Practice! Practice! Practice!

Abstract

The chapter begins with a discussion of enduring stereotypes, and recurring debates about the nature of research including who should conduct it and how.

Through the work of (Carr, For Education: Towards Critical Educational Inquiry. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), it highlights how our current concept of educational theory and our concept of educational practice are end products of social, historical and political processes through which an older, more comprehensive and more coherent concept of practice has been changed to the extent that it has been rendered marginal and now faces something approaching total effacement. The works of (Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997; Carr, For Education: Towards Critical Educational Inquiry. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995; Kemmis, Prologue: Theorising Educational Practice. In W. Carr (Ed.), For Education: Towards Critical Educational Inquiry. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), are drawn upon to discuss the nature of practice and how practice changes and improves. The chapter moves from there to explore the nature of practice in education and how educational practice changes and improves. Boundaries between, theory, research and practice are examined in terms of their social, historical and political constructions in the field of education and in other disciplines. This includes how these constructions have served to isolate and separate research from practice and practice from theory , in ways in which an older, more comprehensive and more coherent conception of practice would not do.

Taking the examples of the separation of theory, research and practice from the discipline of education, this chapter illustrates the risks and consequences of the construction of false dichotomies and artificial divides in any form of practice. It argues that the lure of the separation of theory, practice and research although seriously flawed is strong and can be traced back to a nineteenth-century, mechanistic view of ‘positivist science’ based upon a rationalist theory of action which conceives of reality as having a rational structure ‘out there’ and that all aspects of it can be grasped through logical principles and not simply through sensory experience. The purpose of those who adopt this world view is to see beneath the ‘surface’ of things from the ‘outside’ to uncover principles of order which seek to account for the workings of the hidden mechanism beneath, through logical reasoning.

The chapter concludes with the idea that all theory comes from practice, not only in relation to the conduct of research, theory and practice in the field of education, but also in pursuit of all forms of life including the practices of thinking, theorizing, engaging in inquiry and scholarship as well as in the practice of leading a fulfilled life. In this chapter, no distinction is made between practice in subjects widely taken to be vocational and those usually considered to be academic.