Learning across disciplines: a step too far for educational research?
There is a growing body of literature that focuses on theoretical approaches for adopting educational technologies as well as providing “recipes” for how to integrate technology in the educational process. The main focus of the existing literature is on presenting teacher’s experiences with various tools, usually a “trial and error” process, thus providing very specific and context-dependent learning design examples that fall short of explaining how these developments fit into to a broader pedagogical framework. Moreover, most of the research is done within the borders of specific disciplines, with the results having a limited applicability in a broader educational context.
One can argue whether more focus on evaluating the various learning designs against a theoretical background, in other words creating a clearer link between theory and practice, would yield research results that have a greater impact on one category of stakeholders- the teachers, and their practice. Furthermore, would a cross-disciplinary approach to educational research help shift the focus from discipline specific issues (tightly linked to content) towards essential pedagogical considerations that transcend (and bind at the same time) the disciplinary silos? Or would that level of abstraction be one step too far and actually lead to an even greater disconnect between researchers and teachers?
Institute of Education Library, London
Moreover, the role of the teacher as researcher is worth being assessed, starting from the premise that teachers and educational researchers should be co-creators of the body of knowledge in the pedagogical area. In every discipline there are teachers reflecting on their practice (the so called “scholarship of teaching”), but in order for their contribution to be of a higher value, they need to put their practice in a broader (ideally also theoretical) context. Furthermore, teachers’ reflections are generally very contextualized and therefore linked to a specific discipline or even sub-discipline. Should teachers, supported by educational researchers, go a step further and, starting from their unique context, develop learning designs that can be shared, reviewed and recycled by teachers dealing with other topics or even from other disciplines? Is this too much to ask from teachers? Would this “return to the pedagogical basics” help or hinder teachers in developing their courses? Can valuable lessons be learned by building bridges across disciplines and trying to involve teachers as much as possible in a sort of “crowd sourcing of learning design” exercise?
These questions have been on my mind since I started conducting research on educational technology and got familiar with the literature and debates on the topic. I think they are very relevant questions but unfortunately we are often too deeply involved in our own research to engage with them. That is how the idea of setting up a forum in order to exchange ideas on this topic among educational researchers came about. And, luckily, I was given the opportunity to design and facilitate a workshop addressing these very issues at the upcoming EDEN Research Workshop in Oxford on 27–28 October.
The main objectives of this workshop are to:
Offer the participants the chance to meta-engage with their own research and brainstorm about different perspectives for looking into their topics;
Open a forum of debate and reflection on a topic that educational researchers are confronted with;
Bring together participants from various disciplines and with various backgrounds and question existing research and knowledge building styles;
Provide a source of new ideas a angles for future research;
Create an opportunity to network in view of possible future collaboration.
What I intend to do is use this opportunity to engage researchers attending the workshop in Oxford but also a broader audience, via social media. The ideas shared using these media in the next weeks will feed into the workshop discussions.
The three main topics to be discussed are:
Discipline-linked vs cross-disciplinary educational research;
Closer link between theory and practice: placing and evaluating specific learning designs in a broader theoretical framework;
The role of the teacher as researcher: reflecting on own practice, co-creating, sharing, recycling learning designs; collaboration with educational researchers.
I am looking forward to a lively online and face-to-face debate and especially to finding synergies between the two and help to shape a community of researchers and teachers interested in the topics debated that can continue to be in touch and maybe work together after the workshop. Your comments and ideas on any of the topics above are very much welcome both here and on Twitter using the hash tags #edenrw8 (the conference hash tag) and #erw14 (the specific hash tag for this workshop, “educational research workshop”).