The idea that professional practices such as education should be based upon or at least be informed by evidence continues to capture the imagination of many politicians, policy makers, practitioners and researchers. There is growing evidence of the influence of this line of thought. At the same time there is a growing body of work that has raised fundamental questions about the feasibility of the idea of evidence-based or evidence-informed practice. In this paper I make a further contribution to this discussion through an analysis of a number of assumptions that inform the discussion. I focus on the epistemological, ontological and praxeological dimensions of the discussion and in each domain identify a deficit. In the epistemological domain there is a knowledge deficit, in the ontological domain an effectiveness or efficacy deficit and in the practice domain an application deficit. Taken together these deficits not only raise some important questions about the very idea of evidence-based practice but also highlight the role of normativity, power and values. Against this background I outline the case for the idea of value-based education as an alternative for evidence-based education. As I am generally concerned about the expectations policy makers hold about what evidence can and should achieve in professional practices such as education, my contribution is primarily meant to provide educators and other professionals with arguments that can help them to resist unwarranted expectations about the role of evidence in their practices and even more so of unwarranted interventions in their practices.
Based on findings from a large-scale longitudinal study into the learning biographies of adults, this paper focuses on the different representations of time in the interview data. The paper discusses three such representations: chronological time, narrative time, and generational time. The authors show how different notions of time operate within the construction of life stories. They also analyse the ways in which different representations of time impact upon and serve as resources for reflection on and learning from life, thus contributing to understanding the complex relationships between biography, life and time.
The essays in this book all deal with a question which, in our view, has so far received insufficient attention in work that aims to explore the significance of complexity theory for education. 1 This is the question of the politics of complexity. Whereas a lot has been written about curriculum, pedagogy and learning, relatively little has been said directly about the ways in which complexity theory might help us to engage with questions concerning the politics of education and about how we might account for the politics of this engagement itself. We take “politics” here in the broad sense of having to do with questions of value andpower. For us it is obvious that value and power play a central role in all educational endeavours. In so far as we can see education as havingto do with ways of directing, structuring and evaluating human learning— bearing in mind that human learning is not a natural phenomenon but itself has to be understood as a construct—and in so far as we can see education as having to do with ways in which we direct, structure and evaluate the learning of others, questions of value and power are simply inevitable. Education opens uppathways and opportunities but also, and often at the very same time, limits, reduces and even closes down ways of doing and being (see Mollenhauer, 1983). Education, after all, always involves choices. Those who engage in the justification of educational choices often do so using a language of values, whereas those who engage in research on the ways in which education actually opens up and closes down often do so using a language of power. We see these as two sides of the same coin, as we do not think that “opening up” isnecessarily good or educationally desirable or that “narrowing down” is necessarily bad or educationally undesirable. What is far more important is to acknowledge that in education both “opening up” and “narrowing down” involve the exertion of power and in this sense can be said to be political.
In November 2010 the authors finished the writing of a manifesto for education. The manifesto was an attempt to respond to a number of issues concerning education, both in the field of educational research and in the wider socio-political environment. This is the text of that manifesto followed by two commentaries in which the authors try to highlight some of the reasons that have led to the writing of the manifesto, and in which an attempt is made to situate the manifesto in a number of discussions and debates.
In this article the authors report on research which aimed to explore the opportunities for democratic action and learning in a number of artist-led gallery education projects in the south-west of England. The research takes an approach to citizenship learning and democracy that is less focused on citizenship as a specific subject in the formal school curriculum and the achievement of specific citizenship outcomes that can follow from it. Rather, it is more focused upon understanding how democratic practices that are embedded in the day-to-day lives of young people contribute to their democratic learning and participation as citizens. Drawing upon conceptual categories and concepts that illuminate the process, the authors demonstrate the nature and character of young people's democratic learning. An implication arising from this is the need for practice-orientated research in other contexts (e.g. work, leisure and home) to fully understand the nature of democratic learning.
The conundrum of the inclusive educational curriculum is that the more inclusive a curriculum becomes in practice, the less inclusive it becomes in principle. In this paper we explain the conundrum and argue that its appearance is a product of what could be called 'object-based' logic which is underpinned by a deterministic understanding of causality. As long as we employ object-based logic to think about the curriculum, we cannot avoid asking what a curriculum is for. Whoever answers this question necessarily excludes other possibilities. We argue that a relational or 'complex' understanding of causality, which is shared bycomplexity theories, poststructural theories, deconstruction and Deweyan pragmatism, offers a way out of the conundrum by offering a different understanding of process and hence the guiding role of the curriculum in the educational process. In allowing the possibility of a guiding role for the curriculum, while dispensing with the need for a curricular 'end', complex logic can inform an understanding of curriculum which succeeds where humanistic education in its various forms has failed.