I am beginning to realise that becoming a scholar might have less to do with knowing all the answers and much more to do with becoming comfortable with asking better questions.
That is probably why one question has stayed with me this week:
How do educational ideas move from policy, through institutions, into people’s everyday experiences — and what happens to them along the way?
I hadn’t necessarily started my reading this week looking for an answer to that question. I was reading Marlene Morrison’s What do we mean by educational research and Judith Lorber’s The Variety of Feminisms and their Contribution to Gender Equality as part of my EdD work. But, as I am beginning to discover, the readings don’t always stay neatly within the boundaries of the task you started with.
Sometimes they follow you around.
What do we actually mean by research?
Morrison’s chapter made me think about how research paradigms can shape not only how research is designed, but how researchers themselves are understood.
I found myself questioning the labels we use: positivist, interpretivist, and the assumptions that can come with them. It seems very easy to create a binary where positivism becomes associated with objective, perhaps ‘cold’, research, while interpretivism becomes subjective and almost ‘dreamy’. But do these labels sometimes create assumptions about researchers before we have even considered what they are actually trying to find out?
That made me stop and think about whether research design is ever truly neutral.
I am beginning to understand why ontology and epistemology matter, rather than seeing them as two more complicated words I need to remember for my EdD. What I believe about what exists, what I believe can be known, and how I believe knowledge can be produced inevitably influences the questions I ask and the way I try to answer them.
That is slightly uncomfortable.
I had previously thought of methodology as something I would eventually choose once I knew exactly what my research question was. I am now starting to see that the relationship is much more complicated. My philosophical position, my understanding of knowledge and my methodological choices need to make sense together.
And I need to be able to explain why.
Research that explains and research that changes
One of the things that particularly caught my attention in Morrison was the tension between research that seeks to explain and research that seeks to act.
This feels especially relevant to education.
Educational research doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It sits somewhere between academic rigour, political agendas and professional practice. We can produce research that tells us something about education, but there is also a question about what happens next.
- Does the research influence policy?
- Does policy influence practice?
- Does practice challenge the policy?
And what happens when the people implementing policy are also researchers, academics and professionals who have their own understandings of evidence and knowledge? This is where I started thinking about my own professional context. I work in higher education, where policy ideas are constantly being translated into institutional strategies, processes, frameworks, guidance and, eventually, things that staff and students actually experience.
A policy can sound very different on paper from how it feels in practice.
There is a journey between the two.
And perhaps that journey is where some of the most interesting things happen.
What happens to an idea when it enters an institution?
This is the question I keep coming back to.
An educational idea might begin as a policy ambition.
It then enters an institution.
People interpret it.
Committees discuss it.
Processes are developed.
Resources are allocated — or aren’t.
Staff make sense of it.
Students experience it.
And somewhere along that journey, the original idea changes.
Sometimes that change is positive. Sometimes it makes the idea more workable. Sometimes it creates unintended consequences. Sometimes the language stays the same but the meaning changes completely.
This makes me think differently about policy.
Perhaps policy isn’t simply something that is implemented. Perhaps it is something that is interpreted, negotiated and enacted.
That feels particularly important to me as someone who works in academic development. Much of what I do sits somewhere in that space between institutional intentions and everyday educational practice. I hadn’t previously thought of that as a potential research space. I am beginning to.
And then Lorber made me question who gets to define the experience
If Morrison made me question how we know, Lorber made me question whose knowledge we are talking about.
Reading Lorber’s discussion of different feminist theories made me think about how easy it is to talk about ‘women’ as though women have all experienced inequality in the same way.
But they haven’t.
What about race? Ethnicity? Class? Religion? Culture?
What happens when gender inequality is considered without considering the other aspects of people’s identities and experiences? This made me think about Critical Race Theory and intersectionality, but also about my own assumptions as I approach research.
I found myself asking: whose experiences have actually shaped feminist thinking?
Even the idea of a feminist ‘past’ made me question what we mean by that. When we talk about the development of feminist thinking over the last 35 years, whose past are we talking about? How culturally diverse were the researchers and theorists whose ideas have shaped the field?
These questions feel particularly important for me because my own developing research interests are concerned with women, leadership and identity.
I don’t want to assume that there is one universal experience of being a woman, or even one universal experience of being a woman in educational leadership.
That would be an uncomfortable contradiction if I am trying to research inequality while flattening people’s differences.
The problem with ‘women’
This might be one of the biggest things I have taken from Lorber so far.
It is very easy to use categories because categories make research manageable.
Women.
Men.
Leaders.
Academics.
Students.
Ethnic minority women.
But categories can also hide complexity.
The more I read, the more I am beginning to understand why positionality matters. Who I am, what I have experienced and the professional context I work within will influence what I notice and what I consider important.
That doesn’t mean I cannot do research.
It means I need to be honest about the position from which I am doing it.
And that brings me back to Morrison.
If research design isn’t neutral, and if our understanding of knowledge is influenced by our position, then reflexivity isn’t something I can add at the end of my research. It needs to be part of the process.
This is particularly interesting when I think about researching people who may themselves be researchers.
How might their own understanding of research influence how they respond to my questions?
How might their professional identity shape what they tell me?
How might my position as an insider in higher education influence what I notice — or fail to notice?
I don’t have answers to these questions yet.
But I think I am starting to understand that having questions like these is part of becoming a researcher.
So, am I a scholar yet?
I am still not sure.
But something is changing.
When I started the EdD, I think I imagined scholarship as something I would recognise when I had accumulated enough knowledge.
Now I am beginning to wonder whether it is something else.
Maybe scholarship is partly the ability to sit with uncertainty.
To question categories.
To notice assumptions.
To ask whose knowledge counts.
To recognise that our own position affects what we see.
And, perhaps most importantly, to connect theory to what is happening around us.
Morrison made me question how I know.
Lorber made me question whose knowledge I am seeing.
And thinking about education policy has made me question what happens between an idea and its lived experience.
So perhaps my question is changing.
Instead of asking:
“Do I know enough to be a scholar?”
I am starting to ask:
“Am I learning to see education differently?”
And perhaps that is a better place to start.
I don’t think I have the answer yet.
But I have a lot more questions.
Maybe that’s the point.
