Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

Chapter 9
The Persuasive Power of Figures
and the Aesthetics of the Dirty Backyards
of Statistics in Educational Research
Ulrike Stadler-Altmann and Edwin Keiner
This chapter focuses upon the varying contexts empirical educational research
knowledge is embedded in and how this knowledge becomes subject to processes
of de- and re-contextualisations according to expectations of the respective social
groups it refer to. On the one side, there is an aesthetics of representation of educational
research knowledge and of the rhetorically persuasive power of figures and
graphic accounts, an aesthetics of providing answers. On the other side, there is
an aesthetics of deconstructive scepticism and of epistemological relativism, an
aesthetics of raising questions. The combination of both aesthetic forms and the
provocation of both giving answers and raising questions in a formalised educational
research presentation are related to two further aspects of aesthetics the chapter will
focus upon. We will analyse a more rhetorical and a more epistemological focusing
on two areas: (a) (oral) presentations of educational research projects (from a more
microanalytical perspective) and (b) (written) publications addressing the knowledge
society or educational research outcomes from large-scale assessment studies
(from a more macroanalytical perspective).
It is important to note that the chapter will not address methodology or theory formation
of educational research. These methodological debates were suffused with
normative ideas, convictions and options. We do not start from such a perspective,
but try to compare aesthetic forms of literary and research presentations. The chapter
focuses upon (oral and written) presentations of educational research and the texture
and function figures and statistics play within the rhetorical form of an exposition.
Thus, it contributes to finding rules of a grammar of presentation within educational
research.
U. Stadler-Altmann (B)
Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: The Ethics and Aesthetics
of Statistics, Educational Research 5, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9873-3_9,
C○ Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
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