptions and anxieties of trainee teachers as they enter the Learning and Skills Sector for the first time

“…Although these figures seem to support Hodkinson's (2004) suggestion that 'All academic knowledge is socially constructed' (p. 11), they leave a question mark over Gutherson and Pickard's (2005) claim that the solution to effective class control is not found in a toolkit of strategies.…”

Las murallas invisibles entre la investigación educativa y los docentes

“…En distintas latitudes del mundo surgieron estudios que pusieron de manifiesto la preocupación por esta desconfianza, por ese desprestigio y por esa "mala reputación" que existía sobre la investigación educativa entre los profesores (por ejemplo, Berliner, 2002;Broekkamp y van Hout-Wolters, 2007;Cherney, Povey, Headb, Boreham y Ferguson, 2012;Hammersley, 2002;Hodkinson, 2004;Lavis, Robertson, Woodside, McLeod y Aberlson, 2003;Muñoz-Repiso, 2004Sancho, 2010;Ward, Smith, Foy, House y Hamer, 2010).…”