EDITORIAL: EDUCATIONAL STUDIES TODAY AND FOR THE FUTURE: THREATS, HOPES AND COLLABORATIONS

At a time of continued consternation about the nature and organisation of educational studies within universities in the United Kingdom, it is apposite to give further exploration to the precise nature of educational studies and, crucially, to how educational studies is – and is best – conceived and approached as a body of knowledge to be understood, interrogated and that is of educational and societal benefit. To a large degree, and as the contributions of this special issue examine, to engage in enquiry about educational studies involves essential existential questions about its very being. Such existential questions are not new, and have received ongoing attention in academic discourse in educational circles since at least the 1960s (see, for example, Hirst, 1983; Peters, 1963/1980), if not before (McCulloch and Cowan, 2017; Richardson, 2002). We should also point out that discussions about the nature of educational studies itself, including mappings of the field, have received a good deal of attention since the Journal’s inception – including through similar special issues at notable points in the Journal’s history.

It is also instructive to consider how questions about the nature of educational studies have often been approached from a somewhat defensive stance, motivated that is by a need to justify educational studies as an area of study and to clarify whether, and if so in what ways, educational studies stands as an entity beyond those disciplinary perspectives that have traditionally (at least in the United Kingdom) been key to the organisation of educational studies programmes within universities – most typically, history, sociology, psychology, philosophy and economics. Inherently linked with this more defensive stance is the associated uneasiness with, and critique of, dominant political and economic agendas that marketise education and educational provision and, as a result, instrumentalise educational goals and processes.

This special issue of the British Journal of Educational Studies, which is based on the 2022 colloquium of the Society for Educational Studies held at Oriel College, Oxford, examines educational studies today and for the future. Held in the year in which the BJES marked its 70^th Anniversary, the colloquium itself engendered conversations and reflections about what might be viewed as the current paradoxical state of educational studies in the United Kingdom. On the one hand, educational studies in the UK remains a vibrant and diverse field, bolstered as it has been by intensified internationalisation, interdisciplinarity, and interest in comparative studies in education. On the other hand, educational studies continues to face a number of not insignificant threats. These threats include a constraining higher education research and policy environment, persistent concerns about the relative academic status of university departments and schools of education, and the prioritisation of technical knowledge over the academic insight and wisdom offered by the core disciplines of educational studies.

The six articles which comprise this special issue are all presented in the spirit that has underpinned the BJES since it was founded. In other words, the articles offer – each in their own way – a critical examination not only of the state of educational studies in the UK today, but also about educational studies’ future and the possibilities for educational studies in the future in light of particular prevalent concerns. As the various articles and their arguments presented in the special issue make clear (and again as has been an ongoing matter of reflection within educational studies more widely), while matters concerning the nature of educational knowledge, the educational disciplines and, more recently, inter/cross-disciplinarity have perhaps been at the forefront, it is also important to note developments within educational studies that relate to different sites for, and stages of, education. Writing in the 2002 special issue of the BJES on the state and historical development of educational studies at the time, both Field (2002) and Richardson (2002, p. 32) made mention of what the latter termed the ‘skewing of educational studies in the 1960s and early 1970s toward an overwhelming pre-occupation with schools’. In offering this remark, Richardson wrote of the re-balancing towards greater attention to non-school educational settings and populations that had occurred between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s – a re-balancing that has continued apace in the two decades since, particularly so far as higher education studies is concerned.

In the first paper in this special issue, Gert Biesta examines the integrity of educational studies and, more specially, whether educational studies are well positioned to resist potent agendas that prioritise instrumentalisation and those forms of educational research concerned with a ‘what works’ agenda. Biesta argues that educational studies in the English-speaking world are predominantly configured as an ‘applied field’, before contending that, and as a result, educational studies is ill-prepared for specifying precisely educational questions or, for that manner, to develop an educational perspective on education. In the article, Biesta exemplifies the issues involved, before outlining two approaches that might serve to cultivate a stronger and more meaningful identity for educational studies.

In Confronting the ‘coming crisis’ in education research, Sally Power explores particular (though not necessarily unique) challenges facing empirical research and researchers in education. Here, Power draws on ideas and experiences within empirical sociology to consider the difficulties for education research to build a cumulative evidence base. In the face of such difficulties, Power suggests that there might be some benefits to be gained from the adoption of ‘a descriptive turn’ which would emphasise educational research’s capacity and potential for bringing together different forms of data in ways which move beyond well-trodden (and often unhelpful in educational contexts) distinctions in order to pursue not causality, but descriptions regarding the relations between different forms of data.

The third article in the special issue, authored by Rachel Brooks, focuses specifically on higher education studies today. Through an analysis of different sources of data – including funding patterns and returns to the Research Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom – Brooks argues that higher education studies has become increasingly international in its orientation, with notable collaborative work between higher education scholars. On this basis, the suggestion is made that there are various ‘threats’ bound up with this greater internationalisation – not least, the limited definition of the ‘international’ that is often implicit in scholarship in the field.

In the fourth article, Paul Croll presents an analysis of articles published in four leading UK educational journals in 2021 and how these compare (in terms of focus, approach and so on) with those articles published in the same four journals in 2001. Croll uses this analysis to point to developments in the field, in particular (and similarly to Brook’s analysis of higher education studies) the increase in multiple authorship and the increased international dimension to current UK-based journals. Croll also notes that two particular areas of content were particularly prevalent in the 2021 articles, namely the teaching profession and social aspects of education which comprised over half of the articles published.

Jim Hordern, in the fifth article, considers the relationship between educational studies and educational practice within the current policy context in England. In this paper, which draws on the sociology of educational knowledge and practice, Hordern contends that various possibilities are available for conceptualising educational studies, including through how educational practice is portrayed. More specifically, the article makes use of Bernstein’s work on knowledge structures and academic and professional discourses, alongside philosophical work that distinguishes between different conceptualisations of practice prevalent in the humanities and social sciences, to reflect critically on three arrangements of educational studies (the foundation disciplines, the new science, and the deliberative traditions). Hordern delineates how each of these three arrangements possess their own internal dynamic, socio-epistemic assumptions, relationship to policy, and implications for the future production of knowledge, before highlighting some recent developments in England that illuminate the current position of educational studies in relation to educational policy and practice.

In the sixth, and final, article Jane Gatley focuses on the concept of knowledge. As Gatley suggests, educational concepts are fundamental to understandings of, and for understanding, educational studies. Gatley advances the case for engaging not only in conceptual analysis, but more precisely in conceptual engineering, in educational studies for the reason that conceptual engineering pays particular attention to the purposes of concepts. In the article, Gatley tracks different formulations of the concept of knowledge in education in order to support her claim regarding the importance of paying due attention to purposes and about the importance of conceptual engineering for good conceptual analysis in educational studies.