Disciplined Study of the Problems of Practice: An Alternative to Craftor Discipline-Based Educational Inquiry

Abstract

How ought a department or school of education orient itself intellectually tofoster the productive study of educational processes and institutions? This vexing question has been addressed by two fundamentally different approaches to staffing: (a) using generalists who have previously been practitioners, or (b) using specialists thoroughly grounded in one of the humanistic or social scientific disciplines. Ishall characterize thefirst alternative as the craft-based model and the second alternative as the discipline-based model. The purpose of this article is to review and critique the weaknesses of both approaches to educational inquiry and to propose a third alternative: the disciplined study of the problems of practice. Practice-based inquiry has the potential to be synthetic, context-sensitive, and normative as well as empirical. While much discussion focuses on the study of teaching, I intend this analysis to include administration also.