WHAT KIND OF THEORY FOR HIGHER EDUCATION?
Gert Biesta
The Stirling Institute of Education
aim: to explore and characterise the roles of theory in
Higher Education research and scholarship
from an ‘outsider’ perspective
‘HE tends to be a theory free zone
and our event is intended to respond to this”
(rough) impression of the field
↓
a more complicated picture, i.e, not without theory
a less complicated picture, i.e., not dissimilar to ‘main stream’
educational research
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[1] significant amount of (good) descriptive research on
HE practice and policy
description – analysis (trends/patterns) – relationships between dimensions
[2] relatively small amount of quantitative studies going beyond
descriptive statistics
[3] noticable amount of ‘scholarship’: theoretical and, less often,
historical explorations/reflections
[pattern not dissimilar from ‘mainstream’ research]
&
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* similar themes and topics, with some more specific for HE
(e.g., access and participation)
* some uncritical alignment with policy speak and fashionable concepts
(often with good intentions)
* engagement with theories, theoretical notions, and theorists,
e.g. activity theory, actor-network theory, communities of practice;
legitimate peripheral participation; socio-cultural theory; complexity
theory; problem-based learning; feminist theory;
Kolb, Bourdieu, Foucault, Säljö, Marton
Is HE research & scholarship flourishing without
there being a strong role for theory?
Why would we want (more) theory?
What kind of theory would we want/need?
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THE ROLE OF THEORY IN EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
the ‘received’ view: three purposes of research →
explanation, interpretation, emancipation
the need for theory
explanation: to move from correlation to account of (underlying)
causative connections and mechanisms
interpretation: deepening and broadening understanding of everyday
interpretations (‘double hermeneutics’); from describing what people are
saying to making intelligible why they are saying what they are saying
emancipation: exposing hidden power structures that structure and
distort such interpretations and experiences
↓
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HE research
↓
descriptive & analytical → interpretative research
not surprising: education as a social and socially constructed reality
(partly) explains low number of explanatory studies, as ‘causes’ and
‘effects’ are ‘produced’ through interpretation
↓
correlations and patterns, not strong causality
What kind of theory for HE research? (1)
↓
if HE research aims to address ‘causal’ issues [explanation],
then it needs theory that helps to make plausible how
connections are produced/achieved
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for example:
* relationships between teaching, studying, assessment, learning
↓
convergence or theoretical pluralism?
(my own interests: communication as practice &
retrospective complexity reduction)
* patterns and trajectories of participation and achievement
↓
theory to make plausible how such trajectories are achieved
(own work: how patterns of participation are biographically achieved)
→ inevitability/necessity of interpretation/interpretative ontology
↓
theorising actions and interpretations
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What kind of theory for HE research? (2)
↓
interpretation
role of theory: why people are ‘saying’ what they are ‘saying’
↓
“adding plausibility”
strong(est) version: Weber’s explanatory understanding: to show how,
given people’s interpretations of the situation, it was rational that they
acted as they did
weak(er) versions: adding plausibility through re-description: seeing
actions ‘through the lens of’ (Foucault, Bourdieu, Lave & Wenger, Butler,
etc.) or ‘as a case of’ (pastoral power, misrecognition, LPP, gender
relationships etc.)
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two questions about ‘adding plausibility’ to interpretations and actions
(1) What are we doing when we engage in these forms of theorising?
(2) Why would engage in such forms of theoretical work?
[1] ‘adding plausibility’ is a well-rehearsed justification
of interpretative research
plausibility: ‘making sense’ of phenomena
adding: not reproducing, but re-describing, adding ‘text’
making the strange familiar: as ‘a case of’
‘deepen’ and ‘broaden’ understanding (‘through the lens of’)
BUT
Whose plausibility are we adding?
Is ‘deeper’ and ‘broader’ necessarily better? Or just different?
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[2] interpretation or critique?
interpretative: offering alternative interpretations
critical: offering better interpretations
↓
on the assumptions that ‘first person’ accounts may be distorted as a
result of the social position of actors
a difference, therefore, between adding and replacing interpretation
and different view of plausibility
different relationship between theoriser and theorised:
- promoting reflection and learning (trust in people’s interpretations)
- promoting emancipation (distrust in people’s interpretations)
[see Biesta, in press: “A new logic of emancipation”]
both: making the strange familiar
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[3] making the strange familiar = bringing what is not known or
understood into the sphere of what is known and understood
↓
as basis for (better) action
or: making the familiar strange: a different role for theorising
Foucault
modern Enlightenment: power versus knowledge
“a tradition that assumes that knowledge can only exist where power
relations are suspended” (Foucault)
‘postmodern Enlightenment: power/knowledge versus power/knowledge
“In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is
occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of
arbitrary constraints?” (Foucault)
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“eventalisation”
↓
“a breach of self-evidence”
constructing ‘a polygon of intelligibility’ around singular events
not to deepen understanding, but to pluralise and complicate
↓
shift from ‘adding plausibility’ to ‘adding interpretation’
[adding implausibility?]
Is that ‘useful’? Is it useful to bring about a situation “in which people
no longer know what they do”?
↓
can spur people into action, not based on a (deeper) understanding of
what is going on, but by an acknowledgement that something else might
be going on → a different form of ‘liberation’
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FORMS AND FUNCTIONS OF ‘AUTONMOUS THEORISING’
↓
HE ‘scholarship’
a simple point: autonomous theorising can generate re-descriptions of
educational phenomena and processes
re-descriptions, because educational reality always already comes
described in a particular way
showing that it is possible to see things differently (pluralisation)
- e.g., that ‘learning to learn’ is a strategy to empower students or a
form of neo-liberal governmentality
- e.g., that assessment can be seen as judging learning ‘outcomes’ or as
producing such outcomes
↓
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these are not empirical claims (i.e., not true/false),
but ‘conceptual options’
↓
to highlight the choices implied in particular descriptions
↓
such ‘description’ make particular ways of thinking, doing and being
possible, and other ways difficult or impossible
(see, e.g., the impact of ‘new language of learning’ and
the ‘learnification’ of education)
↓
the “division of the sensible” (Rancière)
↓
“what is capable of being apprehended by the senses”
↓
not epistemological or phenomenological issue, but political
(the “politics of aesthetics”)
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[intermezzo]
police: “an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a
particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is
understood as discourse and another as noise”
not system versus lifeworld, but all inclusive, i.e., everything has a place
(as included or included-as-excluded)
politics: “the mode of acting that perturbs this arrangement” and does
so with reference to equality
“an activity antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks with the tangible
configuration whereby parties and aprts are defined by a presupposition
that, by definition, has no place in that configuration”
“it makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a
discourse where once there was only a place for noise”
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the re-descriptions generated by autonomous theorising can have
political effects, but they do not stem from a deeper, higher, or better
insight
a topological or horizontal approach to emancipation, not deep versus
superficial or true versus false
***
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CONCLUDING REMARKS – POINTS FOR DISCUSSION
[1] by identifying the possible roles for theory in HE research and
scholarship we can characterise and appreciate the current situation
but also identify areas for development
[2] Does this indeed help us to understand the role of theory in HE
scholarship better? (deeper? differently?)
[3] Highlighting the political importance of theory, rather than (just)
seeing theory in cognitive terms.
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[4] Implied in my talk is a critical view of particular forms of
critical/emancipatory theory. Should HE research, scholarship and
theory aim to enlighten or to interrupt?
[5] The question of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. What are the
resources for theorising in/on (higher) education?
the Anglo-American versus the Continental construction
[6] What is special/distinctive about HE research and scholarship?
Its social organisation? Or more?
for more information see
www.gertbiesta.com
e-mail: [email protected]
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some relevant references (papers available on request):
Biesta, G.J.J. (in press). A new ‘logic’ of emancipation: The methodology
of Jacques Ranciere. Educational Theory.
Biesta, G.J.J. (in press). Towards a new ‘logic’ of emancipation: Foucault
and Rancière. In R. Glass et al. (eds), Philosophy of Education 2008.
Urbana-Champaign, IL: Philosophy of Education Society.
Biesta, G.J.J. (2008). Encountering Foucault in lifelong learning. In K.
Nicoll & A. Fejes (eds), Foucault and lifelong learning: governing the
subject (pp. 193-205). London/New York: Routledge.
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