Collaboration, community and collective intelligence will eclipse the cartography of collision

Abstract

This article is a response to ‘Mapping educational research and its impact on Australian schools’, Chapter 2 of The Impact of Educational Research, in which researchers Allyson Holbrook, John Ainley, Sid Bourke, John Owen, Philip McKenzie, Sebastian Mission and Trevor Johnson report on their Commonwealth Education Department commissioned study. They mined the Australian Education Index and the Bibliography of Education Theses in Australia for patterns in education research in Australia over the years 1984–1997 and compared the results with additional data obtained from university education faculties, postgraduate students of education, school principals, system-level administrators and professional associations.

This response to the study argues that its strength is in the construction of a conceptual framework for research as well as in its use of the AEI and BETA. Its framework has potential to provide valuable ongoing data to service the whole education community. The data garnered through surveys of postgraduate researchers and stakeholder groups indicate an interest in research by the education community, but are insufficient to provide many answers about the influence of research on schooling in Australia.

The framing of a research question in terms of ‘impact on Australian schools’ perpetuates a separation of research community, policy community and school community, even though the research framework proposed by the researchers largely avoids the separation. In the end, by avoiding a detailed analysis of what might be encompassed by a critical construction of either ‘collaboration’ or ‘dissemination’ and working uncritically within the given construct of “impact”, the researchers lost an opportunity to develop a notion of community, ‘collective intelligence’ or public interest in educational improvement through research. If dissemination were framed in more organic language — in terms of shared knowledge and experience, commitment to understanding and ‘collective intelligence’ — the framework proposed by the study could be of major benefit to schooling in Australia.