Great expectations
After decades of exhortation for teachers and schools to become research engaged has anything changed? Has the call for practitioner researchers made any headway? Is teaching actually becoming an evidenced-based profession and if so it will make any difference?
These are fundamental and challenging questions. They are perhaps especially important to pose now as there appears, at last, to be a groundswell promoting the notion of the research engaged school. It is entirely appropriate that if the time and energy of schools, and those who work in them, is to be well invested then research engagement should deliver the goods, and we need to be clear about what those dividends might be.
Learning from the past
Looking to the past is not particularly fashionable in educational thinking and development. Quite rightly there are concerns that this leads to replicating tired and expired philosophies and practice rather than forging forwards with new improved approaches. But there is potentially a false dichotomy at work here. Pausing occasionally to reflect on where we have come from need not involve uncritical and wholesale repetition. Rather it can be a helpful process of examining past perspectives and using this selectively to inform - and even challenge - current thinking and action. This came powerfully to mind when reading again a critique of the work and legacy of Lawrence Stenhouse written by Jean Rudduck (Rudduck, 1988). Both Stenhouse and Rudduck were considerable talents and did much to illuminate the forces at play in education – which still have resonance with present-day debates about research engagement in schools. Rudduck is full of admiration for Stenhouse’s lifetime commitment to his cause:
“One of the most remarkable things about Stenhouse was the continuity of his purpose. He first started writing about authority and emancipation in education when he was 16 or so - in a school assignment - and continued for the next forty years, using a series of research and development projects as opportunities to extend his inquiry.” (Rudduck, 1988, page 30)
This reflection signals the pivotal preoccupation which Rudduck identifies as lying at the heart of Stenhouse’s work on curriculum reform – and indeed also at the centre of Rudduck’s own pioneering work on pupil voice. It is all about knowledge, power and control. For Stenhouse the stakes could not be higher and he inveighed against the way knowledge is used to subjugate rather than liberate both students and teachers. Participant research and inquiry were to be the means of redressing this, establishing autonomy and redistributing control.
This call to arms was taken up many years later when the term research engaged school was first coined (Handscomb and MacBeath, 2003)1. Early champions anticipated that “the Third Millennium school is required to be self-evaluating, open to scrutiny, evidenced-based, data rich” but, echoing Stenhouse, suggested that nevertheless schools were often “information poor”: