What future for educational research in Europe? Political,epistemological and ethical challenges

Abstract

This article reflects on the future of European educational research (EER) and its politics of knowledge. EER is interpreted as a field of power/knowledge, where a hegemonic epistemic framework is raised that assembles an evidence-based epistemology, a ‘what works’ political rationality and a technocratic model of educational research. This implies the marginalization of the debates around the social, political and epistemological stakes of EER.

The article argues for the centrality of these issues into the debate and identifies some challenges for EER. Firstly, a point is made for an aesthetics of educational research work that has criticism as its inspiring principle and combines a problematizing disposition with the practice of research as inquiry. This implies also the extensive engagement of the EER community in a democratic and open normative dialogue with all those with a stake in education. Secondly, the article identifies two related epistemological challenges: (a) the making of epistemological pluralism as a distinctive trait of EER; (b) the exploring of the potentials involved in the practising of specific epistemological ruptures that concern the reframing of time, space and difference as constitutive categories through which we understand educational reality.

Introduction

Thought thinks its own history (the past),

but in order to free itself from what it thinks (the present),

and be able finally to ‘think differently’ (the future)

(Deleuze, 1988: 119)

This article develops some brief reflections on the European educational research (EER hereafter) politics of knowledge that I have shared with colleagues in the 2014 European Educational Research Journal (EERJ) Roundtable during the last European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) in Porto.

The Roundtable was organized as a ‘Moot’ and its theme was fascinating, but somehow scary: the future of EER. The starting point of the debate was that we are experiencing a deep uncertainty about the future of EER and the kind of educational research that is being demanded. The question was to focus on ‘What is yet to come’ and the challenges and opportunities for EER. It was a call to contribute to the creation of a space of self-reflexivity about the challenges of self-governance in the unfolding EER landscape and to debate ways of doing educational research differently (Hoveid et al., 2014).

In Europe we are undoubtedly living a troubling present where education and research policies are veering towards instrumental ends and spaces of autonomy for EER are becoming increasingly narrow. At the same time, we need to recognize that we, as educational researchers, live, explore and co-shape our field. Thus, in addressing the ‘future’ question I have attempted to work creatively in a field of possibilities, emphasizing the actual and potential agency of the EER community. Consistently, my choice has been to interpret the future question as what future should we struggle for among the possible futures that lie ahead of us, with a specific reference to the configuration of the field we inhabit, the publics we talk to, the politics of knowledge we practice and the effects of our agency as a research community.

The reasoning in this article is framed by the belief that the ‘stakes of educational research are social and political as well as epistemological’ (Popkewitz, 1997) and is inspired by the Foucauldian/Deleuzian image of an aesthetics of existence, that is, a praxis of free being in which ‘thought’ reflects on its own history in order to emancipate itself from the constraints of its present, and become able to ‘think differently’ about its prospective future (Deleuze, 1988: 119).

A sketch of our present

EER is certainly lively and multifaceted (Whitty, 2006) and can be viewed as a more or less stable hierarchy of antagonistic knowledges, with its division into disciplinary sub-fields, diverse configurations and individual and collective positionings.

At the same time, we need to recognize that we are experiencing the raising of a hegemonic framework in the field of EER, an episteme for educational research that combines an ‘evidence-based’ epistemology and a ‘what works’ political rationality (Biesta, 2007). Such an episteme seems unquestionable and is performing the power to marginalize alternative voices, both within and across different disciplines and research traditions. This is coupled with and reinforced by the re-articulation of the mechanisms of resources allocation and the establishing of a centralized research agenda at the European level.

These processes are having performative effects on the EER community. Firstly, they are promoting a technological model of professional action (Ball, 1995; Biesta, 2007; Goodson, 1999; Seddon, 1997), where it is assumed that ‘the only relevant research questions are questions about the effectiveness of educational means and techniques, forgetting, among other things, that what counts as “effective” crucially depends on judgments about what is educationally desirable’ (Biesta, 2007: 5). This implies, in my view, the neutralization of the political in a field that is ‘profoundly political’ (Eisner, 1993: 7) and risks driving us towards a utilitarian understanding of EER, where ‘education research is only there to service the technical adjustments that will deliver effective schools’ and systems (Goodson, 1999: 287). Secondly, epistemological questions are increasingly marginalized in the debate. More and more we have to play as researchers in a field of knowledge where it is taken for granted that there is an ‘objective world out there’ that can be known through the adoption of ‘technologies of the observer’. This is intertwined with a conception of educational change that is located in a stabilized space and a time sequence and that is directional and measurable (Popkewitz, 1997: 21).

All of this results in an attempt of re-regulation of EER which, in turn, creates a problem of positionality for many educational researchers and is yet producing the division of the field into constellations of ruling and subaltern coalitions.

However, such a re-regulation has a paradoxical side and can also act as a push for the EER community to re-act, enlarge its own reason and (re)make the ‘possibility for educational research to contribute to new visions’ (Goodson, 1999: 294), imagining the world(s) of education in a more comprehensive and democratic space of ‘potential publicness’ (Dolan, 2005).

Thinking of our future: Re-centring the political and the epistemological

My point here is that those who feel uncomfortable with this present, and I do, are called to the ‘task of rebuilding alliances and perspectives’ (Goodson, 1999: 282). This means that in imagining our future, we should ask the following questions: what educational knowledge? For what? For whom?

A first challenge we should confront with as community, as networks, as groups and individuals is the re-centring of the political in the practice of educational research, debating ideas and aims rather than questions of the pragmatics of efficiency and effectiveness. As researchers we should be always aware that ‘education is at heart a moral practice’ whose means and ends are ‘internally rather than externally related’ (Biesta, 2007: 10).

This means to debate around our politics of knowledge. In this respect, valuing the contribution of some established traditions of educational research in Europe and beyond, I would like to make a point in favour of an aesthetics ¹ of educational research that:

• has criticism as the founding principle of the EER community politics of knowledge (Ball, 1995; Dean, 1994);

• is engaged in a democratic dialogue, that is full, free and open normative, with all those with a stake in education (Biesta, 2007: 21), exploring ‘the indeterminacy of the encounter with otherness exposed in a critique of what is’ (Mules, 2009).

Criticism as the inspiring principle of EER politics of knowledge

Re-centring the political in EER means, first and above all, that as researchers we should not accept given problem definitions and predetermined ends. What I envisage here is the adoption of a form of criticism, which combines two, only apparently, alternative traditions of thought and research: a problematizing disposition (Ball, 2013) with the practice of research as inquiry (Biesta, 2007). ² Doing research as problematization (Foucault, 1977) means to look at the educational world as ‘no more than the historically contingent effect of a kind of selective determination’ and to engage in an activity that dismantles the co-ordinates of these determinations, indicating ‘the possibility of a different experience’ (Burchell, 1996: 30). It is an invitation to act as ‘historians of our educational present’ (Ball, 2013), being inspired by a concern both for truth and existence (Burchell, 1996). This implies to be attentive to the diverse forms of educational truth, to be curious about its transformations, to be ‘meticulous in describing the shapes it assumes’, to be willing, and I want to emphasize this point, ‘to be disturbed or even changed by it’ (Burchell, 1996: 32). It also means to not fix once and for all the possibilities of existence and the limits of thought, that is, to give continuous attention to the costs of the limits of present thought and action (what we do not see, what we cannot think, what we cannot do) (Burchell, 1996: 33) (see Ball, 2013, for an extensive discussion of this).

Such a non-identitarian attempt to reveal the ‘inventedness’ of the educational would be, in my view, complementary to the practice of educational research as a form of inquiry (Dewey, 1938). Inquiry is intended here in Dewey’s terms as a form of intellectual engagement with the educational experience that does not provide us with ‘objective’ information about an educational world ‘out there’, but rather explores hypotheses about possible relations between actions and consequences and interrogates itself about their educational potential value and desirability (Biesta, 2007: 15). Adopting the logic of inquiry means recognition that educational research has a double-sided performative effect: (a) it is a form of intervention in and on the world; (b) it is a way to create the conditions for researchers and professionals to experience the educational world enacting processes of value-laden and intelligent problem solving of always unique and situated challenges. Quoting Biesta (2007: 17):

[…] we should not only be experimental with respect to means but also with respect to ends and the interpretation of the problems we address. It is only along these lines that inquiry in the social domain can help us find out not only whether what we desire is achievable but also whether achieving it is desirable. Dewey’s ‘pragmatic technology’ is therefore not about social engineering or social control in the narrow sense of the word. Action in the social domain can only become intelligent action when its intrinsic relation with human purposes and consequences — that is, when the political nature of inquiry in the social domain — is fully taken into account.

Inspired by such aesthetics and pragmatics, EER would produce both a critical effect, problematizing what is given to us as necessary, and a positive effect, ‘clearing a space for the possibility of thinking and being otherwise’. In this view, educational research is interpreted as a way to be involved as researchers together with educators, students, families, communities and policy-makers in producing a different way of understanding and imagining educational reality. With a specific reference to educators, it is called to engage with them in acquiring a different understanding of educational practice, in seeing and imagining educational practice differently, in seeing and understanding problems that were not seen before, in envisaging potential courses of action that were invisible and unthinkable before.

It should be clear that the future of EER I am envisaging here is a future where educational researchers do not (wish to) act as ‘advisors to the prince’. Rather, thinking of their publics, they interpret their role as public intellectuals (Ball, 1995; Goodson, 1999: 277; Whitty, 2006) who expect their ideas to ‘form the basis of influence and action in the public sphere’ and are sensitive to the implications that the processes of knowledge production they are involved in have on the lifeworlds on which they insist (Apple et al., 2010). Coming to the ‘for whom’ question, then, the EER I would struggle for is a research that engages itself in a ‘full, free and open normative debate among all those with a stake in education’ (Biesta, 2007: 21).

Epistemological pluralism and ruptures

Ethics issues cannot be detached from epistemological ones. In thinking about the future of EER today, it seems to be a still up-to-date Eisner (1993) invitation to put the ‘pluralism’ issue at the centre of our future educational agenda, reflexively asking how it can be advanced and thinking of its implications for the research practice. Of course, ‘there are different ways to understand the world’ and ‘make such understanding possible’. The point (quite obvious) I make here is that the understanding of the processes and outcomes of education would benefit from ‘a pluralistic rather than a monolithic approach to research’ (Eisner, 1993: 8). The invitation to make epistemological pluralism a distinctive trait of EER is not, however, a naïve call for complementary. It is rather an invitation to challenge any attempt to establish epistemological and methodological hegemony, reflexively thinking about the educational researcher as a subject and its disposition towards the act of knowing.

As part of this wider challenge, I would suggest the need to question the hegemonic aspirations of a conception of educational change that is directional and measurable, being located in a stabilized space and a time sequence. The idea is to reinforce those research paths that have recently resisted the hegemonic pressures of the evidence-based epistemology and pay close attention to the potentials involved in the practising of those epistemological ruptures that revise the rules in which we understand educational reality and by which we think about educational change and progress (Popkewitz, 1997). With Popkewitz (1997: 23–24), we could summarize as follows the epistemological ruptures implied by such a questioning.

• Rethinking the spatial dimension in the practice of educational research, focusing on the constructing of identities through the formation of social spaces. As Popkewitz has argued (1997: 23), this would be an invitation to EER to put at the centre of its agenda foci and research questions that concern the ‘rules and standards of reason’ through which subjects are formed in the field of education through their locations within ‘historicizing spaces in a variegated time frame’.

• Thinking of time as a multiplicity of strands moving with an uneven flow, understanding change as ruptures or breaks and looking at continuities as conditional and relational. This implies a non-causal and non-linear mode of reasoning that abandons the objective to identify agents and factors of change that move ‘in a continuum from the past to the present and the future’. It calls to an understanding of change and progress that is strictly bounded to ‘breaking the chains of reason that bind and limit alternatives for action’ (Popkewitz, 1997).

• Escaping from the enduring evolutionary principle that, implicitly or explicitly, continues to inform part of the scholarly reasoning in EER and results in the centrality of the logic of comparison and the tendency to create differentiation drawing on ‘some norms of unity’ (Popkewitz, 1997: 25). What is suggested here is to intensify in EER the exploration of alternative discursive practices to construct differences that do not result in the formation of oppositional norms. This would be coupled with the attempt to position difference within discourses that do not establish a single continuum of value, but take into account the hybridity, multiplicity and the performative effects of any form of classification and positioning.

The practising of these epistemological ruptures would be, in the perspective proposed here, part of the effort to address the epistemological basis together with the political nature of educational research, bringing us to turn the attention both to ‘what counts as research’ and ‘what it is that different forms of representation employed within the context of educational research might help us grasp’ (Popkewitz, 1997: 23) and contribute to (re)produce.

An aesthetics of educational research: Democracy, pre-figuration and experimentation

Reflecting about the future of EER, what I have tried to outline here is a proposal for an aesthetics of research that is democratic, adopts a prefigurative politics of knowledge and is oriented towards the exploration of alternative ways of doing education.

Such an aesthetics of research is democratic in so far as it tends to shape the field it inhabits and the relations with its publics as open, contested and deliberative spaces that are endlessly oriented towards the ‘finding of different ways of establishing the play between regulation and openness’ (Burchell, 1996: 34). As Biesta (2007: 6) put it, EER would need to:

…expand [its] views about the interrelations among research, policy, and practice in order to keep in view the fact that education is a thoroughly moral and political practice, one that needs to be subject to continuous democratic contestation and deliberation.

A democratic disposition, understood in this way, entails criticism rather than critique. In this perspective, EER would not be grounded in any transcendent set of values and/or ontological and epistemological assumptions, but would be asked to recognize and explore the paradoxical faces of any form of regulation (and of educational practices among them), which is together constraining and enabling, oppressing and liberating, determined and in perennial becoming.

What emerges here is a prefigurative politics of knowledge that refuses any limitation within a technical role and ‘seeks to create and sustain within the lived [educational] practice […] relationships and political forms that “prefigure” and embody the desired society’ (Goodson, 1999: 292). EER would, on the contrary, intensify its efforts to be part of a process of knowledge production that (re)shapes the space of public debate on education, as an always modifiable democratic practice of individual and collective self-constitution, as a practice of freedom (Burchell, 1996: 33).

I am aware that this is not sufficient or enough in itself, but it is in my view a necessary aesthetics of the research work in the field of education that needs to be coupled with (and should act as the premise for) the experimentation of alternative forms of doing and governing education that widen and enhance the possibilities of existence, making them open for diverse educational subjects/actors.