Educational Research: The Attraction of Psychology / Educational Research Bd.6 (PDF)

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 for