An enduring question in education, especially school based, is the irrelevance of education research. This is of course combined with discourses around the need for impact – usually social and/or economic – from research, especially that which is funded. There are plenty of reasons mobilised for this lack of impact, much of which is limited to constructing and legitimising a theory and practice divide. In addition to this irrelevance, it is also frequently cited that no profession overlooks its own research as much as education.
One of the central feature of these discourses is who does education research and under what conditions. For the most part, the most likely group to undertake education research are university based faculty. This is primarily because research is one of three key areas of academic work (the other two being ‘teaching’ and ‘service’). While in the past, it has been argued that it is doctoral students that do the bulk of education research in Australia, I believe it is fair to say that universities are the primary location of education research.
But lets think for a minute regarding the conditions under which education faculty in universities conduct their research. Unlike what may be thought of as the ideal of university research, that is, the chasing of ideas, the reality for many faculty, but especially early career researchers it is all about chasing money. That is, the way to establish yourself is to attract external funds for your research. At least from my experience and that of my close colleagues, rarely have we been encouraged to chase ideas, or asked what is our current big idea. Instead, we are asked what grant are you going for next, and how can you design a project that matches externally set priorities or funding schemes.
This is combined with promotion being linked with external funding. Despite the core capital, and legacy, of academics being publications (at least for now), it seems funded research is almost as important, and dare I say more important, than the actual outcomes of research. This would have become a much larger issue had the Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) budgets not been released, or at least partially unfrozen, recently. Furthermore, the internal grant drafting cycle frequently is based around an external submission deadline of Feb / March, but then needing to have the next project draft ready for the following year by June / July so that you can spend 6-7 months working on it. A cycle where applicants you found out they were unsuccessful yesterday begin the process again with drafts due by the end of this week. As a result, much of the year is spent writing and revising grants. All of this for schemes with 20% or less success rates.
So much time writing grants rather than actually writing for publication and/or researching. What this creates is a flawed logic where people begin to equate research with funding. At a recent conference a colleague said to me ‘without funding I cannot do research, if I cannot do research I cannot write (except apparently for the same thing again and again using different words)’. Are you kidding me! Have we seriously reduced education research to that which is given money. Especially when we all know examples of colleagues who have reduced what they label as research to what is really little more consultancy. This is why faculty who spend the bulk of their time doing such work publish so little (and this is not to mention the fact that in some cases this involves making personal income thanks to institutional resources – including time – but that is another discussion). If we limit our thinking about research to that which is funded by external agencies, or stakeholders, many – if not most – of the innovative and novel solutions would never see the light of day.
The question that this leaves for me is, where are our new ideas coming from? If social media, and particularly twitter, has demonstrated anything it is that there is substantial innovation taking place in educational thinking and practice and what is more, it is happening at scale. These innovations do not need money to make them happen, gosh in many cases, they do not even permission.
So what does this mean? At its most simple, I call for a revision of what it means to conduct research – including its dissemination (high quality teaching is dependent on high quality research underpinning it). In times of fiscal contraction, yet increased competition for research funds, the single-mindedness of equating research with external funds is highly problematic. What is more, it takes some of our most innovative and productive minds (as you need a good track record to be competitive, so the pressure to apply is most intense on those most capable of producing research) away from thinking creatively.
Don’t mistake my message here, I completely understand why universities chase external funding, and why that is privileged so much in the life of the contemporary academy. What I am calling for is a broadening of opinion of what we count as research. Innovative ideas come from everywhere, and most often, from the ground up. It is difficult to change practice at scale, but as the Chinese philosopher Laozi states: a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Great ideas do not need money. For the most part, education research does not need expensive equipment and one of its key dissemination points is teaching. Therefore, unlike other areas, it does not make a lot of sense to have leading education researchers not teaching. I do not have any definitive answers around the questions I have raised, but one thing I am clear on is that
if education research is to remain a viable part of Australian higher education then we need to re-engage with how we think of research at an institutional level and especially the pressures we apply to early career researchers.
