Session Information
23 SES 05 B, The Knowledge Base of Policy
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper will take forward our understanding of the research-policy-practice interface in education through developing a critical analysis of what counts as expertise in education.
Background
There have been ongoing debates within Europe and beyond about the relationship between educational research, education policy and educational practice. Policy-makers and practitioners complain that educational research is of little use in guiding policy and practice. It is often deemed to be inaccessible, and too abstract and distant from the issues that need to be addressed on a day to day basis. The educational research community counters with the accusation that even when they do address issues of immediate political and practical relevance, their guidance falls on deaf ears. It would appear that researchers, practitioners and policy-makers tend to ‘talk past’ each other.
This paper argues that rather than revisit these debates, useful progress can be made through unravelling the nature of expertise in education. We think the term ‘expertise’ is preferable to phrases such as ‘research’ and ‘evidence’. It reveals the embodied nature of knowledge and thereby emphasises the social dimensions of knowledge claims. Additionally, while the concept of ‘expertise’ does make claims to specialist knowledge; it acknowledges the partial and fallible nature of that knowledge.
Theoretical framework
The theoretical framework employed is that derived from social studies of science to explore how ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ perspectives of scientific phenomena can be evaluated. Through applying Collins and Evans’ (2007) Periodic Table of Expertise, we show how educational researchers, policy-makers and practitioners have access to different kinds of expertise that are more or less specialist, more or less ubiquitous. Importantly, each of these specialist expertises is developed through socialisation within particular policy, practice and research domains. Expertise is not something that can be straightforwardly ‘taught’, it is based on the development of tacit knowledge that can only be learnt through engagement within a domain. This implies that each form of expertise has a somewhat different basis for arguing that its knowledge claims are authoritative; and this, in turn, suggests that reconciling claims from different domains may be extremely difficult.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Collins, H. and Evans, R. (2007) Rethinking Expertise, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
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