Research as a form of work: expertise, community and methodological objectivity

Recent years have witnessed the rapid rise of a new educational research orthodoxy in the UK and the USA. Central to that orthodoxy are the assumptions that method can ensure objectivity in research, and that more objective ‘safe’ research to inform practice is needed. But educational research is a field made up of overlapping communities of practice. This field has rules, but they are largely unwritten, and modify and change as part of a contingent tradition. Within the field, knowledge formation develops through the making of embodied judgements, which can only ever be partly rational, and are related to developing researcher identities. The new research orthodoxy entails deliberate attempts to restrict and modify practices in this field. This is unlikely to completely succeed, but centralised sources of funding for educational research make many researchers vulnerable. In resisting these tendencies, it is helpful to view research as contributing to better understanding, in ways that owe more to the quality of interpretations of the data than to the objective purity of any methods used.