My fad is your philosophy

Posted on | November 9, 2007 | No Comments

Thanks to boskizzi for the pic.

Interesting piece in the Education Guardian this week from Estelle Morris.

Our children’s education should not be based on fads was the headline on a piece written to accompany the launch of an “innovative research centre” – the Institute for Effective Education – based in the University of York – the launch took place at the Houses of Parliament, and Morris is the chairwoman of the strategy board of the Institute.

The Institute’s aim, in Morris’s terms, is, “to transform the relationship between researchers, teachers and policy makers so that education is driven by evidence not opinion and fads.”

I find her use of the word ‘fad’ significant, since this is a word that is heard loud and often in school staffrooms up and down the land (and which reminded me of a recent discussion I read on Krysia’s blog on Teacher of the Future?).

The problem with Morris’s intent here is two-fold:
1. that the aim of the IEE is simply not attainable, since any teacher with more than a few years of experience could point to ‘faddish’ policy initiatives that were nonetheless the result of academic research; and,
2. that policy research is, by definition, backward looking, since its intent is to test the effectiveness of existing policies or theories. If we, somehow, managed to rid our schools of every policy or practice ‘fad’, every non-research-based innovation in educational practice, the research community would very quickly find itself with nothing to research.

Of course, the realistic aim will be to do just that, to test a range of current practices and determine which work and which do not. I understand that. But we simply cannot get to a position where we would be able to (or want to) tell teachers that they can only use approaches and methods that have been fully tested and which have been shown to ‘work’. Unless the core assumptions of every researcher who comes to any such conclusions in relation to any one methodology are known, then the validity and objectivity of the research will always be questionable – and thank goodness for that.

The social sciences too often make the mistake of equating their research methods to those of Science – that can simply never be the case. The human-ness of education as a social activity will always, happily, leave lots of room for innovation, for compassionate response to situations, for philosophical (and even ideological) influences on practice, for simply trying out ideas from wherever they might be culled.

I checked the IEE website – they do not seem to use the word ‘fad’ anywhere!

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