Abstract
This article explores the problematic nature of pedagogy and pedagogic effectiveness in post-compulsory education – the politics of the discourse, the challenges to pedagogic “old-think” by the new learning, and the methodological difficulties of measuring outcomes as attention moves from the theatre of instruction to the setting of application. It takes as its starting point a study commissioned by the UK's Teaching and Learning Research Programme to review and document the evidence base for pedagogic effectiveness in the different field of post-compulosry education. The article unpicks the many different reasons why the scope and framing of this study doomed it to a kind of failure, and why the TLRP's research agenda aroused the passions of many educational researchers outside the mainstream. Concerns centred on TLRP as a manifestation of the new research orthodoxy and its preoccupation with evidence-based research, and the limitations of this orthodoxy in engaging with innovative thinking about new forms of teaching and learning.
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