Keywords

Introduction

Throughout his work, Dietrich Benner has focused on a theory of non-affirmative education. Education is called affirmative when it functions either as an instrument of mere reproduction of a given society or as an instrument of the production of a utopian future society. In both cases, “the goals and tasks of education are determined according to given positive purposes, which are supposed to serve as normative guidelines for education.” One starts from a real-existing, the other from a vicariously anticipated positivity. “Both positions rely on the instrumental concept of educational practice and see in it an important means of handing down or changing given positivities” (Benner, 2010, p. 142; transl. H.S./J.B.). While these two versions of affirmative education affirm the addressees of education with respect to an identity they are supposed to develop, there is yet another version of affirmative education that simply affirms the addressees as they already are. Thus, not only the broad instrumentalist normative education with reference to given or anticipated objectives but also the anti-pedagogical abandonment of educational addressing altogether can be regarded as affirmative: “If we affirm the child in need of education by denying the requirement to learn, we submit to its whims; if, on the other hand, we affirm the requirements to be put on it by judging it as not yet satisfying them, we subject it to our ideas of a normatively correct education.” (Benner, 1982, p. 954; transl. H.S./J.B.).

In the concept of non-affirmative education, however, “young people were not educated to affirm existing conditions or to affirm pedagogical actors as representatives of anticipated conditions. Instead, they must be enabled to participate in discourses on what is to be preserved and what is to be changed. Education that introduces such discourses can only be “non-affirmative.” Its aim is not to anticipate the results of the processes of Bildung. Instead, its aim is to introduce young people to an ongoing dispute that is to be settled, not only among the adults themselves but also between the generations” (Benner, 2022, p. 5). Thus, non-affirmative education means abandoning putting education in service of extra-pedagogical determinations (Benner, 2010, p. 142). For Benner, this does not mean a ban on affirmation in the practice of education; it rather intends to point out that in a theory of education, an affirmation of affirmations or negations is “methodically” inappropriate to orient pedagogical impacts on learning processes (see footnote 25, pp. 142–43).

In our discussion, we will raise questions concerning this argument. While acknowledging Benner’s rejection of instrumental concepts of education, we argue that he is less straightforward about how non-affirmative educational practice and research also need to leave room for “affirmation.” His critique of education in the service of extra-pedagogical determinations can be understood as if putting education in the service of intra-pedagogical determinations would be uncontroversial or even indispensable, i.e. if we understand free self-activity as an inner-pedagogical principle, it’s “affirmation” in terms of a “summons to free self-activity” does, indeed, not contradict a non-affirmative education properly understood. In fact, Benner’s concept of a “pedagogical transformation of external societal interests into legitimate pedagogical action” (Benner, 2022, p. 18) indicates that any extra-pedagogical determination has to be transformed into a legitimate intra-pedagogical determination. But Benner does not elaborate on this point in terms of a legitimate form of affirmation.Footnote 1 The statement in the footnote cited above seems to use a different distinction, arguing that affirmation can be admitted in the practice of education but must be regarded as inappropriate for a theory of education that intends to orient practice. For us, this argument seems to be contradictory, since if educational theory lacks a legitimate place for affirmation, it cannot claim to orient educational practice, which simply cannot do without affirmations. Hence, the legitimate place for affirmation seems to be a blind spot in non-affirmative educational practice, theory, and research. The main thesis of this paper is that the practical verification of an indeterminate equal Bildsamkeit and free self-activity can be regarded as a legitimate and indispensable form of affirmation in a non-affirmative educational practice, as well as in educational theory and research.

In the following, we want to develop this argument by focusing on the question of what a non-affirmative theory of education means for our understanding of educational research. Is a non-affirmative theory of education necessarily calling for a non-affirmative concept of educational research, and what would such a concept look like? Although for Benner, a theory of non-affirmative education has always been center stage, he also reflected on and tried to develop approaches to educational research that he regarded as non-affirmative—from the early paper “Pädagogisches Experiment” (1972/1994) to his own more recent projects of empirical research in education as sketched in the introduction to this volume. Reflecting on his own projects, Benner declares: “One of the non-affirmative aspects of the research concepts outlined above is that, in all three variants, they neither colonize action theory structures rooted in the intrinsic logic of pedagogical practice nor immunize research against criticism with reference to paradigm-specific norms and self-evident features […]. Rather, they seek to bring action theory and paradigmatically proven research into an exchange that avoids uniform conceptions of theory and empiricism and focuses on the further development of educational practice and the optimization of education science research” (Benner, 2022, pp. 32–33).

Throughout his work, we find a pervasive optimism that a productive exchange of action theory and paradigmatically proven research is possible. His “General Pedagogy” ends with a short chapter on “the basic structure of educational research.” Here, Benner sketches competing research paradigms in education, namely empirical-analytic, historical-hermeneutic, and ideology-critical approaches, and their different understandings of critique. In fourth place Benner mentions an action-theoretical approach as developed in his work, which is not characterized as a research paradigm next to the ones mentioned before but as an “action-theoretical discourse” (Benner, 2010, p. 324, transl. H.S./J.B.), which entails a theory of Erziehung, a theory of Bildung and a theory of educational institutions. While arguing within this action-theoretical discourse, “General Pedagogy” nevertheless hopes to be connectable to different paradigms of educational research. This, however, depends, as Benner (2010, p. 325) declares, on whether these paradigms themselves leave room for the action-theoretical questions as developed in his seminal work.

To be sure, we do not want to deny the very possibility of productive interrelations between a non-affirmative theory of education and different paradigms of educational research. Nevertheless, we want to argue that dominant paradigms of research on education, both quantitative and qualitative, do not leave room for action-theoretical questions of non-affirmative education. As they lack a developed theory of their subject matter, i.e., education as a specific non-affirmative practice, they also lack the prerequisite to holding instrumentalist demands at bay.Footnote 2 Moreover, we hold that dominant research paradigms in education are themselves affirmative since research is either used as a mere representation of the field of education as it is or as an instrument of its reform in the name of predetermined objectives. Both forms of affirmative research on education do not only ignore the productive freedom of the practice they investigate; they also reproduce a dichotomy between education and research instead of inscribing themselves in the project of verification of the principles that are at stake in education.

First, we try to make plausible why dominant research paradigms on education can be regarded as affirmative. Second, we revisit Benner’s early outline of Pedagogy as a practically experimenting science as an alternative to dominant research paradigms. For discussing in what way this approach can still be adequately grasped by the distinction of affirmative/non-affirmative, we, thirdly, draw attention to Mollenhauer’s critical pedagogy and its attempt to conceptualize non-affirmative educational research. As the most radical alternative to dominant research paradigms, we finally discuss Jacques Rancière’s interventional empiricism with a particular focus on the concept of practical “verification”. Summing up, we argue that by drawing on Rancière, we can not only develop a contemporary concept of non-affirmative educational research; we can also be more precise in what way such an approach is at the same time affirmative with respect to the principles which are “verified” in the practice of education.

Mainstream Research on Education

Following John Elliott (2006), we start with the distinction between research on education and educational research. What nowadays is acknowledged as “research” in the field of education—both quantitative and qualitative—can be characterized as research on education. Research on education “aspires to produce ‘objective knowledge’ about practice in classrooms and schools by adopting the position of an impartial spectator who transcends the evaluative perspectives of education practitioners. Such a position is presumed to be a condition for describing and explaining what is really going on in institutions of education” (p. 170; emp. original). In contrast to this, educational research is characterized by its “practical intention to realize educational values in action. It addresses practical questions and, in doing so, cannot avoid taking an evaluative stance on the aims of education. In this view, it is a form of inquiry aimed at the formation of practical insights and judgments. Since these are rooted in the everyday experiences of education practitioners, educational research constitutes a form of commonsense inquiry rather than a science” (pp. 169–70). A similar way to draw this distinction is to connect research on education with an objective approach and educational research with an interested approach (Biesta, 2020, pp. 93–94). Still another way to describe both approaches is Eugen Fink’s (1978, p. 33) distinction between ascertaining science and design science (feststellende und entwerfende Wissenschaft), which helps to see that—irrespective of their paradigmatic opposition—both empirical-analytical and historical-hermeneutic approaches can be regarded as versions of ascertaining science.

Before we discuss the prospects of educational research that Elliott, like Benner, depicts as a “practical science” (Elliott, 2006, p. 173), we turn to mainstream research on education. The purpose here is not to provide an overview of the vast variety of research on education with regard to its methodological paradigms and disciplinary backgrounds. Rather, we try to point out some common traits of mainstream research on education by using Benner’s distinction between affirmative and non-affirmative education and transferring it—by analogy—to research. We are aware that, in a certain sense, this analogy is bold, since of course there are essential differences between the practice of education and the practice of research. Nevertheless, it seems fitting since in both cases you can take the central term of (non-)affirmative as characterizing certain positionings (Davies & Harré, 1990)—be it of educators towards students or of researchers towards “the field.” We would like to argue that in this regard, mainstream research on education—both empirical-analytical and hermeneutical-reconstructive—is predominantly characterized by affirmative positionings towards the field.

In empirical-analytical approaches, we find the widespread understanding that research on education has to provide the relevant knowledge base for reforms in education, i.e., the description of the initial state before the reform, the recommendation of aims and measures, and the evaluation of effects (Prenzel & Heiland, 1985, p. 49). This technological understanding of research on education (Bildungsforschung) was articulated well before the upswing of evidence-based education. Interestingly, it is grounded on an alleged analogy between education and research on education: both are supposedly dealing with the transformation of an initial state into a target state (ibid., p. 50). Not only education itself but also education reform is understood as a rational action. In both cases, one has to obtain the relevant knowledge before realizing a measure.

In this technological approach, research on education claims to provide the necessary evidence base for rational action both in education and in education reform. This positioning of research on education vis-à-vis educational practice already contains a devaluation of practitioners’ practical knowledge, which is considered to be not yet scientifically enlightened knowledge about education. Occasionally, research on education even considers this knowledge as mere “ersatz knowledge” (van Ackeren et al., 2013, p. 56; transl. H.S./J.B.), which is based on “intuition” and “personal preferences” (ibid.) rather than evidence. The ideal to strive for, then, is for school leaders, teachers, and other professional educators to have a strong orientation towards scientific “evidence” combined with a low orientation towards “ersatz knowledge” (ibid., p. 57). The devaluation of practitioners’ practical knowledge as “ersatz knowledge” is also justified by its alleged conservative character, while the reference to scientific knowledge is generally associated with the critical questioning of the respective practices (cf. Kuper & Muslic, 2012).

In any case, there is the widespread assumption that scientific knowledge, which is considered authoritative, is not and cannot be generated by the educational practice itself. In this view, it is therefore (tacitly) accepted that educational practice remains permanently dependent on the knowledge production of research. The positioning of research on education in relation to educational practice thus takes on paternalistic features. Because of its assumed superior perspective, it claims to be the decisive authority in the discourse on educational quality and quality development. If it encounters indifference or even resistance in educational practice, it can take this as further evidence of its prior conviction that educational practice is in desperate need of scientific expert knowledge.

Research on education in this understanding decidedly intends to “get practical” (Prenzel & Heiland, 1985, p. 50; transl. H.S./J.B.) by changing the educational world for the better. Therefore, research on education typically starts with a critique of educational practice in its present state of affairs by detecting certain shortcomings and comparing these shortcomings with the performances of other individuals, organizations, or systems. In the ideal case, this mode of research develops causal theories about differences in performance. Research, then, is considered verified if, on the basis of causal theories, effective interventions can be demonstrated. But even if causal mechanisms cannot be secured, evaluations can take effect just by comparison and feedback (Bellmann, 2016). In any case, the scientific evaluation is made within a framework of given standards that are known before rational action is taken. Thus, it represents a form of external critique (Jaeggi, 2014, pp. 261–62).

Although this understanding of research on education is critical, it is at the same time affirmative when judged by a non-affirmative theory of educational research. Transforming an initial state into a target state known in advance is affirmative, both in the case of education and research. It passes over the self-activity and productive freedom of practitioners and turns them into mere executive bodies for external directives. Thus, research in education entails a positioning towards the field, which at the same time devaluates practical knowledge and authorizes scientific knowledge. It is not only affirmative but also paternalistic because it claims to have superior knowledge of the field and the means to produce this superior knowledge. In this way, it establishes a relationship between research on education and “the field,” in which the latter is locked in a permanent dependency.

Hermeneutic-reconstructive approaches to research on education differ significantly from empirical-analytical approaches since they usually refrain from any claims for improving education practice through research. Rather, they aim to describe or reconstruct certain features of pedagogical practice or the implicit orientations of practitioners. These approaches usually seek to represent the educational world, but they do not have the intention to change it. Such research might claim to explicate the implicit knowledge of practitioners, yet it nevertheless leaves everything as it is. It simply tries to reconstruct how practitioners interactively construct the educational world they inhabit. In this sense, hermeneutic-reconstructive research on education is also regarded as a second-order construction (Bohnsack, 2014, p. 25).

At first sight, this positioning toward the field seems to be more modest than that of empirical-analytical approaches. Researchers do not claim to have better knowledge or a “higher rationality” (Przyborski & Wohlrab-Sahr, 2021, p. 355) than those investigated. But, nevertheless, the researchers’ distinct ability to explicate establishes a particular power relation in interpretative research (Hametner, 2013, p. 142). The assumption is that those investigated do have the relevant knowledge that keeps the educational world going, but they only have it implicitly. Basically, this implies that they do not know what they know (Przyborski & Wohlrab-Sahr, 2021, p. 355). In this view, implicit knowledge drives educational practice without practitioners being aware of it. In contrast to empirical-analytical approaches, hermeneutic-reconstructive approaches do not claim any epistemic dependency on the field. Nevertheless, the power of interpretation establishes a split between those who interpret and who interpret. Here, researchers do not intend to let practitioners participate in the interpretation of research material. It is even recommended, not to communicate results to those in the field because confronting them with a different perspective on their practice might cause confusion among them (ibid., p. 102).

Thus, hermeneutic-reconstructive approaches deal with a “Hinterwelt of meaning” (Brinkmann, 2015, p. 533; transl. H.S./J.B.; “eine Hinterwelt des Sinns”), a deep structure of meaning that generates practice but which, at the same time, remains hidden to those who practice. John Elliott also points out this constitutive split between the explicators and the explicated: “Although many qualitative researchers focused on situations and events from the standpoint of their meaning for those involved, they employed second-order theoretical constructs to explain these meanings. Their research findings tended to suggest that things were not as they appeared to participants because they were unaware of the social, economic, and political factors that inevitably condition their commonsense constructions of meaning. With varying degrees of explicitness, a great deal of qualitative research in the field claims to have penetrated to a level of reality that is hidden from the view of participants” (Elliott, 2006, p. 177).

Hermeneutic-reconstructive approaches are affirmative in a different sense than empirical-analytical approaches. Whereas the latter, as we have seen, are affirmative in forming target outcomes of education, the former is affirmative in the sense that they refrain from “getting practical” in the field and leave everything as it is. Although both approaches differ in terms of their claim to improvement, they share a certain picture of research “as an activity aimed at discovering essential truths about a reality that lies beyond how the world appears to those engaged in the practical pursuits of everyday life” (Elliott, 2006, p. 178). Both are research on education that shares an “objectivist view of the ‘objects’ of research” (Kemmis, 2012, p. 891), be it things independent of the mind (like causal mechanisms) or things of the mind (like first order constructions). Against this backdrop of mainstream research on education, we will now turn to the question of how non-affirmative educational research might look like.

Pedagogical Experimentalism

Benners’s early paper, “Pedagogical Experiment” (1972/1994) represents an important contribution in the direction of non-affirmative educational research. The contemporary context of Benner’s paper is the widely discussed dualism between historical-hermeneutic and empirical-analytic approaches and the emergence of an emancipatory pedagogy as a possible resolution of this dualism (Benner, 1973/2001, pp. 273–74). Although Benner acknowledges that contemporary approaches to emancipatory pedagogy rightly regard education science as a practical science (ibid., p. 274), he articulates several reservations towards emancipatory pedagogy. Among them was its inability to successfully establish education science as a practical research discipline, which—for Benner—results from adhering to a technical understanding of experiments and a hermeneutical concept of communication (ibid., p. 317).Footnote 3 In his book “Hauptströmungen der Erziehungswissenschaft” [Main Directions of Education Science], Benner presents his own approach as a solution to those problems which emancipatory pedagogy has left unsolved. The methodological heart of this solution is the outline of a specific pedagogical experimentalism in the final chapter of this book, which draws on central parts of the paper from 1972.

Similar to action research—but obviously without any explicit references to it—Benner sketches a genuine mode of “pedagogical empiricism” within a broader picture of educational research (ibid., 114). Such a pedagogical empiricism is not presented as replacing the hermeneutic or analytic approaches of mainstream research on education. Rather, it is an essential supplement and hinge point without which the results of hermeneutic and analytic approaches remain unconnected to pedagogical experience. For Benner, “one of the most urgent tasks of the present” (p. 110) is to conceptualize “practical-empirical educational research” (p. 101; eine “praktisch-erfahrungswissenschaftliche Erziehungsforschung”) as distinct from, but related to, hermeneutic and analytic approaches. The heart of such a “practical science” (ibid.) is the development of specific “research methods for a practical empiricism” (p. 110), namely a distinct pedagogical experimentalism.

Benner is well aware of the different traditions of experimentalism in the history of education. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, we find the idea of technical-experimental research on education among founders of educational psychology such as Meumann and Lay. In his own defense of experimentalism, however, Benner draws on a different tradition of pedagogical experimentalism, in which the idea of pedagogy as an experimental practical science was developed in close relation to practical reforms in education. For Kant, for instance, the Philanthropinum Dessau was a concrete contemporary example of generic pedagogical experimentalism (pp. 83–84). In the same way, Peter Petersen developed his idea of a pedagogical ‘Tatsachenforschung’ in close relation to the Jenaplanschule, as a reform experiment (p. 89). Benner considers Petersen’s approach as groundbreaking for a “truly pedagogical empiricism” (p. 106; transl. H.S./J.B.).Footnote 4

When Benner took up the idea of pedagogical experiments in 1972, it was risky since pedagogy, once a practical science, was about to turn into a technical discipline (p. 79). Against this background, a first and decisive step in Benner’s line of argument was the distinction between a technical and a practical experiment for which he draws on his academic teacher, Erich Heintel. A technical experiment seeks to gain causal knowledge about some subject matter or problem that can be turned into potential technical applications of this knowledge. The meaning of these applications, however, is located outside of the experiment. A practical experiment, on the contrary, is situated within the horizon of motivated conjoined action, which transcends the horizon of technical applications in two ways: On the one hand, in a practical experiment, those involved in the experiment deliberate about the meaning of technical applications. On the other hand, the subject matter or problem is investigated, even when or where it is not available in a technical way (p. 81). Any particular practical experiment again is partial and located within the total experiment of the human transformation of self and world (p. 83). The latter point is crucial because it demonstrates that reforming the school is neither possible nor desirable without reforming society (p. 107). To put it in Dewey’s terms, Experimentalism encompasses education and democracy. In Benner’s words, [s]eparating experiments in education as partial experiments from a “total experiment” in society will likely serve to disguise societal contradictions rather than to solve them (ibid.).

Benner uses both distinctions (technical/practical; partial/total) for sharp criticism of the contemporary understanding of pedagogical experiments. With reference to the distinction between a technical and a practical experiment, Benner observes that “[w]here experimentation is [actually] going on, be it in politics or education, it is technical experiments that prevail; in each case, the aim of experimentation is presupposed without question” (p. 86; transl. H.S./J.B.). With reference to the distinction between partial and total experiments, Benner’s diagnosis is that, in the case of partial experiments, all attention is absorbed by the question of under what conditions the experiments can be optimized, while the growing questionability of the broader horizon within which these experiments take place is surpassed by repairs that stabilize the system (p. 86).

On this basis, Benner finally develops a structural model for educational research in which educational theory, practical experiments, and practical empirical research are coordinated. The structural model is depicted in a figure that can be read as a cyclical problematization of practice (p. 114). At first glance, this looks similar to empirical-analytical approaches and their external critiques of practice. In Benner’s structural model, however, the relation of theory both to practice and to empirical research is not understood in terms of verification or falsification (p. 108). First, practice is oriented but not regimented by theory (p. 109). Hereby, Benner points out a “pedagogical difference” (p. 109, transl. H.S./J.B.) between theory and practice that entails both relationship and differentiation. Theory can guide practice but practice cannot be deduced from theory. It is the unalienable task of practitioners who bear responsibility in concrete situations to mediate between theoretical orientations for meaningful action, on the one hand, and the practical realization of plans for action that are critically oriented in this way, on the other hand (Benner, 1973/2001, p. 330). Due to the pedagogical difference, pedagogical experiments always have the character of a risk (“Wagnischarakter”; ibid.). And trying to overcome this risk by establishing a linear relationship between theory and practice (or empirical research and practice, for that matter) would be equal to negating the very possibility of practical experiments in education. Educational theory, for Benner, is a theory of an experimenting practice (ibid.) while making a distinction between pedagogical and educational experiments. Pedagogical experiments are directed to the transformation of the institutional framework, which is conducive to educational experiments (ibid., p. 331).

Second, Benner understands the relation of theory to empirical research neither in terms of verification or falsification. Rather, theory needs practical empirical research to get in contact with the way in which theory becomes practically relevant by the mediation of practice. At the same time, the theoretically oriented experimental practice needs empirical research to get in contact with its own consequences. Although Benner has reservations against the cybernetic idea of a feedback loop (ibid., p. 326), a functional equivalent is center stage in his own structural model for educational research. It is the pragmatist idea of enabling a reflective experience (“Rückerfahrung,” ibid., p. 330) by getting in contact with the consequences of one’s own practice. Practical empirical research, as Benner envisions it, functions as a means of making a reflective experience possible—both in theory and practice. It allows theory to reflect on its own practical relevance in its mediation by the field, and it allows the practice to problematize its own understanding (Benner, 1972/1994, p. 109).

In contrast to mainstream versions of research on education, Benner’s concept of educational research is non-affirmative in two ways. First, it does not establish an instrumental relation between research and practice as it is pervasive in empirical-analytical approaches. Rather, it is the pedagogical difference (between theory and practice and between research and practice) that provides room for an experimental practice whose pedagogical relevance can only be determined by those involved in these experiments. Theory and research are both important factors within this process of sense-making, yet they are not able to determine it. Second, educational research is non-affirmative since it is far from leaving everything as it is. Rather, it intervenes in educational reality in order to make it conducive for educational experiments. This interventionism, however, is indirect since it seeks to transform the institutional framework for education as an experimental practice in its own right.

We want to ask two critical questions here. The first one concerns indirect interventionism. Cautious as it might be, it establishes a hierarchy between those who experiment with the context and those who experiment within. While it must be admitted that there is some division of labor between education, educational policy, and research, more radical conceptions of action research would claim that these and other different practices build an interconnected “practice architecture” (Kemmis, 2012, p. 886) so that pedagogical experiments presuppose some joint attention and shared responsibility for consequences within these architectures. This political understanding of pedagogical experiments is not only appropriate for democratic societies but also for a democratic education that has a “double purpose”: “the formation and transformation of selves and societies” (ibid., p. 894).

The second critical question refers to the structural model for educational research that suggests that the process of “problematization of practice” is in some way theory-driven. In any case, an educational theory is considered the starting point of this process, both from theory to practice and from theory to empiricism (Benner, 1972/1994, p. 114). In contrast to this, a pragmatist position would argue that the starting point for any problematization of practice would be the practice itself. Although Benner’s structural model emphasizes the relationship of theory, research and practice, there seems to be a bias for the theoretical point of view and a surpassing of the practitioners’ perspectives (Sesink, 2015, p. 32).

It is interesting to note that Benner not only developed a structural model for educational research with the pedagogical experiment as its crucial element but that, some years later, he (together with Jörg Ramsegger) also was involved in a pedagogical experiment of/in a primary school that was accompanied by a research project from the University of Münster. In the final report about this reform experiment, we can notice a more radical view on pedagogical experimentalism that also addresses the critical questions mentioned above. Here, researchers and practitioners were seen as a community of experimenters, which reflect together on the consequences of their experimental practice. “Already the choice of the objects of observation makes it clear that the accompanying research in the primary school project is oriented towards a concept of experience which is under the primacy of practice. The practical staff members are not executing organs of theoretical designs, and the scientific staff members do not primarily seek knowledge for the sake of theory. Rather, all staff members contribute their respective qualifications to the joint attempt to combine the development of an action-oriented concept with research into pedagogical practice in the sense of a permanent correction of the concept by practice and of practice by the concept” (Benner & Ramsegger, 1981, p. 185; transl. H.S./J.B.).

This remarkable example of (participatory) action research is non-affirmative in a still different sense: It not only refutes both instrumental relationships between research and practice and a detached spectator perspective of research on practice that leaves everything as it is; moreover, it disrupts a widespread hierarchy between researchers and practitioners and verifies an unconventional equality between them. Both sides are seen as “equal partners” (ibid., 185) in the attempt to improve education and to interpret what improvement in education means. In the following, we will discuss whether this positioning of educational research can still adequately be grasped by the distinction affirmative/non-affirmative or whether we rather have to acknowledge that a non-affirmative positioning towards ‘the field’ at the same entails some kind of affirmation in terms of verification.

Critical Pedagogy and the Researching Community

During a symposium to mark Mollenhauer’s passing, Benner addresses a question originally posed to him by Mollenhauer: Can education in the sense of Bildung be understood without any normative connotations of the opposition “affirmative vs. critical” (Benner, 2000b, pp. 103–5). Benner argues here that this distinction is essential for any critical theory of Bildung, as in view of the indeterminacy of Bildsamkeit educational practices can never simply affirm societal demands but have to transform them into developmental tasks that, because of their openness, can in principle never be affirmative of what is already there. And, as we have seen, the same goes for practical experiments in educational research. Mollenhauer, too, is working on the elaboration of specific research methods for educational scholarship, and, as already indicated, both of them argue for a non-affirmative theory of education (Benner, 2000a, p. 41). Moreover, Benner explicitly praises the later Mollenhauer for having won back spaces for non-affirmative education from (overly) rationalistic approaches. Benner also shares Mollenhauer’s specific understanding of critique as being formulated both in “the name of and in ignorance of a better education” (ibid., p. 34).Footnote 5

Talking about education from a practical view, Benner’s strength seems to be understanding education in terms of negativity, i.e., its inherent potential to mark the limits of the real. For Benner, education cannot shake off its negative core structure, i.e., it is never emancipation to something but always emancipation from something (Benner, 2000a, p. 36). Education “does not argue in terms of positive progress, but in recognizing the negativity of successful emancipation” (ibid., p. 35). Although Benner is speaking about the human condition of not positively knowing about the future, it is rather Mollenhauer’s pedagogy that is better suited for the concretization of this dimension. For Mollenhauer, education rests on acknowledging the capacity to draw the distinction between the actual and the possible, or, as he put it in more pedagogical terms, between what is the case at the present and what could be possible now or would be possible in the future (Mollenhauer, 1983/2014, p. 125). But, for him, it is not just educational practice that centers around this distinction, but also educational research—albeit he elaborated the latter aspect to a lesser degree.

In his earlier book on emancipatory education (“Emanzipation und Erziehung”), Mollenhauer picks up a central idea from Schleiermacher’s lectures on pedagogy, in which society is understood starting with the problem of its continuation given the succession of generations. “If it is true,” Mollenhauer writes, elaborating on this basic thought, “that society is not a phenomenon of mere repetition, then it is the task of pedagogy—both as practice and as theory—to engender [hervorbringen] the potential of societal change in the adolescent generation” (Mollenhauer, 1968/1970, p. 66; transl. and emp. H.S./J.B.). Obviously, the educational scope of this passage relies on how “engendering” is to be understood, and Mollenhauer’s choice of words (“hervorbringen”) is rather vague. Educationally, it makes a huge difference whether it is interpreted more along the unidirectional lines of the adult generation yielding, generating, producing, or even causing this capacity for change in the younger generation; or whether it is understood as giving rise to, bringing forth, or—maybe most accurately—bringing out in the adolescent generation their capacity for change.

What is most interesting, though, is how Mollenhauer sees this exposition as a task that is essential to both educational practice and research. So, as the discussion of the practical side should not be our focus here, we can turn directly to the hints Mollenhauer gives us to conceptualize educational research in these terms. On a closer look, the introduction to his seminal collection of essays, forming “Erziehung und Emanzipation,” which became known for Mollenhauer’s pointed (and hugely successful) attempt to position Critical Pedagogy in the field of educational research, offers a promising but less noticed deliberation of an experimental stance. This is of great interest here—not only because it is picked up very favorably by Benner in connection with his account of pedagogical experiments (Benner, 1973/2001, p. 311).

Like Benner, Mollenhauer seems to react to the same problem: the growing influence of the rather technological research style of the natural sciences on empirical research in education (Mollenhauer, 1968/1970, p. 11; 13). Instead of just reverting to what at that time was deemed mere philosophical speculation, both authors want to hold on to some form of empirical educational research. But whereas Benner opts for the path to reinterpret what an experiment is, Mollenhauer’s main angle—even though he explicitly talks about practical experiments in society, as well (ibid., p. 20)—seems to be a reinterpretation of social research via a shift of what participant observation is.

In a later, rather technical book on methods for educational research, Mollenhauer (together with Rittelmeyer) speaks of the common differentiation of grades of participation ranging from an identification with a social role without any distance all the way to a mere uninvolved spectator (Mollenhauer & Rittelmeyer, 1977, pp. 153–4). Eventually, this leads to the exposition of the epistemic problems of objectivity and the ethical implications of interfering with practice. However, in terms of political enlightenment, there are not only discussions about the will for change and taking a practical stance in and through research against present hierarchies (ibid., p. 159; 161). There are also hints at how being an observer is first and foremost a social role, a role that might as well be taken on without any scientific or research interest (ibid., p. 154). Both these aspects are important for the question of how to understand educational experiments in terms of their social nexus.

In a slight, but a very insightful shift of wording, Mollenhauer suggests a research mode he calls “participating observation (beteiligte Beobachtung)” (Mollenhauer, 1968/1970, p. 20). Other than the traditional participant observation [teilnehmende Beobachtung] emphasizing mainly physically taking part, the determining attribute “beteiligt” transports the meaning of involvement or concern. Still, at first glance, this remains an expression of the importance of empirical research in education. This position, however, serves also as a reminder of the influence the humanistic tradition (Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik) of characterizing pedagogy as reflexion engagée (Flitner, 1957/1958, p. 18)—as engaged and involved theorizing—had on Mollenhauer. But, as he, in the same vein, speaks of “political involvement [politische Beteiligung]” (Mollenhauer, 1968/1970, p. 162), this also expresses his own stance as a main proponent of Critical Pedagogy and political emancipation. So, in just these two words, beteiligte Beobachtung, Mollenhauer combines, even merges, all three of the major research traditions of his time.

Conceptually, this subtle shift bears the potential to open anew a conversation about the involvements of educational research, i.e., what it is involved in and who is involved in it. Besides the formal broadening (i.e., you can be an involved observer, e.g., with historical matters, even though you are not a participant yourself!), it allows us to embed educational research into a social or communal framework. This counters the habitual research practice of treating “study participants” as matters of fact and, effectively making them, as Latour puts it, into a “dispensable crowd” (Latour, 2004, p. 246), instead of being offered “arenas in which to gather” (ibid.). Based on the conviction of the principle of an “equal participating involvement of everybody in the process of societal change” (Mollenhauer, 1968/1970, p. 51; transl. and emp. H.S./J.B.), which Mollenhauer imagines taking place in a “practical community of experimentation” (ibid., p. 20), a “multifarious inquiry” (Latour, 2004, p. 246) is launched, in which “new complexes of meaning are created, and new orientations for action are trialed” (Mollenhauer, 1968/1970, p. 20).

The experimental critic as “one who assembles” (Latour, 2004, p. 246) is in a certain way related to Benner’s research program of working towards orienting our practical understanding (Benner, 1972/1994, p. 82); however, it adds the orientation introduced by asking who is taking part in these practical experiments.Footnote 6 With Mollenhauer, we can understand this not only as somewhat esoteric research in and for educational practice but explicitly as raising the question of involvement in academic practice and discourse, i.e., of who is included as an actor in educational research. Who has not just an external (practical) role or “a supplementary [or] an empty part” (Rancière, 2004, p. 305), which might not count as equal? Who counts as an educational researcher? Who speaks in educational research and who is dispensable? Who counts, and who is being counted?

As a consequence, the participating research of an experimenting community is most certainly not social change instilled from the outside. Nevertheless, from our perspective, Mollenhauer seems to have a limited understanding of the emancipatory interest of educational research. Granted, similarly to Benner, Mollenhauer writes against reductions of educational thought to the techniques of the natural sciences by arguing that innocent-sounding claims of science explaining reality and informing about it are just other means to dissect educational practice, to the effect of its mastery (Mollenhauer, 1968/1970, pp. 11–13). In addition to simply being a limited form of inquiry, it bears the danger of preparing knowledge to be used for the mastery and dominance of people (ibid., p. 16). Nevertheless, Mollenhauer seems to still organize his critique around a similar image: the disclosing function of educational research and practice, for the purposes of “liberation from uncomprehended dependency” (ibid., p. 20) and “enhancing transparency, enlightenment, [and] rationality of educational action” (ibid., p. 17).

Although we do find some interesting hints for both experimental and communal educational research in Mollenhauer’s text, this eventual retraction to a base layer of subject philosophy leaves us with important questions regarding the exact scope of these forms of inquiry. First, despite the groundbreaking talk about an “experimenting community,” Mollenhauer’s pedagogico-epistemic framework heavily relies on the figure of the autonomous subject. In the spirit of the Critical Pedagogy of that time, he “locates the problem of emancipation in consciousness binding itself to rationality” (ibid., p. 10), ultimately aiming at the “liberation of subjects” (ibid., p. 11). Much later, Mollenhauer even criticizes Benner’s reliance on the concept of practice, since Benner is not able to account for subjective (aesthetic) sensations and experiences (Mollenhauer, 1990, p. 482). Secondly, and probably more to the point of our argument, Mollenhauer’s approach broadly inherits the classical hermeneutic research perspective oriented towards reconstructing and understanding the past and, therefore, lacks a clear and elaborated concept of future-oriented research—except for maybe the interesting insinuations picked up above.

Similarly, Mollenhauer misses out on explicitly encompassing this dimension of future-oriented creativity, which he elaborates on in terms of self-formation, in his epistemological reflections—despite his influential emphasis that “detours” (Mollenhauer, 1986) through non-scientific, i.e., literary, artistic, and autobiographic renderings of education, are necessary in order to find new and more accurate ways of talking about education. Instead, he somehow loses sight of the communal dimension of research that he pointed out earlier and then gets lost in the subject-philosophic and hermeneutic undergrowth of understanding others under the condition of radical alienness and ineffability (Friesen, 2015, p. 113). As we shall see below, it is Rancière who, in terms of practical verification, radicalizes this poetic shift from cognizing, or scientific knowledge production of what is, to explore what could be. After all, it is precisely this aspect of future-orientedness that formally distinguishes verification in the sense of recognition of the equal capacity for involvement in social change from any representationalist concept of verification. But to properly understand these connections and the poetic or creative moment of educational research (in contrast to knowledge production), we need to take a little detour ourselves.

Verification as a Principle of Emancipatory Research

In educational discourse, there is a tendency—to which the authors of this paper contributed, as well (Su & Bellmann, 2021)—to employ a somewhat literal reading of Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster as a lesson about emancipatory education. In accordance with the above shift from Benner’s non-affirmative education to a notion of non-affirmative research, there should, however, also be room to connect to the book’s main idea in its intended sense as a parable of emancipatory research written against certain ways of academic research (e.g., Pelletier, 2012, p. 100).Footnote 7 Against the philosopher or researcher imposing their supposedly greater knowledge of how things are, which essentially is a way to incapacitate most members of society from knowing, this presents an interesting deviant way to understand educational research.

In contrast to those epistemic regimes, which are based on a claim to first depict reality and then intend to change or preserve it, we can highlight a certain shift in how we understand the relation of research to the world it examines. Asking what it means to affirm or not affirm, we turn to Rancière’s philosophical method or pathFootnote 8 of verification. Rather than thinking of verification as complimentary to falsification, i.e., as a process of checking certain theoretical models against reality, for Rancière, verification is a twofold form of inquiry: intervention and invention (Rancière, 2009, p. 114, 2017, p. 735). As we shall see, the combination of these two aspects entails an understanding of verifying research that is specifically not based on affirming certain cultural contents but on the continuous affirmation of taking a disruptive stance (in the name of equality), i.e., the disruption of the system of what counts as just.

On the one hand, every inquiry itself is an intervention. To make sense of this emphasis, we have to remind ourselves of the background against which the Rancièrian principle of verification is formulated. Under the influence of the paradigm of the natural sciences, it has become somewhat of a standard model for empirical research techniques to think of the process of research in a representationalist way as being separated from the observed facts and things and hence—ideally—void of any interference with the examined entities. Just the opposite of Benner’s understanding of practical experiments, in such a way of looking at things, any intervention—if at all—takes place in an applicatory form, “without questioning the applicatory relation itself” (Benner, 1972/1994, p. 80). Albeit in close succession and interconnection, the critical observations and analyses are taking place before the technological or critical application of certain findings to fields of action. Rather than being an observation of what is, which is succeeded by the imposition of what should be, and in avoidance of affirming a certain explanation of reality or a certain aspect of culture, inquiry as intervention is to be understood as an (experimental) examination of what might be possible.

Such an inquiry is both affirmative and non-affirmative. It affirms the possibility of things being different and the effort of beating a path. What is affirmed is the joint and active construction of the possible. But it is also non-affirmative towards present structures of domination (or dominance in general) by way of things to be left behind—the path of disrupting reality and common sense, especially in its structures of hierarchy and dominance. At the same time, this inquiry is also neither affirmative nor non-affirmative. It does not affirm any positive way of being or any positive form of culture, what Benner calls bad positivity (Benner, 1982, p. 954). But neither is it non-affirmative in the sense of what might be called bad negativity, i.e., making a habit of finding fault with anything.

On the other hand, as is implied by the outline so far, this inquiry is also an invention. Experimental research (in education), as understood here, is not seeking evidence or discovering some truth already out there. Rather, it is an inquiry into (future) possibilities, possibilities that have to be given rise to by disordering the reality of common sense, i.e., by, first of all, envisioning research methods as systems of interference in order to stop “collud[ing] in the enactment of dominant realities” (Law & Urry, 2004, p. 399). As such, research has to be understood as action in the Arendtian sense.Footnote 9 It “interrupt[s] what otherwise would have proceeded automatically and therefore predictably” (Arendt, 1970, p. 31). Action not only begins something new, but also “[i]n order to make room for one’s action, […] things as they were before are changed” (Arendt, 1971/1972, p. 5). In contrast to a scientific view of the future (in terms of predictions), experimental research as acting inquiry means practicing the habit of interrupting what is in order to make the future different (enacting new beginnings).

The scope of this context can be further explored when circling back to Rancière’s core idea of radical egalitarianism. In a recent interview, Rancière again contrasts practices of verifying inequality and practices of verifying equality (Rancière, 2017, p. 730). In accord with earlier reflections on his own method (Rancière, 2009), he does so in a way that explicitly characterizes his philosophical writing as an egalitarian democratic act through its practical impact: It “tries to work out the distinctiveness of egalitarian practices and create a room in which those practices can become visible” (Rancière, 2017, p. 735; transl. and emp. H.S./J.B.).

Through directing his philosophical writing towards helping democratic egalitarianism into its distinct form, Rancière’s egalitarianism takes off from the rejection of explanatory and representative stances, which demonstrate to those explained what they cannot do. In other words, explanations verify incapacities. Democratic or egalitarian action, in contrast, “is the form of action which carries out the disruption of any ultimate legitimacy of power, or, if you turn it on its positive side, the affirmation of the equal capacity of anybody” (Rancière, 2009, p. 120; emph. H.S./J.B.). The educational point of this concept, however, lies in its formal structure, which only becomes clear in its reversed version: In order to affirm the equal capacity of anybody (irrespective of what they actually do and can do), one actually needs to affirm the capacity of everyone to do what they cannot do (Pelletier, 2012, p. 112).

Against any comfort one could find in lacking courage to use one’s own thinking, in accord with Kant, this is about “forbidding the supposed ignorant one […] the satisfaction of claiming that one is incapable of knowing more” (Rancière, 2010, p. 6). After all, suggesting that anyone is incapable of learning, thinking, and acting would amount to negating their freedom and emancipation. It is important that affirmations are not thought of as confirmations of existing images or endorsements of certain cultural qualities, they are not affirmations of an ideal either; they are “not the promise of an equality to come that will never come” (ibid., p. 5). In contrast, they are affirmations that things could be different and that everybody is equal in bringing about new beginnings. And they practically work by forbidding their opposite: the comfort of well-diverseness and being in the know.

At first sight, this is rather an associative relevance of radical egalitarianism for educational research in the way in which it is expressed through its joint focus on emancipation and an extended understanding of the core figure of enlightenment. But, when Fink in his existential pedagogy speaks of “daring, projecting, and producing freedom” (1970, p. 221; transl. H.S./J.B.), it becomes visible that what is to be affirmed in emancipatory practices are intelligent capacities to dare thinking about future projections (Mollenhauer, 1983/2014, p. 117f.), which can take the form of practically insisting on the difference between reality and possibility—and thereby on the possibility of things being different (ibid., p. 126f.).

This can be elaborated in view of the above-quoted passage, “practices becoming visible,” which has an acute relevance for educational research insofar as inquiry as intervention and invention appears as a redistribution of what can become visible and sayable. This importance of making things thinkable and sayable does not only go for educators or for growing up in general. Philosophical writing—and the same goes for educational research—is also working on such a (re)distribution of the sensible (Rancière, 2010, p. 8) or on the construction of what can be said about education at all (Mollenhauer, 1983/2014, p. 2). Rancière writes at the intersection of political and educational philosophy since he claims that “he does not say what politics is but what it might be” (Rancière, 2009, p. 119). After all, thinking and writing towards a construction of the possible might be characteristic of political and educational research in a way it is not for sociological, psychological, or other research. In a very concrete way, both political and educational researchers have traditionally seen it as their task to redistribute who counts as speakers (Spivak, 1988) or as just making noise (Rancière, 2009, p. 115). For education, just think about the invention of the notion of the child and its Bildsamkeit and self-activity. On the one hand, this means to ask, “Who is qualified for thinking at all?” (ibid., p. 116)? Who is qualified to speak? On the other hand, this also means to inquire about what is sayable and “thinkable at all” (ibid., p. 116). How does something that cannot be expressed become something for which we have adequate language (Mollenhauer, 1983/2014, p. 2f; 86f)?

Circling back once more to the above-quoted passage, what does it mean to “create a room,” a room, in which these redistributions of what is sayable and visible can take place? Benner praises Mollenhauer and especially his work on aesthetic education for “having won back spaces for non-affirmative education” (Benner, 2000b, p. 41; transl. and emph. H.S./J.B.), which can be said to be the (paradoxical) production of “a shift in the distribution of the sensible [as] an affirmation and verification of the fundamental equality those previously excluded already possessed” (Ruitenberg, 2010, p. 622; emph. H.S./J.B).

As we have seen, moreover, it remains an open issue how to translate this to renderings of educational research. The question would be how “reframing the distribution of the sensible” (Rancière, 2009, p. 122)—which for Rancière has mostly political connotations—might possibly be of special interest for educational research (if presented a little differently). It lies in taking the stance of making room in terms of things possibly being different. Whereas the educational tradition starting with Schleiermacher imagined this room first and foremost having to be made for unrepressed theorizing in the convivial seclusion of the Berlin salons (Schleiermacher, 1826/1964, p. 173; see also Mollenhauer, 1968/1970, pp. 119f and 132), for Rancière, however, this room is not created for the theory itself, but for practices of “inventing equality” (Rancière, 2017, p. 735; transl. and emp. H.S./J.B.). You can concede to Schleiermacher and the tradition of Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik that educational theory does need this room it creates for itself (in order not to subject itself to any implicit or explicit repressions). Where they fall short, however, is in their claim of the dignity of practice, which prevents them from exploring how educational theory itself is a disruptive intervention in the mode of equalization (other than applications of previously configured norms, of course).

Educational matters are not matters that we consider to be following some knowable rules or laws, and which therefore are thought of as being predictable. In education, we do refer to future matters, and our understanding works with anticipations, expectations, and possibilities. However this is by no means a futurity that is settled or fixed, but one that is—as Eugen Fink puts it in his emphasis on the productive and communal structure of research—a futurity which we make possible and which is possible through our action (Fink, 1970, p. 189). So, educational matters are not matters of prediction but matters of (joint or communal) deliberation in which both meaning and new possibilities of action are practically created (ibid., pp. 212–3). Meaning and freedom is not something we do come upon but something which we come up with cooperatively. And in educational terms, we do so in a deliberation among educators and children who might be different in how exactly their freedom is developed, but who are equal in that they are free (ibid., p. 214).

In terms of educational research, thus, in view of such a project of freedom—as it takes shape in jointly deliberating, forethinking, and concerting possibilities of action—we are trying to (conceptually) get hold of something which is rather constituted “through free projecting (Entwurf) and trial, through experiment and social experience” (Benner, 2000a, p. 34). In this sense, practical research—or when Benner speaks about practical theory or practical experiments (Benner, 1972/1994, p. 83)—is not to be confused with educational instrumentalism or normative pedagogy. Whereas in the “infamous” and piercing analysis of Luhmann and Schorr, pedagogy as academic endeavor gains its autonomy through the distinction of reality and norms (Luhmann & Schorr, 1979/1988, p. 161), what this comes down to is that experimental educational inquiry, as constructed here, rather manifests itself by distinguishing reality and possibility. It is neither about getting involved with educational reality as it is nor about what it should be. Rather, it is about inscribing itself into what educational practices could be.

Projecting a Space of Possibilities in Educational Research

To understand educational research in a framework of verification of equality, we would have to articulate equality explicitly in terms of research (as opposed to education). Thus, we have to ask what it looks like to disrupt current research realities in the name of equality. Traditional research—or, as Rancière polemicizes, the old method (Rancière, 1987/1991, p. 15)—understands itself as a largely discrete practice of experts. This educational research practice is distinguished because it produces a certain knowledge about education that is thought of as impossibly being produced by the educational practice itself. In other words, educational practice is denied the capacity to produce the relevant knowledge it needs to sustain itself as a reflective practice. It gets into a position of permanent and one-sided dependency. Verifying equality in educational research means disrupting this very dependency.

Like the ignorant schoolmaster (Rancière, 2010, p. 6), the emancipatory researcher (constructively) disrupts the imputation of any incapacity to learn and to know by breaking the relation of dominance that has been established between research and practice by arrogating the monopoly of explanation and knowledge (or rationality, generally speaking). However, the Rancièrian picture needs to be qualified. The “old” research of explanation is only exerting its stultifying influence on practice, if it comports itself as being without alternative or if it is the dominant understanding of research. Any research in the style of a factual report and explanatory clarifications needs to be embedded into a practical nexus of emancipatory interest—as imagined by both Mollenhauer (1968/1970, p. 10; 51) and Benner (1972/1994, p. 110). That means it certainly has its place in the larger project of emancipation—and enlightenment, for that matter.

This larger emancipatory framework of educational research takes the form of a curious entanglement concerning the verification of the educational practitioner’s capacity to learn. On the one hand, the emancipatory researcher forbids the educator the comfort of thinking they could not engage in inquiry themselves, disrupting the inequality of not counting as a producer of relevant and legitimate knowledge. On the other hand, this means summoning the educator to do research in terms of inquiry and produce the relevant knowledge themselves—affirming the capacity to inquire. It is precisely under the current circumstances, in which a differentiated realm of “science and research” is generally thought to be responsible for matters of knowledge, that such emancipatory research is needed, as equality, generally, “needs to be acted out, to be verified time and again” (Sonderegger, 2014, p. 56). That is, as long as we live in a society with a hierarchy of knowledge at play, there is a need for emancipatory research that is deliberately disruptive to this order. Not in order to enlarge the gulf between research and practice or to extend the “old” dichotomies, not to follow other everyday authorities or to give in to other hierarchies, but to set out to explore and inquire for oneself.

Just as human becoming is imagined by Fink as projecting (Entwurf) (Fink, 1970, p. 221), from Benner’s conception of the pedagogical experiment we can argue that (educational) research, too, has to be understood from its projecting dimension. At first sight, this does not appear to be astonishing. Rather, it seems quite characteristic for modern humans to project themselves into either the ideal (Fink, 1970, p. 157) or the open future (Mollenhauer, 1983/2014, pp. 74–5)—in anticipation of what is possible (Fink, 1970, p. 126) or under the assumption that things could be different (Mollenhauer, 1983/2014, pp. 126–5). However, this is more than just emphasizing that practical experiments do come full circle as they reflect on their origins in the “contradictions of idea and reality” (Benner, 1972/1994, p. 113; transl. H.S./J.B.). What we mean by projecting has to explicitly go beyond suggestions to conceptualize pedagogy as practical science harmonizing between idea and reality—precisely if the understanding of research as a change agent gets to a point where reality is made fit to a thought-up ideal. In the end, this amounts to promising an ideal-to-come never come. In contrast, any such research that is not just producing knowledge about what is but that is also changing eventually has to deal with the indeterminacy of its own role with regard to how things could be different from today. And this “different” is not a definite “different,” one that can be known or idealized; it is not a new reality to be generated.

At this point, it becomes clear once more that educational research is not fully taken up in speaking matter-of-factly. Especially as research that is “committed to the pragmatic theory” (Mollenhauer, 1968/1970, p. 132), it is bound to engage with what Mollenhauer, in the lingo of his time, called “the real-possible” (ibid.). Recalling Latour’s unique anti-factual realism, in which “[r]eality is not defined by matters of fact” (Latour, 2004, p. 232), but rather concerted by gatherings made possible, this goes far beyond any merely normative involvement as taking shape in holding on to some counter-factual expectations. Involvement in terms of matters of concern, on the one hand, comes down to questions of who is included to gather, who is having a part—or is being beteiligt. On the other hand, though, it is important to put a stronger emphasis on the circumstance that matters of concern are explicitly not “stable objects” which in the typical epistemic order of subject and object are assumed not to change during the process of research (Luhmann, 1997, p. 867). Rather, it seems we have to at least extend Latour’s anti-factual realism with a possibilist stance in order to properly take into consideration the distinct educational outlook on the open future as a space of possibilities. In this sense, verification as a principle of educational research is, in a very basic sense, an explicitly unrealistic stance, i.e., it is about continuously working on the distinction between what is and what could be possible (instead of: idea and reality).

Both Mollenhauer’s reference to the possible and Latour’s re-definition of reality in terms of gatherings and matters of concern, seem to account for this issue. Refining through these lenses our understanding of pedagogical experiments, we should point out, once again, the difference it makes whether educational research is about some educational reality out there, whether it is to produce a desired educational reality that is sketched in advance, or whether it takes place as a practical experiment in a community. A central clue to the latter conception lies in the fact that the practice of verification (in terms of concerting what could be) is a social scene.

Far from being secluded research on education and its influence on educational practice, educational research in this practical conception is projective cooperation (Fink, 1970, p. 239). Taking a leaf from Arendt’s conception of power, it is not so much the single (research-backed) act of exerting influence on practice, which is in focus when thinking about the practical involvement of research. Rather, it is the power that is of interest, which “springs up whenever people get together and act in concert” (Arendt, 1970, p. 52; emp. H.S./J.B.) and—to put it maybe a little too poetically—“where word and deed have not parted company” (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. 200).

In what we have discussed before, we have seen that educational research, too, is acting in concert. It is precisely this acting in relation to others and their actions that goes against any technological understanding of the involvement of research with practice and against thinking about education and research from its endpoint. Further, it is not individuals that are empowered or become empowered. Rather, if we keep in mind that empowerment emerges when people get together in the name of equality and act in concert, it is about the empowerment of the experimenting community. After all, a “solitary insight is not science, which it becomes only by being discussed” (Mollenhauer, 1968/1970, p. 45, transl. H.S./J.B.).

This perspective changes the entire outlook on what it means to be affirmative or non-affirmative. The candidate for affirmation is no longer a certain tradition or ideal, but taking an affirmative stance is to be understood as a communal or communicative act. In terms of criticality, taking this stance acknowledges that critical research is not a disclosing imposition from the outside, but rather a critical engagement of interlocutors with each other—much like Kemmis’ research in the first-person plural is emphasizing that different practitioners are equally joint as interlocutors (Kemmis, 2012, p. 896). After all, every researcher belongs to an encompassing experimenting community prefigured by what can be called “practice architectures” (Kemmis, 2012, p. 886), which by anchoring meaning and comprehensibility surely make any practical conduct possible, but which also are shaped and shifted by the actual practices. So, every inquiry is not only concerting, but also necessarily “an altering intervention in this communication community” (Mollenhauer, 1968/1970, p. 15; transl. H.S./J.B.). Thus, educational research has to account for the conjuncture that its field of study as well as its own practice are largely constituted by an experimental community.

As a consequence, we are able to imagine an understanding of educational research that is, in a way, complementary to Dewey’s well-known dictum that education is “an activity which includes science within itself” (Dewey, 1929/2008, p. 40). Educational research is an activity that includes education within itself. Becoming mindful of this recursive structure, i.e., of not only being research on education but being education itself, educational research should become able to account both for an educational understanding in terms of explanation, as well as (if not more so), in terms of its emancipatory dimension.

In a certain tradition, which is possibly prevalent in research settings inspired by natural science techniques, science is generally assumed to be educational in a rather reduced and restricted way. It is reduced insofar as it holds the explanatory function and the cognitive aspects of people’s engagement with science and research to be the whole spectrum of educative research activities. And it is restricted (and even stultifying) insofar as explanations turn out to be the unidirectional process of imparting knowledge, which, once it is scientifically gained and proven, is displayed with authority. There is, however, a need to broaden this view. Since dealing with experiences and actions whose outcome cannot possibly be foretold or predicted, practical research in education is neither just a representation of matters of fact nor a technological precept for a reality to be produced but a conjoint practical experiment in which new educational realities are projected and tested.

Above, we linked the emancipatory dimension of educational research to its creative or poetic dimension, which we expressed in terms of new possibilities. Thus, “creation” is not to be misunderstood, neither in terms of a technological regulation of practice nor in terms of a diligent fabrication of knowledge. Judged from Benner’s perspective, this research can be regarded as “non-affirmative” since it is neither instrumental in terms of bringing about a pre-known future nor is it simply leaving everything as it is. At the same time, this research is “affirmative” in a way Benner himself was reluctant to concede: it becomes part of pedagogical experimentalism in which pedagogical principles are verified and thus “affirmed.” The image of educational research experiments in a creative and concerted community of equals is about making room for emancipatory research, which is not antagonistic or even hostile towards explanation and factual knowledge (as it, at times, seems to be the case for Rancière’s emancipatory thinking). However, the acquisition of knowledge or the explanation of reality, though they have their place, can never be a sufficient goal of educational research, whose vanishing point is the emancipation of educational researchers and practitioners alike.