Why educational research should not just solve problems, but should cause them as well

As we move into the second year of our tenure as editors of the British Educational Research Journal, we offer some reflections on the state of educational research in the UK and beyond, particularly in relation to recent developments in research policy and research practice. We argue that in addition to enhancing the usefulness of educational research, that is, its capacity for solving problems, there is an ongoing need for research that identifies problems and, in that sense, causes problems. This kind of research challenges taken for granted assumptions about what is going on and what should be going on, and speaks back to expectations from policy and practice, not in order to deny such expectations but to engage in an ongoing debate about the legitimacy of such expectations — a debate that crucially should have a public quality and hence should take place in the public domain. If there is one recurring theme in the discussion about educational research, it is the idea that such research should contribute to the improvement in educational practice. Ernst Christian Trapp (1745–1818), first professor of education in Germany (University of Halle, 1778), made a case in one of his earliest publications for the development of effective knowledge about and for education (see Trapp, 1778). In his inaugural lecture from 1779, he added to this that education should be studied on its own terms and not from perspectives that are alien to it or that are unable to grasp the unique character of the ‘art of education’, as Trapp called it (see Trapp, 1779). Views about what education actually is, what is unique and distinctive about it, and even whether it can be characterised as an art or not, are far from settled. This is one important reason why we have argued that the nature of educational research should remain contested (Aldridge et al., 2018). Yet it is only in function of our answer to such questions that we can begin to ask which approaches are ‘alien’ and which approaches are ‘proper’ and ‘appropriate’. Although the ambition to improve education is widely shared, and has been widely shared for a couple of centuries already, the question of how research can ‘reach’ the practice of education remains a topic of ongoing concern and discussion. References