Research and the Theoretical Field - Pauldowling.me

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61 Introduction: The use-value of research The Report of the Review Panel—Strategic Review of Research in Education (1992) claimed that there was a perception amongst educators and administrators that much educational research was irrelevant to them. This perception was despite the respectable profile of Australian educational researchers in the international research community. (DETYA, 2001) The report from which this extract is taken presents a rather more optimistic picture of the relationship between research and educational practice and policy that would possibly be unduly optimistic if applied to the situation in the UK (see the discussion in Dowling & Brown, 2006). The various ‘modern mathematics’ initiatives in the 1960s, led by the Cambridge Conference on School Mathematics (1963) might be described as a push, largely by mathematicians, to shape the school mathematics curriculum by bringing it into line with a particular philosophy of school mathematics (see Cooper, 1983, 1985; Moon, 1985, see also Dowling, in press). This, in a sense is the opposite side of things, with researchers—in this case mathematicians— regarding research as legitimately imposing upon educational practice and policy (the design of the curriculum relating to both). Rejection and imposition both reject any possibility of transaction, any dialogue between the two fields. Well, if we think that dialogue is an important facilitator of learning, then we would presumably want to avoid both monologic forms. But there are different forms of dialogue as well. Before considering how we might describe these different forms, I want to give some further thought to two key issues: firstly, how we might conceptualise the way in which one activity views another and, secondly, how we might think about theory and practice. In the introduction to Chapter 5 I introduced a part of my own theoretical language, social activity theory (SAT, see Dowling, 1998, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c) that establishes four domains of practice in relation to any given specialised activity, such as school mathematics or educational research. For my purposes here I need refer to just two of these domains. The esoteric domain is the region or text associated with the specialised practice that is most strongly institutionalised. In the case of educational research, this domain will include, in general terms, the language of research methods that is being introduced in the MRes and also the theoretical space relating to the particular research performance. Now, in the introductions to Chapters 1 and 2, I described research as a transaction between three areas: theory, research methods, and the empirical setting, in other words, between the research esoteric domain and the empirical setting. However, the empirical setting is at least in part shaped by methodological decisions, such as research design, sampling and data collection and analysis strategies as well as by the theoretical space, so this is a rather one-sided transaction. I therefore want to reformulate the earlier description; let’s look at it like this: the esoteric domain of educational research (the theoretical space and methodology) casts a gaze upon the world beyond itself, the empirical field (Brown & Dowling, 1998) and creates the empirical setting in its own image— or, at least, according to its own principles. The findings of a research performance appear to be about the more general empirical field, but actually RESEARCH & THE THEORETICAL FIELD
62 concern the empirical setting, an artefact of the esoteric domain of the research in transaction with the empirical field. The empirical setting is what I refer to as the public domain of educational research; it is established by the recontextualisation of the empirical field. Clearly, the researcher must recontextualise the empirical field in some way, minimally, by textualising or re-textualising it; research, after all, is presented in textual form. Where the esoteric domain is very strongly institutionalised and, in this respect, the researcher’s actions and conceptualising constrained, then we might suggest that the empirical field acts as a kind of catalyst or lever for the internal development of the esoteric domain. Again, this would be rather like ‘normal science’ in Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) terms. In educational studies, however, we often find that the esoteric domain—theoretical space and methodology—are comparatively weakly institutionalised, so that the researcher’s options are, in this respect, more fluid and the empirical field potentially has more ‘voice’ in the transformation of the esoteric domain. Only potentially, though, because we need also to factor in the subjectivity of the researcher, which, as I noted in the previous chapter introduction, is sometimes considered to be very important in some areas of research. I have for some time argued (see, for example, Dowling, 1995) that the recontextualising the empirical by educational research is potentially very productive. However, it has implications. Most particularly, that research findings are recontextualisations of the empirical entails that any attempt to impose them back on the empirical field as monologic prescriptions for practice is always unwise and, in many cases likely to be impossible; educational research and educational practice and policy are different kinds of activity. I’ll say a little more about this shortly. So what kind of opportunities might educational research offer Essentially, research involves motivated analysis. This involves putting some things together and keeping other things apart, conceptually, in ways that, at least from the perspective of the empirical field, are new. Mary Douglas’s (1996) organization of cultures in ‘cultural theory’ (see the introductions to Chapters 4 and 5) would be a case in point; she presents a new way for us to think about cultures that are familiar and, perhaps, others that are unfamiliar to us. Rebecca Rogers (2003; see the introduction to Chapter 3) encourages us to see a problem in certain alignments between home and school cultures, rather than or as well as in certain discontinuities between them. This is a reorganizing of the way we think about cultural reproduction in/by the school. Basil Bernstein (1973) distinguishes between elaborated and restricted speech codes and associates the former with the school and with middle class students and the latter with working class students. For him, at this time, it was this discontinuity rather than the alignment between home and school that constituted the problem and he pronounced his famous chiasmus: RESEARCH & THE THEORETICAL FIELD
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Master of Research (Online) Researc
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3 Introduction Only theoretical obj
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7 one or two hours of work, but thi
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Page 56 and 57: 55 Babbedge et al report that ‘th
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111 Week 7 Week 6 Week 5 Week 4 Exp
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