TY - CONF
T1 - Building students or building theories?
T2 - Examination of the role of theory in education research
AU - Lian, Anna
N1 - Dr. Ania Lian Ania teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the College of Education, Charles Darwin University, Australia. Her areas of expertise include language teaching pedagogy, literacy education, and educational neuroscience. Ania’s responsibilities range from coordinating Master of Education course, through to the development of the Higher Degree Research supervision culture, building Higher Degree Research students’ capacity, as well as developing international links with South-East Asian countries, especially Cambodia and Indonesia. Ania is a Senior Education Adviser to the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport of Cambodia. Ania’s most recent research project is a “reading for emotion” approach that she developed to support students’ language and literacy skills. Her most recent book is Challenges in Global Learning: International contexts and cross disciplinary perspectives.
PY - 2018/4/28
Y1 - 2018/4/28
N2 - Over the last decade, research studies in education have been attracting a lot of criticism from a variety of stakeholders, including the researchers themselves. The central point of this critique is the intellectual stagnation that has crept into the field together with the comfort that comes from using theory in ways that limit, rather than expand, our understanding of the complexity of factors that impact on and interact with the learning process. This also includes our understanding of students as persons, not a “site” for both practice and theory. The culture of research affects the culture of research training and research examination practices, which, in turn, shape how new academics envision the future of education that they then communicate in their teacher preparation courses. Getting it “right” is important if education research is to serve the children that it “studies”. The key task of this paper is to focus on the role of theory in education research, address the critique of education research in this regard, demonstrate and discuss examples of research that validate this critique, and offer an alternative to current mainstream paradigms that is both challenging and exciting, while also slowly building its own evidence base.
AB - Over the last decade, research studies in education have been attracting a lot of criticism from a variety of stakeholders, including the researchers themselves. The central point of this critique is the intellectual stagnation that has crept into the field together with the comfort that comes from using theory in ways that limit, rather than expand, our understanding of the complexity of factors that impact on and interact with the learning process. This also includes our understanding of students as persons, not a “site” for both practice and theory. The culture of research affects the culture of research training and research examination practices, which, in turn, shape how new academics envision the future of education that they then communicate in their teacher preparation courses. Getting it “right” is important if education research is to serve the children that it “studies”. The key task of this paper is to focus on the role of theory in education research, address the critique of education research in this regard, demonstrate and discuss examples of research that validate this critique, and offer an alternative to current mainstream paradigms that is both challenging and exciting, while also slowly building its own evidence base.
KW - Critical reading
KW - literacy
U2 - 10.13140/RG.2.2.22264.55046
DO - 10.13140/RG.2.2.22264.55046
M3 - Conference paper presented at Conference (not in Proceedings)
ER -