Negotiating the essential tension: working within, across, and outside research traditions
Keynote conference talk
Taber, K. S. (2020). Negotiating the essential tension: working within, across, and outside research traditions (Keynote talk). Paper presented at the Inclusive Ways of Knowing: Diverging from Tradition: Kaleidoscope Conference 2020, On-line.
Kaleidoscope is the annual research conference of the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Education Research Students' Association
Abstract
For scholars, the essential tension operates between the imperative to work within an established and recognised tradition, and the drive to innovate. Finding a comfort point in relation to that tension is important for a research student, and, indeed, any productive academic. Working in a tradition is essential to being recognised as a competent scholar deserving of being welcomed into the Academy as an independent researcher whose apprenticeship is successfully completed. Such a ‘journeyman’ has demonstrated she is an effective pupil, and can accurately work in knowledge production, albeit as a form of cultural reproduction. She has the expertise to work in an established research programme, and is given a licence to undertake research in, and to teach about, that tradition – for as long as it is seen as being a progressive programme justifying its place in the Academy.Yet the Academy also claims to most value novelty and originality, and this is a core criterion in a doctoral examination. Those recognised as great scholars are the revolutionary thinkers who thought ‘outside the box’, whilst ‘breaking the mould’: the visionaries who saw clearly what others could at best only make out through a glass (spectacles of their existing commitments) dimly. And they often borrowed productively from other fields. Few transcriptions or embellishments are judged as masterpieces in their own right. Careful analyses are always to be expected in scholarship, but it is novel syntheses that are lauded.The research student needs to judge how to respond to the essential tension, both in terms of best meeting the assessment criteria for the degree, and in terms of becoming the kind of scholar, and indeed the kind of thinker, they aspire to be. This raises the question: how can a scholar strive to have both a disciplined, and, yet, an open, mind?
Contents:
The essential tension?
Kuhn and the essential tension
Why might it be important to work in a tradition?
A research programme is not just for Christmas…but need not be for life
Are there research programmes in education?
A typology of research students
Kelly’s models of how knowledge progresses
Working outside a tradition
Advice to the ambitious research student
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