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Philosophy as Educational Enquiry and Critique
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Aims of this resource
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Section (iii) Traditions of enquiry
Educational research is a complex and multidisciplinary field, and the student embarking on it is faced with what can seem a bewildering array of different ideas, different vocabularies, and different literatures. Sometimes it scarcely seems like a coherent subject at all, and there is danger that an excessive importance is attached to the ‘latest research findings' – in the absence of any more robust sense of the forms of enquiry that have developed. In handbooks of educational research this complexity is sometimes addressed through the provision of taxonomies of perspectives, using such terms as ‘ontological', ‘epistemological', ‘subjective', ‘objective', in ways that themselves lack any proper anchoring. In fact, these terms cannot be secured in taxonomies of this kind. Unlike what happens in a physical science such as biology, where terms generally have stable and uncontested meanings, in the areas of enquiry we are considering the sense of these terms depends heavily on the traditions of enquiry in which they are located. In other words, one needs to understand the term with reference to the way it has been used within a particular literature. Unlike what we find in biology, in educational research a whole perspective is sometimes at stake.
A sample of different philosophical traditions of enquiry is offered below but with the strong caveat that this set is not to be read as a taxonomy. There are numerous overlaps between these approaches and the ways that they are identified is to some extent arbitrary. Nevertheless, these serve as rough indications of lines of philosophical thought that have been important for education and that each have generated their own literatures. In fact, the items enumerated below do not constitute any kind of uniform list. They are assembled rather on a pragmatic basis as a means to identify particular lines of thought.
Political liberalism Pragmatism
[under construction]
Analytical approaches to epistemology
Analytical approaches to ethics
Poststructuralism
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