Reflexive Pedagogy: Researching Teacher Education

Education and being educated are intrinsic to what people associate with being able to live a full and fulfilling life yet, ‘researching education’ or more specifically ‘researching teacher education’ today is predominantly and myopically focused on the ‘practical’ and ‘useful’, and is far removed from understanding, questioning or contributing to debates about how we can understand education ‘now’, of what happens in education from a ‘reflexivity perspective’, of what education is or ‘could be’. Research that is neither philosophically sophisticated nor engaging divests the field of any meaningful and sustained disciplinary work.

 

Surrounded and smothered by the technical and technocratic, the time spent talking and worrying about research income, quality, accountability, ‘outputs’ and ‘impacts’, never seems to be enough. Not surprisingly, the ‘endless worrying’ deflects most researchers from making regular investments and locks up their best energies in just trading on the interest. Most researchers end up digging in the same quarry of ideas, year on year to meet the requirements for the mandatory ‘research performance exercises’.

 

A performance driven quest founded fallaciously on the idea of ‘individual merit’ misses the point about developing research together, being part of ‘a community of scholars’ and thrashing out a ‘generative research programme’. Have researchers in education and teacher education, reached a stage where they can’t see much point in much of what they do anymore, and more perniciously have they gotten so very good at pretending in an elaborate game playing charade?