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Educational Theory, Practice and Research: Some Challenges
David Bridges
In this talk delivered at the Centre for Modern Didactics in Lithuania, David Bridges asks teachers to consider the relationship between their own classoom research and more traditional forms of inquiry.
When I first entered teacher education some thirty odd years ago as a keen young philosopher, fresh from my analytic training under Richard Peters and Paul Hirst, it all seemed relatively simple. The traditional fare that student teachers had been offered was dismissed as simplistic 'tips for teachers' and the theoretical component as 'undifferentiated mush'. Instead we would offer through the new degree award of Bachelor of Education a robust diet in which educational practice would be informed by a more rigorous educational theory which itself was derived from and constituted by the disciplines of education. Tibbie's influential book on 'The study of education' (Tibbie, 1966) made it clear that those disciplines included the Psychology of Education, the Sociology of Education, The History of Education and the Philosophy of Education - and these four disciplines provided for a decade and more the theoretical stuff of the BEd degree and the ideas which were intended to inform and provide critical purchase on the practice of teaching. Importantly too, the university departments of education developed a busy practice in meeting the rapidly expanding demand of the teacher training colleges (or colleges of education as they were then known) for lecturers who could teach these subjects to new generations of students. Diploma and Masters course sprung up, PhDs were undertaken, learned societies established and journals published - a significant proportion defined by and providing institutional support for the 'disciplined approach to the study and practice of education.
Inevitably, for someone of my generation, a review of the developments in educational theory and research and practice in the last two decades is a story dominated by a discipline based view of the relationship between these three. A longer historical perspective no doubt reveals continuities between recent developments and an earlier history rooted in, for example, the work of Dewey and the Chicago pragmatists. For present purposes let me pick out and describe briefly and comment on two sets of developments, which offer different perspectives on educational theory, research and practice and the relationship between them.
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Educational Theory, Practice and Research: Some Challenges