What should educational research do, and how should it do it? A response to “Will a clinical approach make educational research more relevant to practice” by Jacquelien Bulterman-Bos



approach requires a constant questioning of the assumptions of inquiry systems. Tenets, no
matter how fundamental they appear to be, are themselves open to challenge in order to cast
a new light on the situation under investigation. This leads directly and naturally to
examination of the values and ethical considerations inherent in theory building.

In a Singerian inquiry, there is no solid foundation. Instead of asking what “is,” we ask
what are the implications and consequences of different assumptions about what “is taken
to be”:

The “is taken to be” is a self-imposed imperative of the community. Taken in the context of the whole
Singerian theory of inquiry and progress, the imperative has the status of an ethical judgment. That is, the
community judges that to accept its instruction is to bring about a suitable tactic or strategy ....The

acceptance may lead to social actions outside of inquiry, or to new kinds of inquiry, or whatever. Part of
the community’s judgement is concerned with the appropriateness of these actions from an ethical point of
view. Hence the linguistic puzzle which bothered some empiricists—how the inquiring system can pass
linguistically from “is” statements to “ought” statements—is no puzzle at all in the Singerian inquirer: the
inquiring system speaks exclusively in the “ought,” the “is” being only a convenient
faςon de parler when
one wants to block out the uncertainty in the discourse. (Churchman, 1971 p. 202).

Within a Singerian inquiry system, one can never separate out the meanings of a piece of
research from its consequences. Educational research is a process of
representing
educational processes, and the representations are never right or wrong, merely more or less
appropriate for a particular purpose, and it is perfectly fair to expect the researcher to
defend the appropriateness of the representations. Greeno (1997) suggests that educational
researchers should assess the relative worth of competing perspectives by determining
which perspective will contribute most to the improvement of educational practice and of
course this evaluation must take into account the constraints of the available resources
(both human and financial), the political and social contexts in which education takes place,
and the likelihood of success. While the Lockean, Kantian and Hegelian inquirer can claim
to be producing knowledge for its own sake, Singerian inquirers are required to defend to
the community not just their methods of research, but which research they choose to
undertake.

Singerian inquiry provides a framework for debating the issues raised by Bulterman-Bos
about the nature of educational research. At one extreme, should all educational research be
undertaken only by those with substantial practical experience as educators? Or at the other
extreme, should we value as knowledge only that produced by studies designed from the
outset to be widely generalizable? Within a Singerian framework, both are defensible, but
the researchers should be prepared to defend their decisions. The fact that the results of
action research are often limited to the classrooms in which the studies are conducted is
often regarded as a weakness in traditional studies. Within a Singerian framework,
however, radical improvements on a small scale may be regarded as a greater benefit than a
more widely distributed, but less substantial improvement.

To sum up the argument so far, I have suggested that educational research should be
broadened by an acceptance that a complete reliance on “scientific detachment” results in
such limitations about what could be said that the whole enterprise becomes irrelevant,
somewhat along the lines of Wittgenstein’s closing line in the Tractatus logico-
philosophicus: “That of which one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence”
(Wittgenstein, 1921/1961, my translation). If we accept that educational research should



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