Postscript Humanistic Study, Collaboration, and Interdisciplinarity: A Dialogue on the Leuven Research Community

Background

Nick: The Research Community on the Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education has been organised by Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe of the Catholic University of Leuven, since 1999, beginning with generous funding from the Research Foundation Flanders, Belgium (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen; FWO). Since then, a group of international scholars in philosophy and history of education has convened each fall for an annual conference and working paper session – usually in Leuven, occasionally in other European cities. The conference has an annual theme, and participants prepare papers addressing that issue from their respective disciplinary perspectives. The papers are available in advance, so the sessions are organised around summaries of the papers, a brief response, and then an intensive discussion about each project. The papers are revised again after the conference and eventually published in an edited book series from Springer. The sessions are characterised by stimulating discussions, good cheer, and friendships that have grown over 20 years. Here, we reflect on the RC as an academic project, on what it can tell us about issues of collaboration and interdisciplinarity, and along the way offer a few comments about Paul Smeyers’ indispensable role in conceiving and guiding the project.

Lynda: Thank you, Nick, for providing the openings of our shared chapter. I want to add a couple of ideas about the formation of the RC across its own history. There has been a core group initiated, as I understand it, by the major journal editors in philosophy of education (among others, Nicholas Burbules, for Educational Theory, Richard Smith, and later Paul Smeyers for Ethics and Education, and Paul Standish for the Journal of Philosophy of Education). From the original members, students have been added, as have like-minded colleagues. A few dropped out along the way but not many — it has been a very convivial group. One more point: while national or regional members do know about each other’s academic and professional backgrounds, the principal way that all of us as international colleagues have come to know each other is through our yearly scholarly contributions. This is, first and foremost, a research group — out of which has emerged much affection and, for some members, the development of other projects.

It seems fitting that our method is a dialogue, arguably the basis of collaboration. Readers should know that Nick and I have known each other since graduate school days in which our tenures overlapped and we shared some professors. Our work as philosophers of education has evolved somewhat differently but, importantly for the international audience of this volume, we share an understanding of a national history of our discipline and of the humanities in educational research. In what follows, we also share agreement on the five topics of our dialogue, which set our reflection on the Research Community within a broader academic and thematic context. We hope that, across the five topics, a coherent thread emerges.