Abstract
This chapter explores notions of what it means to “represent” a work of research in the act of writing up a study informed by the pragmatic philosophies of Richard Rorty and John Dewey. The argument is framed within current concerns in the educational research community over ways of raising the scientific nature of scholarship in this field. The chapter then extends this discussion of representation by examining scholarly communication practices that can increase the openness of this work as a guiding principle in the advancement of science, discussing open access and open data strategies for enhancing both the impact and the public good quality of the work.
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Notes
- 1.
The AERA committee that prepared the standards statement consisted of Richard P. Duran, Margaret A. Eisenhart, Frederick D. Erickson, Carl A. Grant, Judith L. Green, Larry V. Hedges, Felice J. Levine (ex officio), Pamela A. Moss (Chair), James W. Pellegrino, and Barbara L. Schneider.
- 2.
Scientific Research in Education includes principles of “pose significant questions that can be investigated empirically” and “link research to relevant theory” and “use methods that permit direct investigations of the question” (Shavelson and Towne 2002, p. 3). My focus in this chapter, however, falls within the scope of the sixth scientific principle, namely “disclose research to encourage professional scrutiny and critique”; p. 5), which in the context of this report I have written about directly elsewhere (Willinsky 2006).
- 3.
For example, as Shavelson and Towne explain in Scientific Research in Education, “these [mid-range physical and social science] theories are representations or abstractions of some aspect of reality that one can only approximate by such models” (2002, p. 60). Yet in this important research statement, there is at work both a representative or “spectator theory” of knowledge, as Dewey called it (1988, p. 19), and place reserved for a more socially constructed approach: “Indeed, science is not only an effort to produce representations (models) of real-world phenomena by going from nature to abstract signs. Embedded in their practice, scientists also engage in the development of objects (e.g., instruments or practices); thus, scientific knowledge is a by-product of both technological activities and analytical activities” (p. 57).
- 4.
Given Dewey’s pragmatism, “the notion of ‘accurate representation’ is simply” as Rorty explains, “an automatic and empty compliment which we pay to those beliefs which are successful in helping us to do what we want to do” (1979, p. 10).
- 5.
For Rorty, knowledge is concerned with “when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation” (1979, p. 170); instead, we need to place the emphasis on making our work speak to others, on having it contribute to “this project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking” (p. 360). This sense of responsibility might otherwise be lost if the research (prior to the writing process) is treated as the important thing that needs to be represented.
- 6.
The ISI Web of Science assesses the impact factor for only 127 journals in education, and the articles in the top-ranked Journal of the Learning Sciences are cited an average of three times within the course of a two-year period. The journal published by Taylor and Francis (having acquired it on acquiring the publisher Lawrence Erlbaum) costs libraries $645 a year for four issues or $612 for online only, while individual subscriptions are $64.00.
- 7.
While new open access journals in education continue to appear, some of the field’s venerable titles, having experimented with open access, are going the other way. The online edition of the American Educational Research Association’s Educational Researcher, for example, was free for a number of years, until in 2007 the AERA moved its journals to Sage Publishers, at which point, access to individual articles in the Educational Researcher could be purchased for $25.00. Teachers College Record, one of the field’s oldest titles, was also one of the earliest to try a form of delayed open access, making articles freely available six months after publication, usually leading to a huge increase in readership at that point. It has since reduced the degree of open access to a sampling of older articles, although it has instituted a very reasonably priced point of access for those seeking to read more recent work.
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Willinsky, J. (2014). The New Openness in Educational Research. In: Reid, A., Hart, E., Peters, M. (eds) A Companion to Research in Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6809-3_75
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