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The Disciplines of Education in the UK: between the ghost and the shadow
Martin Lawn and John Furlong
Ghosts of Disciplines Past
‘The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and
moaning as they went….The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to
interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.’
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol 1843 [2003 p52] with thanks to Kenway et al
[2006]
In their evocatively titled book ‘Haunting the Knowledge Economy’ , Kenway et al (2006) ask:
how we can learn to live with the ghosts of our past, to think about them, even find ways to
‘converse’ with them, and in doing so, understand where we are and how the future is shaped.
Kenway and her colleagues use Dickens to conjure a powerful image, but does that image
provide an appropriate metaphor with which to begin a discussion of the contemporary position
of the disciplines of education in 2009? In the UK, have they fallen into desuetude, so much so
that they are now no more than ghosts? Has the policy context of the last 20 years, that has
increasingly come to influence our teaching and the funding of our research with its pressure on
the production of knowledge which stresses use value, have these external forces squeezed out
the power of a disciplinary contributions to the study of education? Do the remnants of the past
now only live on in the routines of method, not in the analytical strength of disciplines? Does the
absence of reference back in much that is published, the absence of conceptual communities or of
disciplinary based theorization, do these now mean that the (disciplinary) past is another country?
That ‘other country’ we are referring to here is the period of the 1960s to the 1980s which came
about as a result of the Robbins Report (1963). The Robbins report, probably the UK’s last full
expression of liberal higher education, saw university education in more than just instrumental
terms; knowledge was an end in itself. The subsequent ‘search for degree worthiness’ in teacher
education courses meant that the ‘foundation’ disciplines of philosophy, sociology, psychology
1
and history of education came to the fore, dominating both teacher education and educational
research in the UK and much of the English speaking world. This was the period, albeit relatively
short-lived, when, as Bridges (2006) reminds us, the foundation disciplines appeared to offer a
secure way forward for education. They offered ‘a differentiation between different kinds of
enquiry (R.S Peters had recently complained of the current condition of educational theory as
‘undifferentiated mush’); coherence in terms of internal consistency of any one of these forms
and the ‘systematic’ or rigor of enquiry which raised such enquiry above the level of popular or
received opinion – the discipline of the discipline’ (259).
Those days of certainty are long gone; but does that mean that sociology, psychology, philosophy
and history – and indeed the whole range of disciplinary based perspectives – economics,
geography – does that mean that these perspectives have nothing to offer research, scholarship
and university teaching in education now and in the future? What can and should those
contributions be and what is the current institutional position of those disciplines within the
academy? These are the questions that we want to begin to address in this volume. The idea of a
volume of papers focused on the disciplines of education has had a slow genesis. It began in 2005
with British Educational Research Association seminars on the social organization of educational
research with scholars from the US Social Science Research Council/National Academy of
Education on educational research [Lawn and Furlong, 2007; Humes, 2007; Rees and Power,
2007; Gardner and Gallagher, 2007].
A further stimulus was the ESRC Demographic Review of 2006 (Mills et al, 2006) which
highlighted the profound demographic difficulties facing the field of education in the UK. With
more than one third of education academics now in their late 50s, the challenge of securing the
future of education is more problematic than almost any other social science discipline.
While we, and all of our contributors, fully recognize that university departments of education,
which now include most of the once independent teacher’s colleges, are not the only place where
educational research, scholarship and teaching takes place, they are an important part of the
picture. If education departments faced a general demographic crisis with an aging population,
we feared that the position of those working explicitly within the disciplines of education was
likely to be even worse. At the very least, those individuals specifically employed in the earlier
period to teach ‘the foundation disciplines’, many of whom helped to shape educational research
2
and scholarship for over a generation, were now either retired or on the verge of it. The 2008
Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was for many of them, probably their last.
Of course, the contribution of the disciplines and of theory more generally has always been
contested. Our sense though has been that such internal debates are now being brought to a head
in education by the demographic crisis. But our questions were not merely demographic (who
was or was not employed specifically to ‘profess’ the sociology or psychology of education etc).
Rather we were concerned to understand the current strength of the disciplines of education as
forms of academic practice. If in 10 years time there were very few disciplinary specialists left
working within faculties of education within British universities, would that be a cause for
concern?
Our aim in producing this volume was therefore to bring these questions into the public view and
to explore the issue of the past, current and future relevance of the disciplines to the field.
Interestingly, what we have found is that the story is not as straight forward as we had imagined.
While there are real problems of power, of supply and of effect, most of the contributors to this
volume are optimistic about what has been achieved and what will be achieved in the future in
their own specialist areas. Driven by their close affiliation with their disciplinary work, their
sense of what is being produced and how it is being produced is positive. Our aim in this
introduction is therefore to explore the puzzling position of disciplines in education in the UK
and their ghostly or material futures.
What’s in a Discipline?
Amongst the many beliefs that modernity legitimised and underwrote was the general
conviction that social progress depended on making our social practices and institutions less
dependent on custom, habit, dogma and tradition and more firmly based on knowledge that met
universal standards of objectivity and conformed to impersonal criteria of rationality and truth.
[Carr p138]
3
There are a range of competing views of what disciplines do. The view described in the quotation
above, which sees disciplines as (uncontested) carriers of theory and standards, is still present in
discourses of education. So is its corollary, that scholars working within disciplinary boundaries
produce a bounded academic identity, which is constantly reconfirmed. That is, those who
support the same theories and standards, cluster together, using department-buildings,
publications, courses, procedures, appointments, journals, and conferences to maintain their
intellectual community (Schneuwly 2002). There is a stronger ‘European’ notion of discipline, in
which community created standards and qualifications protect the borders of the discipline, which
can be contrasted with a ‘weaker’ UK version in which ‘being interested’ is treated as the
equivalent of being qualified. In this more pragmatic UK version, policy influence upon the
academy is stronger, and the impact of ‘movement’ and ‘associational’ activity is also more
marked. Working in the discipline can mean absorption and socialization into skills, hierarchies
and the canon, or a more social and equal activity of like minded enthusiasts, working with or
against policy and funding pressure. The classical European version still expects a significant
effect from disciplinary processes, for example, its capacity to break down public problems into
its own disciplinary logics, while the pragmatic UK version has to be convinced that they still
have a significant or functional place in the business of education, even if it is reduced to
knowledge about methods. Educational studies in the UK might have lost the powerful
disciplinary claims and procedures of the classical European model while retaining only the
sociality and intensification of pragmatism under pressure.
A different view of disciplines in social science refers to them as a ‘project’. From this
perspective, a discipline does not have clear boundaries; rather, its ideas are sharply contested,
and legitimacy is something that has to be struggled for. A discipline is then a continuous
struggle to occupy a field and yet it ‘always involves the projection of a world of possibilities
within which things gain their meaning.' (Ross p208). Bourdieu’s work takes the notion of field
further: it involves a ‘critical mediation between the practice of those who partake of it and the
surrounding social and economic conditions’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 p105). Here is the
idea of a project, a community of knowledge determined less by its extensive and defended
disciplinary procedures, standards and artifacts than a determination to contest and create, in
which the production of ideas and methods reflect its engagement with the social world both
within the discipline as well as outside it.
4
This view, of an active and contested discipline, as an intellectual and practical project, is
probably more closely linked to the numbers of sub fields and groups of fragmented enthusiasts
in the UK who are able to organize seminars and create websites and eJournals without reference
to disciplinary boundaries. Post disciplinary elements and actors may network or be sustained by
a university department without reference back to any common project, nor indeed, with any
necessity for contestation as they work only within micro communities.
The rise of the disciplines
Broadly speaking two approaches to the idea of a discipline can be seen here, a consolidating and
powerful community and a knowledge project, constantly engaging and reforming through
argument. Neither seems fully to characterize the current situation of educational disciplines in
the UK at the moment. Critical mass appears to be replaced by micro communities; common
disciplinary work and accumulated insight seems either unknown or impossible; skill is replaced
by willingness or audit and intellectual engagement with requisite publication.
What these broadly different disciplinary approaches have in common however is that each of
them recognises the importance of both an ‘epistemological’ dimension (questions of theory, of
method, debates about the nature of evidence, and how it should be represented and defended)
and a political or ‘sociological’ dimension which examines their struggle to establish themselves
witin their field. Interestingly, Kuhn (1977) argues that both of these different dimensions are
essential for intellectual progress to be made. Progress, he suggests, requires a context where
there is relatively close agreement on theories and methods of enquiry, and where there is
sufficient institutional certainty so that new comers can be inducted into the discipline.
Put like that, it is clear that even in the 1980s in Britain these conditions did not fully exist. As
Bridges (2006) reminds us, during that period (and indeed ever since) the disciplines of education
have been seriously divided within themselves.
The sociology of education for example contained everything from traditional hard data survey
people through ethnographers, neo Marxists and critical theorists to post modernists and socal
5
relativists. Psychology spanned neurophysiology, behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism
through to psychoanalysis. (260)
But it remains the case that whatever their internal intellectual differences, they did exist
institutionally in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK. They were enshrined in course curricular, and
in dedicated jobs; there was a growth of specialist conferences, of journals and of specialist
masters programmes which served to induct newcomers into these disciplines, newcomers who
eventually found employment either in the UK or overseas as an intellectual diaspora.
But how had that been achieved? A rough sketch would suggest the following:
From the 1920s to the 1950s, the main discipline in education was psychology; subjects of study,
training, careers and publications were defined by the dominance of psychology in education.
From the 1960s to the 1970s, the disciplines in education grew in range and scale. History and
philosophy were the most active disciplines and thus established an ‘opposite pole based in the
humanities to the quasi-scientific approach that was already established in educational
psychology’ (McCulloch 106). Sociology of education then grew out of clusters of researchers in
the LSE, defining itself through questions of class and stratification, and working with survey
data.
‘By the mid 1970s then the disciplines were well established both in terms of their
general rationale for contributing to the study of education as a whole, and also
increasingly as clearly defined discrete disciplinary communities in their own right’
111/2 McCulloch (2002)
From the 1970s to the 1980s, a rapid massification and expansion of universities and teacher
training colleges saw a range of new subjects of study and ways of understanding or defining
them. The Open University’s influence in redefining educational studies (particularly in the
sociology and psychology of education, and in new areas, like educational administration and
management and curriculum studies) was crucial in the expansion. Both macro theoretical and
micro case study research crossed the borders of the disciplines and even fostered the growth of
determinedly non-disciplinary based study. The identity of the British Educational Research
6
Association, founded in 1974, was shaped by the growing fields of action research and ‘teachers
as researchers’ rather than disciplinary division.
McCulloch’s analysis of the more recent period of educational history is more cursory. Although
he notes the serious challenges faced by the disciplines in the 1990s and beyond he concludes on
a very positive note, arguing that ‘Over the past 50 years, the disciplines separately and together
have made a significant contribution to the study of education…having successfully established
themselves and survived in difficult conditions, the disciplines continue in the 21st century to
represent central pillars of educational studies and research’ (McCulloch, 2002: 117). We would
take a different view and suggest that the more recent period deserves more careful analysis. At
an institutional level, by the 1980s, the position of the disciplines began to be seriously
undermined; from then on, there was a ‘falling from grace’.
Charting the fall from grace
At one level, the reasons for this significant change in fortunes within British higher education
are not hard to find; they are the result of what as early as 1982, Hoyle was describing the ‘turn to
the practical’ both in teacher education and research. Perhaps too much has already been written
about this ‘turn’ and the struggles behind it (Adams and Tulasiewicz 1995; Wilkin, 1996;
Furlong et al 2000; Mahony and Hextall 2002; Whitty 2002). Suffice it to say that of particular
significance in England (and to a lesser extent elsewhere in the UK) was the establishment of the
Training and Development Agency (TDA) for Schools with its emphasis on competences and
‘standards’ in initial teacher education; the rapid expansion of employment based routes into
teaching where higher education was no longer seen as essential; the development of school
based continuing professional development (CPD) and the end to full time funded higher degree
programmes for teachers; the increasing interest in practitioner research with only weak links to
higher education; and differentiation of research capacity in universities as a result of successive
research assessment exercises (the RAE). Each one of these moves has served progressively to
either undermine or reform the contribution of disciplinary based knowledge to research and
teaching in education.
However, we would suggest that in order to understand these changes they need to be
contextualized within in wider movements within higher education. Education, as a field of study
7
is (no more than) a particularly acute example of changes that have overtaken higher education
more broadly. Those changes, as Barnett (1990) pointed out twenty years ago, are both
‘sociological’ and ‘epistemological’ in origin. At the ‘sociological’ level, the main challenge has
been as a consequence of universities increasingly coming under the influence of neo-liberal
policies. As Marginson (2007) has observed, the result has been a redefined internal economy for
universities, in which under-funding drives a ‘pseudo-market’ in fee incomes, soft budget
allocations for special purposes and contested earnings for new enrolments and research grants.
Increasingly, therefore, higher education ‘managers’ (including deans of education) have found
themselves having to compete in internal and external markets in order to maintain the position of
their departments. This has had major implications for both teaching and research.
In terms of teaching, university managers have increasingly found themselves having to compete
for external funding in a highly competitive environment. And the dominant ‘market’ in terms
of teaching for university departments of education in England has been TDA-funded forms of
teacher education with its increasingly instrumental focus. In departments where all of the
teaching is funded by the TDA, there have been major consequences for the staff that are
recruited (mostly practitioners recruited as directly from schools), for the professional
development opportunities they are offered (often professionally rather than theoretically led) as
well as the teaching that they undertake. In a market where they need to compete for funding,
universities have been keen to take on government funded programmes and with them,
government agendas. As Marginson comments: ‘The paradox of this new openness to outside
funding and competition is a process of ‘isomorphic closure’ through which universities with
diverse histories choose from an increasingly restricted menu of commercial options and
strategies’ (Marginson, 2007).
It is in this ‘sociological’ context that the disciplines of education have fared badly in the last 20
years. As the papers in this volume testify, small numbers of individuals have managed to
maintain their personal commitment to disciplinary based teaching and research – for example
with funding from the ESRC. However, at an institutional level the story is different. It is only
those institutions that have access to alternative sources funding – for example through non-
vocational undergraduate education degrees or through the international postgraduate market – it
is only they that have had any significant opportunities to maintain a degree of independence in
8
terms of the courses they offer and in the appointment of disciplinary based staff. It is only they
who have been able to decide for themselves what contribution disciplinary based knowledge
should make to their teaching and research.
But why has this externally imposed agenda been so explicitly instrumentalist? Intellectually,
why have most of the disciplines of education been so marginalized? In order to answer this
question we need to turn to the second of Barnett’s dimensions - the ‘epistemological’.
From the 1980s onwards, a much wider repertoire of methodologies and theories started to come
into education. Literary theory, cultural studies, activity theory, feminism, post-colonial theory –
all of these and many more began to make their claims for a space in the analysis of educational
questions. In a very short period of time, they began to undermine (or ‘enrich’ as some might put
it (Bridges 2006)) the theoretical hegemony of sociology, psychology, history and philosophy.
But by the 1990s there also began to be growing doubts at a more fundamental level. What
Barnett (1990) then described as the ‘end of certainty’ was something that was experienced
throughout higher education:
The idea of objective knowledge is central to Higher Education. But from various
theoretical quarters – philosophy of science, sociology of knowledge, epistemology,
critical theory and post-structuralism – the idea of objective knowledge and truth has
come under a massive assault. What if anything is to replace objective knowledge is
unclear. Pragmatism, relativism, ‘meta-criticism’ and even ‘anything goes’ are all
proposed. The very diversity of the alternative options is testimony to the collapse of
some of our basic epistemological tenets
(Barnett 1990: 11)
Epistemological self doubt was particularly acute in the field of professional education – the
economic base of many university departments of education. There was an increasing
recognition that there was much more to professional knowledge than had been traditionally
captured in disciplinary based theory. In the 1980s and 1990s, writers such as Schön (1983;
1987) and Eraut (1994) began to argue that, because groups like teachers inhabited ‘the swampy
lowlands’ of professional life, much of their knowledge was implicit and therefore could not by
definition be represented by abstract, disciplinary based knowledge. As Eraut said at the time,
9
there was ‘increasing acceptance that important aspects of professional competence and
experience can not be represented in propositional form and embedded in a publicly accessible
knowledge base (Eraut 1994; 15).
If theoretical, disciplinary based knowledge was uncertain and if key aspects of professional
knowledge were by definition implicit, then the traditional contribution of the disciplines to
understanding in the field of education became increasingly open to question. The widespread
development of school based research, of school based CPD and of employment based initial
teacher education - all of which have very little to do with higher education in general and
disciplinary based knowledge in particular – all of these are testament to this epistemological
crisis of confidence.
At the same time as this growing marginalization of the disciplines from professional education,
there have been significant changes in management of educational research that have served
further to challenge their position. This has been particularly marked since the coming to power
in 1997 of New Labour with their enthusiasm for ‘research informed policy and practice’. In a
seminal speech to the ESRC in 2000, David Blunkett, Tony Blair’s first Secretary of State for
Education, argued for a ‘revolution’ in the relations between government and the research
community (Blunkett 2000); a revolution that would allow government to harness research to its
struggle to re-position Britain’s education system in a globally competitive marked. This has
resulted in a ‘new social contract’ for research (Demeritt, 2000): significantly increased funding
in return for increased accountability. That accountability has meant greater government
specification of research topics and methodologies than in the past, with the prioritizing of certain
sorts of research that can provide evidence directly to ministers: large scale evaluation studies,
school effectiveness studies; and a renewed interest in the economics of education with a narrow
focus on ‘rates of return’. This is not to criticize these approaches but to note that they are now
promoted at the expense of more intellectually driven approaches. Within the neo-liberal
university, we would suggest, there has been little option but follow this lead.
10
Evidence that there is indeed ‘new social contract’ for educational research is apparent from the
2008 RAE. Research funding directly in the field of Education1 almost doubled compared with
the previous RAE period; 60% of that research funding came from Government. As the RAE
Panel comment in their subject overview (RAE 2008), ‘the espousal of evidence informed policy
and practice may have been a factor in this increased share from government’. They also note
that it was perhaps inevitable that increased funding has resulted in a greater emphasis than in the
past on applied work.
While some of this highly applied work was rigorous, drawing on multidisciplinary teams, other
work, they suggest, suffered in quality through being too closely tied to shifting government and
government agency priorities, tight timescales, a focus on description rather than analysis and
limited theorization.
While there was evidence over the last RAE period of ‘original high quality theoretical, scholarly
and critical works in philosophy, sociology and history of education’ that often offered
‘challenging new agendas’, research of this character, the RAE panel suggest, was very much in a
minority. Overall, the evidence informed movement they suggest has ‘loosened the links with
social sciences.’
And where are we now?
As we noted above, one of the starting points for this volume was the ESRC Demographic
Review of the Social Sciences (Mills et al 2006). On Education, the authors state:
Education is the second largest discipline under consideration, and perhaps one of the
most complex. Structural, historical and institutional factors affect all disciplines in
different ways but in education their impact has been quite profound…..Despite its size,
the field also tends to lack the research autonomy to enable it to engage policy debates
confidently and critically. (Mills et al 2006)
The picture then is of a large number of professionals working together but, when compared
with other social science disciplines, lacking in intellectual autonomy. This complex picture it
1 Here we use gures for those researchers returned in the 2008 RAE within the eld of Educa!on, acknowledging that
academics returned in other disciplinary elds may have received funding to conduct educa!onal research.
11
would seem, is largely corroborated by the 2008 RAE panel. While high quality disciplinary
based work continues to be produced, it is very much in the minority and its contribution to the
field as a whole seems increasingly problematic, increasingly fragile.
In short it would seem to us that the earlier post war foundational model of the patronage of key
professors of education and the establishment of key journals has been replaced by a
proliferation of professors of education, a disconnection between many of them and older
disciplines, with a concentration on useful methods, multiple sources of publication and
governmental funding. Neither position seems healthy for a disciplinary project in the 21st
Century.
The danger is that the remnants of the past live on only in the routines of method, not in the
analytical strength of disciplines. This is well known to post structuralists of course, and treated
as a fruitful and creative opportunity to insert new theorizations of reflexive modernity. But the
effect in Education is that many now live with an uncertain relation to the disciplinary based
work. The crucial role of a discipline in education in breaking down problems into its own
logics and mediating between public information and problems, and public action is in danger
of disappearing. It has been short circuited.
As the ESRC review clearly demonstrated, the material conditions of the production of
advanced educational studies largely depends on the arrival in mid-career of neophytes who
have to skill themselves quickly, via EdD or PhD programmes, to adapt to the combination of
practical and reflective practices of an (in the main) teacher education based world of work. To
return to our opening metaphor, in the current world, ghosts don’t have much time to linger as
the speed of reformation, sub disciplinary groupings, interest-based developments, and
utilitarian, sponsor-based work re-shapes the field constantly. Journals arrive without a past,
reflecting (often creatively) new areas of work and old journals linger on, supplied by the
necessity of research audit publication. The internationalization of fields of study and the
growth of cross border study creates hybrids of different disciplinary histories and their
production, or micro-studies which avoid the problems of the past while looking to the future
and action. Without conversing with the past, and recognizing how it was populated, can we
recognize our disciplinary responsibilities before we can decide to reject or develop them?
12
This then is how we would suggest the reader engages with the specific contributions to this
volume. It is an opportunity for the non specialist reader to engage in a series of disciplinary
based conversations about what each discipline’s major contributions in the past have been and
what they should be in the future. We also asked each contributor to describe and assess their
discipline’s ‘sociological’ position – its mechanisms and sites of production, its journals, places,
projects and development - and its ‘epistemological’ strengths - substantive, methodological
and theoretical developments which have contemporary relevance and value.
The disciplines we have chosen to include illustrate a range of different positions in relation to
the ‘disciplinary project’. We have included contributions on the four foundation disciplines of
the earlier period – sociology, psychology, philosophy and history – in that they have the
greatest historical claim. However, as we will see, they vary in their epistemological coherence
and some are more sociologically challenged than in the past. To these we have added
economics. Though highly influential in recent years, the economics of education never was
part of the main ‘canon’ – at least in a sociological sense; it has never had a secure institutional
base within mainstream departments or education – nor in economics for that matter. We have
also included a contribution on comparative and international education. Some might claim that
this is not discipline at all – in an epistemological sense; yet it has established itself as a very
important ‘perspective’ and perhaps in sociological terms has many of the hall marks of a sub-
disciplinary field. Finally we have included geography – what might perhaps be considered an
emergent sub-discipline within education though at present it has neither institutional status nor
epistemological certainty. Our hope is that through these contemporary conversations the reader
will be in a better position to assess the current and future potential contribution of disciplinary
based perspectives to research, teaching and scholarship in education, and place the ghosts at
rest.
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