Professional Knowledge, Professional Lives: studies in education and change
Educational Research as a Public Intellectual
This then is the response to New Right overreach on the professions. What of the vacuum left in community life and public knowledge. Here there is the opportunity to define new strategies for curriculum and learning. If the national curriculum concentrates on a uniform unifying codes divorced from local communities the opportunity is open to develop new links between education community building. What would a curriculum for community-building look like as opposed to one looking back to a mythical golden age of nationhood. The appeal of such a vision of education would I think be substantial and would highlight many of the iniquitous structures currently in place.
Likewise at the level of public knowledge - the deterioration in public information offers new opportunities for educational research and activity - looking at the full implications of developing a learning society and improving public education both inside, and at least as crucially outside, the school. Here we should be researching and defining new patterns - for public education in a learning society. Curriculum should focus on the pupil as researcher and not only as the passive recipient of other people's knowledge.
At this stage of a new government new visions and voice in educational research are needed which harness some of the forces which were active at the time of the elections. Without new visions we are stuck with the piecemeal pragmatism that has affected our work for two decades. We have to find a new strategic politics and a way to create new pre-figurative sites.
Moreover, as the new government increases its call for more a professional teaching force the alliance between research and theoretical knowledge and teaching will once again be forced on to the agenda. This time we have to be ready with a range of new collaborative perspectives and activities. These new perspectives need to stress educational research which act as a kind of moral witness to the initiatives that are undertaken. Hopefully we can once again join in a world under construction and this time our intellectual inauguration needs to envision a new moral order for schooling.
