A Social History of Educational Studies and Research

Past, Present – and Future?

Gary McCulloch, Steven Cowan

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317483878
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Bildung
• Categoria: Bildung Allgemein

A Social History of Educational Studies and Research examines the development of the study of education in the UK in its broader educational, social and political context since its early beginnings in the first part of the twentieth century. By providing a historical analysis of the contested growth of the field this book examines the significant contribution that has been made by institutions of higher education, journals, text books, conferences, centres, and academic societies. It discusses the problems and opportunities of the field, and its prospects for survival and adaptation to current changes in the decades ahead. The work draws on documentary sources, social network analysis, and interviews with leading figures from across the field.

This book highlights international influences on the development of educational studies and research in the UK, its role in the growing internationalisation of the field as a whole, and also comparisons and contrasts with the nature of the field elsewhere. It relates the development to the wider social, political and economic changes affecting higher education in general and educational studies and research in particular. It addresses the historical development of disciplines in higher education institutions and the nature, extent and limitations of interdisciplinarity.

A Social History of Educational Studies and Research discuss the problems and opportunities facing the study of education today, and its prospects of adapting to changes in the decades ahead. It is a distinctive and original analysis of educational studies and research that provides the first comprehensive study of its type.

1
Introduction

Over the past century, education has become recognised as a prime investment for the future in order to pass on the cultural heritage to the next generation, to improve society, to organise production and industry. It is also a key to the organisation of society, to patterns of opportunity, status, hierarchy and power. With the accelerating growth of interest in the nature and impact of education, there has emerged in modern universities a comparatively new field of study: the study of education itself, based principally in departments of education. Such departments were created in many countries from the late nineteenth century onwards, originally with the main purpose of training teachers for the new national systems of education, but increasingly during the twentieth century to support the development of a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of education through concerted study and research. In Europe, this new field has often been framed in terms of the ‘educational sciences’ (Hofstetter 2012). In the UK, it has usually been described as ‘educational studies’ or more specifically in research terms as ‘educational research’ or ‘education research’. This book will seek to examine the historical development of educational studies and research in UK universities – the academy. It will also assess how this broad and diverse field has developed in a changing social and political context into the knowledge formation that it has become in the twenty-first century.

There has been increasing international interest in the history of educational studies and research over the past decade. In the United States, the most important work has no doubt been Ellen Condliffe Lagemann’s An Elusive Science, which traced the ‘troubling history’ of education research through the twentieth century, highlighting its variety and range, defining itself as a ‘discipline history’ in the sense that it sought to investigate ‘the changing ecology of knowledge and the politics that has been part of that’ (Lagemann 2001, p. xiv; see also Lagemann 1997). David Labaree, also in the US, has valuably examined the low status of schools and departments of education within the academy, commenting:

The ed school is the butt of jokes in the university, where professors portray it as an intellectual wasteland; it is the object of scorn in schools, where teachers decry its programs as impractical and its research as irrelevant; and it is a convenient scapegoat in the world of educational policy, where policymakers portray it as a root cause of bad teaching and inadequate learning.

(Labaree 2006, pp. 2–3)

Labaree explains this poor reputation in terms of the historical association of schools of education with teacher education.

In Western Europe, Hofstetter and Schneuwly have analysed the institutionalisation of educational science in terms of the number of academic chairs, textbooks, institutions and posts that supported educational research, publications in specialised journals and public discourses in education (Hofstetter and Schneuwly 2004). Other recent European work has begun to chart the development of the educational sciences in different European countries since the Second World War (Laot and Rogers 2015). In the Baltic states, too, there has been a growth of interest in this theme, for example with the publication of two edited collections on the development of the educational sciences in Baltic countries during the twentieth century (Baltic Association of Historians of Pedagogy 2009, 2010). In Western Australia, a comparative history of five different departments of education in universities across the state has also been produced (Gardiner et al. 2011).

Such studies have been slower to develop in relation to the UK and have until recently tended to focus more upon developments in Scotland rather than in the rest of the country. As H.M. Knox pointed out in 1951, the study of education was treated in the later nineteenth century as an academic and cultural subject in Scotland, whereas in England the main focus was the professional preparation of teachers (Knox 1951, p. 34). The earliest academic chairs in education in Scotland were established at Edinburgh (Laurie) and St Andrews (Meiklejohn) in 1876. From 1892, education was a recognised arts subject for the master of arts degree in Scotland, and Scottish universities were also pioneers in creating an honours degree in education with the bachelor of education (B.Ed.) degree approved at Edinburgh in 1916 (Knox 1951; see also Simon 1990). The academic study of the theory and history of education was thus separated from teacher training, which was confined to training colleges (Bell 1983). In the interwar years, the Scottish Council for Research in Education (SCRE) was established (in 1928), and an independent and distinctive research tradition was created (see for example Lawn et al. 2010). This faded after the Second World War, although the creation of the Scottish Educational Research Association (SERA) in the 1970s was a significant initiative to revive and develop a distinct approach in a changing context.

There has until now been relatively little written on educational studies and research in the UK as a whole. John Nisbet, the first president of the British Educational Research Association (BERA), was something of a pioneer in this respect with a number of reflective essays on the early origins of the field and also one on its development in the 1960s (Nisbet 2000, 2002, 2005, 2009). William Richardson has produced an extended article on the history of educational studies in the four nations of the UK from 1940 to 2002 (Richardson 2002). Peter Gordon edited four volumes of inaugural lectures by professors of education since the late nineteenth century, constituting a running commentary on the development of the field over the course of more than a century and the issues that have arisen during that time (Gordon 1980a, 1980b, 1988, 1995). J.B. Thomas has contributed a useful edited collection on the history of teacher education in universities, as well as a number of institutional histories (Thomas 1990, 1992).

A number of studies have considered the development of particular disciplines applied to education, for example a collection edited by Furlong and Lawn on the ‘disciplines of education’ (Furlong and Lawn 2011; see also Furlong and Lawn 2007). This focused on the state of the key disciplines of sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, economics, comparative and international education, and geography in relation to educational research and argued that, although they were all confident about their own roles and importance, they were becoming increasingly small and isolated. This view differed markedly from that of J.W. Tibble forty years before, who in 1966 had edited a widely noted work, The Study of Education, which framed the study of education fundamentally around the ‘foundation disciplines’ of philosophy, history, psychology and sociology (Tibble 1966; see also McCulloch 2002). Another significant recent work is John Furlong’s ‘anatomy of the discipline’ of education (Furlong 2013a). Furlong’s work seeks first to consider the history of the study of education in UK universities and then to understand the current situation of education in relation to teaching and research.

A particular concern of the current work is to consider the extent and nature of interdisciplinary approaches in educational studies and research, as well as the contributions made by the different disciplines in relation to these, with particular reference to the historical experience of the UK. It relates these to the broader emergence of interdisciplinarity as a strategy to define common problems in a changing educational, social and political context. Interdisciplinarity is currently a theme that is attracting general academic debate, represented for example in the publication of the report Crossing Paths in 2016 (British Academy 2016), and this book seeks to make a contribution to this broad discussion. These aims raise significant prior issues of definition about what we mean by disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity and also about the social construction of educational studies and research. They have a great deal of potential for enhancing our understanding of this field – its past, its present and indeed its future – and for promoting its contribution to education and the wider society (see also McCulloch 2012a). Within this overall picture, the field has always been in flux, never stable, and tensions between different interests across this broad and diverse coalition have been constant.

In the 1920s, the philosopher R.G. Collingwood published a book entitled Speculum Mentis, by which he meant the ‘map of knowledge’ (Collingwood 1924/2013). Collingwood argued that unlike in the medieval world, when there had been an overarching unity of mind, the Renaissance had unleashed separation, difference and conflict in understandings of the world. Despite the growing complexity of modernity, Collingwood sought a mental map or general theory by which to understand the state of human knowledge. This has been an aim of many philosophers and theorists through the ages, witnessed for example in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century in the Cyclopedie and in the early twenty-first century in the Internet (Burke 2012). A number of theorists and philosophers have proposed a general map of knowledge for the domain of education, for example the philosopher Louis Arnaud Reid and the historian W.H.G. Armytage in the 1950s (Armytage 1954/1980; Reid 1952). Increasingly, however, educators have resorted to focusing instead on dividing and categorising different parts of a complex and expanding map. Different phases of education have become established, from early childhood and primary through secondary and tertiary through further, higher, adult and third age education, as well as education designed for different groups of the population from the masses to the elite, according to location, family, religion, vocation, gender and ethnicity. Approaches to learning have multiplied, and teaching has also become diverse and multifaceted. The content or curriculum of education has extended and become divergent. As education has grown, it has become more complex; as it has expanded, it has differentiated.

At the same time, there have been interdisciplinary visions and initiatives at regular intervals over the past eighty years, episodes that have punctuated and also helped to shape the making of the field during this time. These include for example the Standing Conference on Studies in Education (SCSE) (founded in 1951), the British Journal of Educational Studies (BJES) (1952), the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) (1964) and the British Educational Research Association (BERA) (1974). Conferences have been a key site for such activity. The SCSE, founded originally with a broadly interdisciplinary mission, became for some years an elite vessel for discussion through its annual conferences, mainly for professors of education (McCulloch 2012b). Annual conferences have become a significant focus for societies and associations such as BERA, on a mass membership basis, and such societies have again witnessed tensions between disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. Societies have also organised the publication of journals on particular topics, which themselves represent the field in a particular way. The SCSE for example was responsible for the BJES, while BERA organised the development of the British Educational Research Journal (BERJ). Centres have similarly fostered study on a larger scale and with wider groups than has often been possible through university departments. CCCS is an interesting example of a university-based centre that promoted an interdisciplinary approach to issues closely related to education. The Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), in the late 1990s and the subsequent decade, also gave rise to a large number of large research projects across departments and universities designed to address broad problems.

Taking account of these activities, this book argues that this past and ongoing set of relationships between academic disciplines and interdisciplinarity is best understood in relation to an extended university project. That is, it occupies not only the departmental and faculty structures of the university but also its many accompanying projects, developed and promoted by practising academics, such as journals, societies, centres and conferences. This is what Smeyers and Depaepe have recently referred to as ‘institutional spaces’ that mediate intellectual space but also provide a wide range of places within which to conduct academic work (Smeyers and Depaepe 2013). Schriewer and Keiner have also usefully discussed the communication patterns and intellectual traditions of the educational sciences in France and Germany that represent a recognised body of knowledge (Schriewer and Keiner 1992).

It is important to understand the changing and contested nature of a discipline or of a field in relation to its history, that is, in the context of its long-term formation over a number of decades, often reaching back to the development of modern research universities in the nineteenth century. This is demonstrated compellingly by Lagemann in the US, who proposes that her ‘discipline history of the scholarship of education’ is intended directly to address her belief ‘that many of the most difficult educational problems that exist in the United States today are related to the ways in which the study of education has been organised and perceived within universities’ (Lagemann 2001, p. xv). In historical terms, Lagemann also insists that her notion of discipline history is not a rarified history of ideas, but is concerned with politics and society and is indeed a contribution to social history. The historian of literacy Harvey J. Graff, in his book Undisciplining Knowledge (Graff 2015), a comparative and critical history of interdisciplinary initiatives in the modern university, also makes a strong case for understanding knowledge formations from a perspective grounded in social history (see also McCulloch 2011 on the contributions of social histories of education). The present work therefore attempts to approach these issues around educational studies and research in terms of a social history, as an attempt to establish a deeper historical understanding than has previously been attained in the UK.

It is vital also to recognise the changing context within which these developments have taken place over the longer term. These include for example the growing role of the State in higher education since the Second World War and especially since the 1970s. The character of higher education has itself changed fundamentally, from a narrow social and academic elite to a diverse mass formation. Financial resources provide a further key variable, in the case of educational studies and research most clearly from a very small base in the 1940s through growth in the 1960s, to significant injections of finance associated with specific initiatives such as the TLRP in the 1990s. The four jurisdictions of the UK itself have also changed internally and in relation to one another over the past century. The processes of internationalisation and transnationalism, insidious on an everyday level and powerful both institutionally and structurally, have also increasingly impinged on local and national concerns.

In examining these issues, a number of methods have been deployed, in particular historical documentary methods including archives, text-mining of relevant journals and interviews with a cross-section of education academics. The combination of this unique set of data over several decades provides significant insights into a range of areas. Archival sources are particularly helpful over the period from the 1930s to the 1980s. The social networks of journals tell us a great deal about the nature of the field from the origins of the BJES in 1952 up to the present day. Interviews with academics highlight the issues as perceived by individual academics over the past two decades, in some cases reaching back further into the 1960s and even the 1950s. Overall, we are able to trace both institutional issues affecting national societies, journals, centres, conferences and departments, and the ways in which these also impinged on key individuals in the field.

Historical documentary methods have been used in the present study to trace the development of a number of key institutions, including archive-based documents where possible. There is no single large archive on which to base such a work in relation to educational studies and research in the UK, with the possible exception of the archive of the Institute of Education (IOE) itself, unlike many other fields and disciplines. This in itself reflects the general lack of historical memory in this area of study. However, there are several relatively small collections of primary source material that together help to shed light on the role of particular institutions and individuals. These include records from the National Archives, as well as from institutional archives of BERA (in the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University) and the IOE and from the personal papers of figures such as the historian of education Brian Simon (also based at the IOE archive). The many published texts in the field especially since the Second World War provide another useful set of evidence for the current study. McCulloch (2004a) discusses the use and analysis of such sources in a historical study of education, and this informs the present work.

This work also makes innovative use of text-mining as a way to assess the kinds of social networks represented by the academic journals in this field, most notably the BJES. As the US researcher Brian Carolan has affirmed, patterns of academic journal articles can tell us a great deal about what he describes as the structure of scholarly knowledge: ‘As a cultural object, the journal article is intimately connected to both producers and consumers of scholarly knowledge. Whether using citations or collaborations there is much to be gleaned about the interworkings of a research community through this artefact’ (Carolan 2008, p. 20). We focus especially on the oldest generic journal of the field in the UK, the BJES (founded in 1952), and also compare this with later broad-based journals such as British Educational Research Journal (BERJ) (1974) and the Oxford Review of Education (ORE) (1976), as well as the disciplinary journals Journal of Philosophy of Education (1965) and History of Education (1972).

A further source especially on the development of the field over the last thirty years is interview evidence from a broad range of senior academics who have worked in this field over that time. We selected forty academics from across the field, some of them associated with particular disciplines and others with a more generalist outlook, to discuss their views and experiences through semi-structured interviews in the academic year 2012–13 (40 anonymised semi-structured interviews in 2012–2013). Nearly all of these are anonymised and are given fictitious names here (consistent with their genders). Richard Johnson of the University of Birmingham is named as a respondent with his permission because his testimony bears in a unique way on the development of CCCS, with which he was closely involved. Interviewees were not in general asked about their memories of particular events, such as would be usual for an oral history interview, but rather for their approach to the issues around disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity and examples of these from their own careers.

In the next chapter, we critically assess the characteristics of modern disciplines and of multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity before considering the emergence of educational studies and research in the UK. Chapter 3 examines the case of the Institute of Education (IOE) in London and the extent to which it provided a model for other departments in the field. The IOE has been the largest university education department in the UK over the past century, a unique specialist institution in its own right and a leader in the field of educational studies and research both nationally and internationally. The IOE was founded originally as the London Day Training College in 1902 and assumed the title of the IOE in the 1930s when it became part of the University of London. Its size and scope have meant that it has been a key site for debates around disciplines of education and also interdisciplinarity, from the work of Fred Clarke as its director in the 1930s and 1940s, through its focus on the separate disciplines in the 1960s. Chapter 4 charts the growth of a national infrastructure for the field, first at an elite level through the SCSE in the 1950s and then on a mass basis with the emergence of BERA and SERA in the 1970s, in each case attempting but largely failing to foster an interdisciplinary approach. In Chapter 5, attention is given to the many journals in the field, including the BJES, and their influence on the construction of the field. Chapter 6 considers the various wa...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of appendices
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Interdisciplines and the modern university
• 3 The Institute of Education London: All the gates of knowledge thrown open?
• 4 Organising the field: From the Standing Conference to the British Educational Research Association
• 5 A journal for the field? The British Journal of Educational Studies
• 6 Published registers and texts of education
• 7 An interdisciplinary project? The case of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
• 8 Crisis and collaboration
• 9 Crossing paths? Educational studies and research in the twenty-first century
• 10 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index