The Disciplines and Discipline of Educational Research

Abstract

It is, I think, important to clarify from the beginning of this book my understanding of the nature of educational research and educational theory, for this carries implications for many of the chapters that follow. This chapter begins by reviewing the development of educational theory and research from a time (in the 1960s and 1970s) when it was still possible to talk of four ‘foundation disciplines’, to one characterised by the diversity, fragmentation, and hybridisation of the intellectual sources of educational research—one in which this research is described in terms of multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and, as some would have it, postdisciplinarity. The chapter welcomes the greater diversity and enrichment of the resources available to contemporary educational researchers and acknowledges the importance of being able to combine different disciplinary approaches in the exploration of educational theory, policy, and practice. It argues, however, that this should not be at the expense of discipline in educational inquiry, i.e. of the systematic procedures that provide a better warrant for the beliefs that are put forward, rather than inquiry that lacks such ‘systematics’ and in the sense of shared rule-governed procedures, ‘which make a community of arguers possible’ (Hunt in Consequences of theory. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1991: 104). In a final section, the chapter acknowledges and examines the perennial wrestling between, on the one hand, rules that operate to maintain particular hierarchies of power and control over what might count as credible belief and, on the other hand, rules that serve more narrowly epistemic functions related to the development of knowledge and understanding.

The original version of this chapter was published in Bridges, D. (2003) Fiction written under oath: Essays in philosophy and educational research, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.