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The Pursuit of Truth(s) in Educational Research

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Abstract

In a science-based approach to educational research the pursuit of truth only emerges in the form of a quest for evidence or ‘what works’. This chapter elaborates the idea that educational research can hold a different relation to truth, c.q. a relation that takes seriously Hough’s observation that educational researchers and practitioners are beings ‘whose borders are indistinct, merging into the history of the culture that produced [us]’. It will be argued that educational research should conceive of itself as being concerned about precisely this condition if it is to be called educational. What is important in educational research is not what researchers have to say ‘about’ education ‘to’ practitioners. Instead, the educational researcher is someone who makes things educational instead of primarily, or only, researching about education. Likewise, what is important in educational practice is not what practitioners ‘learn from’ research ‘about’ education, but how this allows them to undergo transformation. This (re)introduction of the subjective, the (re)emphasizing of the researcher’s and the practitioner’s investment, does not signify an abdication of truth and knowledge, but a fuller acknowledgement of human involvement in understanding the world.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cf. Cavell 2005, p. 120.

  2. 2.

    This is, as will be clear to some readers, not something new. Something like this has already been argued for drawing, for example, on Foucault’s concept of care for the self (for example, Simons et al. 2005; Standish 2002; Masschelein 2006). I’m merely approaching the same issue from a different direction.

  3. 3.

    I am drawing on a passage from Sheridan Hough (1997, p. 13) here. Hough uses this line of argument on Nietzsche, but I find it applies equally well to Wittgenstein.

  4. 4.

    Cf. Peter Winch’s (1958) The Idea of a Social Science, for the basic contours of this ‘place of its own’.

  5. 5.

    This particular phrasing was inspired by a paper by Ilse Geerinck (2008).

  6. 6.

    Cavell addresses the theme of exposition in (for example), Conditions handsome and unhandsome (1990).

  7. 7.

    Emerson, quoted in Cavell 1996b, p. 66.

  8. 8.

    This kind of educational research has also been described, with reference to Foucault, by Simons et al. (2005). Educational research as critical research should, they argue, ‘no longer be related to a guarding, judging, legitimizing, monitoring, saving or securing position, but to an ‘experimental’ praxis and attitude which is not concerned with ‘legitimisation’ […] and with defining or defending a ‘position’, but with ‘experience’, with experience in the literal sense of ‘what is happening to us’ (p. 827). Understood in this way, educational research has to do with ‘a limit-attitude, an attitude of susceptibility to the limits of the present’ (ibid.). The critical researcher thus understood finds herself in what they call ‘an uncomfortable ex-position’ (ibid.) – uncomfortable because what is at stake in this kind of research is both the given order and one’s position in that order (cf. ibid., p. 828). In ways comparable to what I try to argue for here, the critical researcher, Simons et al. argue for, offers research of a kind that functions as an invitation – research that invites us to ‘offer insight, not at the epistemological level […], but at the ethical or existential level, i.e. the level of how we relate to ourselves, to others, and the world’ (ibid., p. 829).

  9. 9.

    Concept borrowed from Cavell 2005, p. 122.

  10. 10.

    Ibid.

  11. 11.

    I would like to thank Naomi Hodgson for her close reading of an earlier version of this chapter, and Michel Salu for introducing me to the writings of Asimov.

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Acknowledgements

This chapter is a revised and elaborated version of arguments previously published in the Journal of Philosophy of Education. See Ramaekers 2006 – copyright, author’s.

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  1. Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Stefan Ramaekers

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  1. Stefan Ramaekers
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Correspondence to Stefan Ramaekers .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

    Alan D. Reid

  2. Faculty of Education, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

    E. Paul Hart

  3. Hamilton Campus, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Michael A. Peters

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Ramaekers, S. (2014). The Pursuit of Truth(s) in Educational Research. In: Reid, A., Hart, E., Peters, M. (eds) A Companion to Research in Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6809-3_7

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