Educational Research: The Attraction of Psychology

1. Making sense of the attraction of psychology: On the strengths and weaknesses for education and educational research; Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe.- 2. Struggling with the historical attractiveness of psychology for educational research illustrated by the case of Nazi-Germany; Marc Depaepe.- 3. On the fatal attractiveness of psychology: Racism of intelligence in education; Jean-Claude Croizet.- 4. Psychology in teacher education: Efficacy, professionalization, management, and habit; Lynn Fendler.- 5. The fatal attraction of the language of developmental psychology in child rearing; Stefan Ramaekers and Judith Suissa.- 6. Mirror neuron, mirror neuron in the brain, who's the cleverest in your reign? From the attraction of psychology to the discovery of the social; Kathleen Coessens, Karen François and Jean Paul van Bendegem.- 7. The vocabulary of acts: Neuroscience, phenomenology, and the mirror-neuron; Paul Standish.- 8. The attraction of neuropsychological findings in contemporary educational thinking, or: Feeling, emotion and relationship as blind spots in educational theory; Volker Kraft.- 9. In defence of the humanities against the exaggerated pretensions of 'scientific' psychology; David Bridges.- 10. The theology of education to come; Richard Smith.- 11. Learning is not education; Nicholas C. Burbules.- 12. Attention, commitment and imagination in educational research. Open the universe a little more!; Stijn Mus.- About the Authors.- Author Index.- Subject index.

For some years both governments and Educational research associations such as AERA have subscribed to a view of the relationship between educational research and educational practices as needing to be linear and causal. The emphasis on RCTs and research informed decision-making and practice was going to shape educational rationally hence making it more effective. Central to this drive has been the psychology of education with its emphasis on transforming our understanding of brains and minds into sets of technologies. Increasingly it witnesses the superimposition of the neurological on the psychological. Such moves pay little attention to an inescapable and conditioning feature of education - that it is always a normative practice shaped everywhere by the kinds of things a society thinks or determines that it wants.  While psychological and other forms of quantitative research are likely to offer important insight into the practices of education they will successfully do so only to the extent that they take seriously the contextual and related normative conditions of educational practices. In this edited volume Smeyers and Depaepe and their colleagues offer a timely intervention subjecting to serious interrogation the current passion to see particular, often aetiolated, impulses to reduce educational scholarship to a series of causal regularities immune to the complexities of actual lived educational encounters and practices. They argue carefully for the reinstatement of the central actor in education- the student as a complex, subtle, context located being whose education depends on more than statistical generalisations. Lest this volume be considered, in its turn, a collection of rhetorically freighted abstractions the essays here give considerable concrete expression to the concerns about the emergence of particular kinds of psychology and its attractiveness to the 'modern' mind. From Depaepe's paper on the historical attractiveness of psychology, and its need