Evidence-based practice and its discontents in Academic Language and Learning

Abstract

Academic Language and Learning (ALL) is a relatively recent practice field known in Australian Higher Education as Academic Skills Advising or Student Support. Changing social, political and economic circumstances shape ALL work in complex and contradictory ways. Of crucial current significance are discourses calling for education to become an evidence-based practice. This paper outlines the main tenets of evidence-based practice discourses (EBPD); recapitulates Gert Biesta’s critique of EBPD’ views of education as instrumental technology and positivistic science; and explores how these critiques hold in the managerial expropriations of these discourses in the ALL context. The paper argues that, while these managerial expropriations ostensibly provide ALL with some legitimacy, they simultaneously reduce its practice to means-to-end interventions servicing the language/learning commodity; and increasingly consign its research to techno-scientific evaluation investigating managerial outcomes and acting as powerful panoptic surveillance. The paper calls for the continued critique of dominant discourses and their reproducing practices; and reconnecting with questions of educational purpose in ALL thereby enabling more radical and meaningful re-imaginings of this work.

Keywords:

• Evidence-based practice
• Academic Language and Learning
• managerial discourses
• higher education
• education
• critical theories in education
• sociology, politics, and philosophy in education

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Michael Hallpike, Karl Smith and Roger Hurcombe for invaluable feedback on previous versions of this paper.

Notes

1. In Australia, proponents of education science include researchers involved in the Science of Learning Research Centre (e.g. Hattie 2009). EBPD can also be detected in government documents such as DEST (2005) and societies such as the Australian Society for Evidence Based Teaching.

2. For similar views on educational desirability, see Denzin (2009) and Usher (1996).

3. Due to restrictions of space, the above summary account of positivism necessarily skims over complex and enduring philosophical debates.

4. Davies (2003) New-Managerialism represents what this paper has simply termed managerialism.