Disciplining thought: Between ideology and anything goes. (September 2019) - Standish, Paul
Educational research is subject to orthodoxies of old and novel kinds. The 'foundations' approach risks becoming stuck in footnotes to received ideas, while new-fangled disciplines seek to legitimate themselves in jargon and deference to new 'authorities'. The critical deficit in both tendencies obstructs responsible enquiry. I begin by sketching the weaknesses and the potential of the foundations approach and go on to identify a range of threats to this potential. The first and major concern is the rise of empiricism, understood as the view that it is only through empirical enquiry that research into education can take place. A second concern is the dominance of English in educational research, in relation not only to the inevitable unfairness this brings in opportunities for publication but also to the substance of thought and enquiry. Exploration of the key terms in David Bridges' '"Rigour", "discipline" and the "systematic" in educational research': and why they matter' (this issue) frames the discussion, raising questions of inter- and multi-disciplinarity. There is an internal relation between discipline, rigour and coherence, and these, though not systematicity, are requirements of argument. The notion of disciplined thought is prised apart from distorted conceptions of rigour and over-reliance on procedure.