Education, Theory and Pedagogies of Change in a Global Landscape

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Role of Theory in Doctoral Research

Victoria Perselli

• Editore: Palgrave Macmillan
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137549235
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Social Theory

Where does theory come from in educational research and how is it operationalized in diverse, interdisciplinary contexts and professional settings? This volume examines the places and spaces of theory in doctoral work across a wide range of interdisciplinary themes and fields of inquiry on a global scale.

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Theory, Theorising and Pedagogies of Change

Victoria Perselli

Introduction and contextualisation

Diverse contemporary perspectives regarding what education is and what it is for, combined with a more generalised insistence that change – rather than continuity – is a relentless and irreversible feature of professional life-experience ‘in postmodernity’, can be evidenced via the proliferation of particular linguistic tropes and research foci currently reverberating around the globe (Schön, 1973; Stronach & MacLure, 1997; Milella, 2007; Toscano, 2007). Curious collocations (Perselli, 2014b, 2015) such as ‘widening participation’ ‘inclusive education’, ‘lifelong learning’, ‘quality assurance’, ‘audit society’ and ‘the new public management’ have all been constructed and co-opted – as is the way with language – into our educational systems and structures via aspirant agendas of ‘access’, ‘accountability’, ‘excellence’, ‘improvement’, ‘impact’ and so forth. A common assumption behind these collocations is that education workers form part of a more general populous characterised as ‘the learning society’, with Higher Education (HE) nominated as the conduit through which substantial portions of this populous will eventually pass (Crosland, 1966; Hood, 1991; Power, 1994, 1999; UNESCO, 1994, 2009; Reisman, 1997; EHEA, 1999; OECD, 2000; ESIB, 2005; European Commission, 2007, 2014; Chang, 2008).

A visible response to the multiple expectations of education – and the perpetual motion of postmodernity more generally – has been the emergence of research paradigms and methods that seek to articulate the variously imbricated positionalities and subjectivities of HE workers: ‘Institutional research’, ‘higher education research’, ‘academic development’, ‘the scholarship of teaching and learning’ all constitute efforts to describe, interpret and influence what HE is, what it is for, what HE workers do and the matrix of relationships between HE and wider society. Well-worn metaphors and models of HE research – Mode 2 (Gibbons et al., 1994), Triple Helix (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000), Third Space (Whitchurch, 2013) – further reveal and reinforce a notion of traditional disciplinary and professional boundaries and divisions dissolving if not disintegrating, with HE workers now finding ourselves juxtaposed variously as administrators, teachers, researchers, policy makers and – most recently – business folk; purveyors of the generation, transferal or mobilisation of knowledge ‘in new times’ (Quicke, 1998; Whitty, 2000).

The chapters in this volume are similarly representative of a distinct lexis of learning and teaching – here tentatively proposed as ‘pedagogies of change’ (Perselli, 2014a; see also Armstrong & Juhl, 2007; Muro, 2012; Blake, Sterling & Goodson, 2013) – that likewise inform and give shape to the various problematics posed in and on HE, but as an embodied, experiential and professional reality, rather than in broad brush-stroke terms. They seek to address in direct and practical ways some of the challenges of how to be, how to do and make, but also how to think – whether as individual practitioners or as a community of scholars – in the politically quixotic and socio-economically contradictory environment that constitutes contemporary manifestations of the university. In so doing they offer us detailed descriptions of what can be done to resist forms of ‘theory-austerity’ (Perselli, 2014a) that have arguably been imposed on educational settings, whereby ‘what works’, or alternatively ‘what saves/makes money’, is king.

Design and methodology: The ‘architecting’ of the project

The project from which this volume emerged began with desk-based considerations of the various scenarios in which educational research takes place, its principal themes, methodologies, methods and tools. More specifically, a question arose regarding how, where and when in their professional practices do HE folk find time and space for thinking; and when they do, what kinds of theory or theorising take shape in their minds (Perselli, 2011)? How are such ideas/theories being operationalised in the various contexts and settings that they thereby inhabit? These questions emerged in tandem with a curiosity about the ways that being, thinking, doing and making are understood contemporarily among emerging and research-young scholars; the most immediate context for this being the doctoral project and the process through which doctoral scholars construct, develop and defend their work (Perselli, 2011, 2014b, 2015).

In this way, a realisable research project was born, whereby practitioners of education from pre- to postdoctoral status and at various stages in their academic careers were invited to consider the question: Where does theory come from … ? in relation to their specific professional or disciplinary areas (see also Winter, 1998) and to present their individual stories – in narrative form – by way of response; the overarching objective being the generation of a compendium that represents a cross-section of research topics, methodologies, theories and theorists; albeit without any pretence of – or desire for – ‘comprehensivity’ as the ultimate prize.

Doctoral research is particularly amenable to this treatment in that, once accomplished, it emerges as a unique, multidimensional artefact, protean with possibilities for further exploration. By this I mean that whereas reportage in the form of the journal article or book chapter will tend to focus on discrete elements of the research project (its claim to originality, its ‘contribution to the knowledge base’, for example), a thesis typically conforms to a range of more general requirements (rationale, context and setting, methodology, methods and tools, ethical considerations, empirical data, analysis, findings, evaluation), all of which must be given their due weight and rendered more or less explicit on the page. In simple terms, a research activity (the project) is translated into a distinct and familiar representational form (the thesis), but one which is interpretable from a multiplicity of sightlines and perspectives. This is perhaps what makes formal defence of the thesis (typically, the viva voce) so troublesome, since each observer will be seeing – or expecting to see – different things. But it also suggests that there is an open-endedness regarding doctoral education that is frequently under-explored as a phenomenon in its own right. Furthermore, from the ontological, experiential vantage point specifically, whilst successful candidates may be urged to ‘get publications’ from their theses, how to go about this can be almost as daunting as it was to finish the thing itself, and having worked so hard and for so long many folk are happy to put the experience to one side and move on in their lives. Paradoxically then, whilst practitioner researchers such as those contributing to this volume are on the one hand expected to demonstrate the significance of their work towards bringing about change in the world of lived experience – its impact, currently – other insights that might be gained through revisiting and re-examining the project-as-object are lost. This is evident not least in the apparent demise of the monograph in many research constituencies of Europe, where publication in numerically rated elite journals champions the cause of competitivity. This phenomenon arguably constitutes a form of postdoctoral lacuna (Perselli, 2014a) which this compendium may help to redress.

Ethics and aesthetics

Open-endedness in the ways that doctoral research may be (re)viewed or revisited implies open-endedness in the approach taken here. Added to which, what constitutes theory in educational research (as conceptual knowledge … ? curricular knowledge … ? as theorising in/from practice … ?) and where its boundaries with ontology, epistemology, methodology and so forth may lie, is already in my eyes a complex phenomenon that can best be considered ‘in its appearing’ (Ashworth, Freewood & Macdonald, 2003; Clegg & Flint, 2006); in this case via the first-person testimonials of individual scholars. Suffice to say that from the outset participants were invited to interpret the task according to their own understandings of theory and its place in their work; my hope being that each of these authors, whether applying the task to the doctorate itself or to their ensuing, postdoctoral activities, would simultaneously relish the opportunity to consider this afresh.

In turn these solitary, desk-based reflections and preparations raised issues of editorship: What would the storytellers’ responses be like? Would there be sufficient coherence between them to constitute an overarching story or metanarrative – and was this desirable or necessary? Might there be cranky, ‘off-the-wall’ submissions that were either too opaque or too dense to be useful to a potential readership that includes neophyte researchers – and how should this be navigated? Alternatively, would the project present sufficient challenge for accomplished researchers? Having once committed to producing something, why might participants chose to stay engaged with the process, with so many competing agendas elsewhere? Was it necessary to be driven by clock-time, or by the demands of a particular publishing house? Was the project a good place to be? How might the role of the editor in this instance be similar – yet different – to the supervisory relationship? How not to ‘drown the poem of the other with the sound of [one’s] own voice’ (Lather, 1997: xvi, italics mine) – and what does this mean in the context of exercising aesthetic judgement? Having nominated the doctoral project as a ‘prismatic’ educational artefact that can be illuminated from a variety of angles and examined in numerous ways, what curatorial skills are being called forth here?

Anxieties of this kind were useful towards mapping out some simple plans and protocols. They provided the underwriting for the design of the project: namely, to be ‘in educative relations’ (Lomax, 1998, italics mine) with the storytellers and their work, and to produce something substantive – and preferably cohesive, not fragmented – from these engagements. This meant first and foremost being in dialogue about the writing and its potential as an intercommunicative text and teaching tool for self and others: those aspects of educational research that aspire to ‘the greater good’. They underwrote the research also in terms of a sensibility that all educators are artists, so that what is produced by way of manifestations of our art is not dissimilar to that of composers, choreographers, poets or sculptors; just more transient and more flawed perhaps: representations of experience as opposed to ‘the thing itself’, which many artists consider their work to be.

To this end, whilst acknowledging the pain that invariably accompanies production, it was also important to remember that neither artists, educators nor even postgraduate students work entirely alone; the necessity for solitude may be counterbalanced by what we conventionally refer to as ‘critical friendship’, ‘triangulation’, ‘peer review’; but which could just as usefully be equated with the back-office (that is, less lauded) skills of the record producer or movie production team: ‘What do you mean by … ?’ ‘How do you want this … ?’ ‘Supposing we add a treble voice here … ?’ Wherever feasible, therefore, opportunities were sought from early on in the project to present chapter ideas as work in progress to outside audiences. This gave individual contributors the possibility to locate their understanding of the problematic of theory within the wider discourse: of our individual institutions, local, national or international organisations, or indeed in our daily work with students.

Protocols and pedagogy

In the initial stages no deadlines were set for submission of full texts, but each draft was responded to within the space of a few weeks. That way, the momentum of the project was sustained and generally increased as full chapters began to emerge. My sense of being in educative relations intensified via the reciprocal learning that came through engagement with each of these authors in the progressive iterations of their texts. Reviewing individual submissions, and the conversations centred on them, continuously provided clues regarding how to be useful to writers – and how to get in their way (Lather, 1997; MacLure, 2010) – individually and as a collective. Inevitably only a flavour of that relational element can be offered here.

Chapter 2: Engendering knowledge: Education, the maternal and doing research with women

Particularly informative and provocative in the early days was the chapter that heads up the collection: ‘Engendering Knowledge … ’ by Simone Galea. The main draft of this text appeared in my inbox on the day that a Master’s student coincidentally addressed me as ‘our research mother’ – to which I had had no ready response, but which set me thinking further about some of the problems and dilemmas articulated above.

For Galea, following Luce Irigaray, mothering the production of research is ‘a process of becoming by which one gives birth to oneself as speaking subject in relation to others and in relation to the birth of new knowledges’. Galea reassures me that I am not alone in finding the term ‘mother’ and the process of mothering difficult, and that there is a literary and philosophical trajectory of the West that illustrates how this is so. Yet this is further complicated if we try to reinvent a new ‘concept’ of woman/mother, since it resorts back to the very language game invented by men:

Irigaray’s philosophical practice deconstructs man-made definitions of the feminine, especially those generated by philosophical discourse. She argues instead for the social symbolisation of women in women’s own terms. This would necessitate a radically different way of thinking the feminine subject; one that is independent of the phallocentric order, requiring a re-organisation of sexual, linguistic and socio-symbolic systems (Grosz 1989: 110).

[Chapter 2, p.33]

Thus Galea detonates any easy, formulaic representations whereby ‘theory’ = concept, or ‘theorising’ = new conceptualisation; compelling us to seek alternative forms in language. From Irigaray’s deconstruction of Plato’s Cave, Galea proposes a new allegory of womanhood illustrative of the triadic pedagogic relationship between, self, other and the act of producing new knowledge, thus disrupting the often intense Western dyad of other versus self. Galea’s text is moreover protean in its capacity to challenge received wisdoms generally, the full extent of which cannot be realised within the chapter itself. This is not least because, without patronising neophyte scholars, she deals adroitly with the bigger issue of alternative knowledges to that of the idealised Western, phallocentric version, including what constitutes ‘research’. She does this in terms not only of ‘gender issues’ but also regarding the twisted forms of propositional language and logic that we fall into when attempting to describe particular forms of lived experience (being a mother or, in the case of my Masters student, being a member of a diaspora, whereby ‘home’ – Kurdistan – is frequently acknowledged in the West more for what it is not than what it is; a form of lack) in ways that we believe will render our accounting more acceptable to the academy. This is vividly ill...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1. Theory, Theorising and Pedagogies of Change
• 2. Engendering Knowledge: Education, the Maternal and Doing Research with Women
• 3. Negotiating Gender Concepts and Critical Pedagogy: A Reflective Account of Doctoral Research in Physiotherapy Education
• 4. Troubling Critical Management Learning with Theatre and Performance Practice: Inter- and Transdisciplinary Approaches to Curriculum Design
• 5. Lessons from Te Whāriki: Insights into the Relevance of Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory in the Debate about ‘Schoolification’ of Early Childhood
• 6. ‘Finding Foucault’: Contextualising Power in the Curriculum Through Reflections on Students’ Dialoguing About Foucauldian Discourses
• 7. Rethinking Advanced Culture: A China-Characterised Bricolage
• 8. Teaching in Higher Education: Deriving a Context-Specific Knowledge-Base Through Praxis
• 9. Setting a New Course or Stepping Out of Line? Challenges to Previously Disconnected Theoretical Fields in a Danish Profession-Oriented Higher Education Context
• 10. Keeping the Lights On: A Play in Two Acts
• Index