Yaşadıkça Eğitim (Dec 2015)
Education and Educational Research: Blind Men, Elephant, Crisis of Identity
Abstract
Educational research is found to be problematic by some prominent education scholars. Major weaknesses of the field are supposed to be stemming from seven primary sources: The scientific, academic and disciplinary standing of education as a field of study; being somewhat an extension of other more established disciplines leading to mixed identities in the field; easy infiltration to the field by other disciplines and researchers; ambiguous standing of school as an institution in the society that creates a rather elusive context for solid theory and research; the field’s oversensitivity to larger external forces such as economic and political transformations; the concept of science in the eyes of policy-makers and funders that dictate certain forms of knowledge production, that is usually positivist; profile of practitioners and prestige of profession in education that is gender, pay and socio-economic structure of the profession. At the end, major proposals are presented to get the educational research out of this problematic status.
