What is the Point of a Faculty of Education?

The imperative for discipline-specific educational research within university education departments

There is often a tradition of a newly appointed professor giving an inaugural lecture – usually soon after appointment or promotion.

We, in the Faculty of Education, seemed to have let that tradition slip in recent years (and during the year after my appointment I was dealing with serious family medical issues, and this was not foremost in my mind).

However, belatedly, I gave my professorial lecture in 2019 on the question (or more pointedly, on my suggested answer to the question) 'What is the point of a faculty of education?' The subtitle, 'The imperative for discipline-specific educational research within university education departments', may act as something of a spoiler!

The lecture was filmed, and can be viewed as part of the University of Cambridge Video & Audio Collections, available here.

Abstract:

This lecture poses the question of what the purpose and value of an education faculty or department might be in the modern university. In particular, it asks what the so-called ‘USP’ (unique selling point) of such an institution is, and highlights the potential for a large eclectic department (such as the one I have been working in) to be seen as redundant in the context of a wider university. It seeks, then, to respond to this enquiry through identifying the particular expertise provided by an education faculty, in relation to the ‘proper’ specification of the content of educational scholarship. From this position, an argument is made that an education faculty that wishes to remain viable at time of severe pressure on university resources should, as an imperative, prioritise core work around those areas of scholarship, teaching, research, and public engagement that only this particular kind of institution can offer. This is not, by any means, an argument for building a homogeneous silo of education scholars looking to see educational work as somehow encapsulated and disconnected from other disciplines and shunning cross-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary or transdisciplinary ventures – far from it – but rather an argument that a faculty which looks too much like the university writ large within one department opens itself up to being seen as potentially redundant and dispersible without losing anything essentially particular. Indeed, it is argued that the kind of work which society desperately needs education faculty to undertake is in a very real sense at the borders of educational studies and other disciplinary areas.

The slideshow and text may be viewed here

The lecture text (DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.18634.70089) can be downloaded here