The Discipline(s) of Educational Research

Abstract

Running through this chapter is a distinction between discipline as a general requirement on any enquiry which aspires to the status of ‘research’ for it to be conducted in a rigorous and systematic way, and a discipline as a particular evolved form of such systematic and rule governed enquiry. The chapter begins by describing the recent history of the disciplines which have informed educational enquiry. It pays particular attention to the way some of the longer established disciplines have fragmented and the way in which they have been joined by new forms of enquiry drawn from almost every part of the academy. The result is that educational enquiry is constituted by a perhaps bewildering array of diverse balkanised and hybridised disciplines that has prompted some to talk of an era of postdisciplinarity. However, the surrender of discipline in the more generic sense comes at a very high price. Without what Schwab calls its ‘syntactical structure’ any form of educational enquiry loses the basis of its claim to credibility, let alone to its particular honorific standing as research. Worse, it undermines the very possibility of a community of arguers. The final section examines the argument as to whether disciplines constitute obstacles to free and open enquiry, power structures which exclude some forms of enquiry as well as privileging others. It argues that disciplined enquiry is needed to reveal and critique power/knowledge structures and not just to protect them. The very diversity of forms which educational enquiry assumes today is some protection from a particular academic hegemony.