A Challenge for Comparative Education: Transforming Sites of Control into Locales of Opportunity

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Critical Comparative Education: Understanding the Research Complex and its Consequences

Proposal

Education matters in contemporary Africa. Surprising to some, research on education also matters. Two education research puzzles challenge us. One emerges from the striking continuities and omissions in decades of research on education in Africa. The other reflects and reveals constraints on African research initiatives. Both puzzles highlight how, now more than a half century since European rule ended in most of Africa, external influences continue to exercise powerful leverage, not only on education in Africa but also on education research topics, findings, and interpretations. They highlight as well the ways in which the research process itself shapes and frames what is studied and how that is studied, and constrains observations, analyses, and understandings. The challenge of this paper is to reflect critically on that process.
Just as the location of the production of new production is critical, so too is the location of the generation of knowledge. Research and researchers are not sequestered in sometimes troublesome ivory towers but rather play significant roles in maintaining inequality and dependence and thereby in entrenching poverty. While its products are consequential, the power of the established research complex lies primarily in its process, specifying who are to be recognized as knowledge producers, how knowledge is to be produced, and which knowledge is legitimate. Certainly, that complex has been challenged. Certainly it has accommodated to some critiques. Yet, its powerful influence persists.
Exploring the research process requires unpacking the research complex—incentives and rewards for researchers, academic journals and their editors, research funding organizations, and the academic disciplines. At issue are the production and producers of knowledge. The conservative charter of most education systems in Africa is reflected in and reinforced by research strategies more concerned with reproducing the social order than transforming it. Improving education quality, it turns out, requires challenging the research complex.
My concern is to explore some promising pathways in that effort to reconstruct the research process. One path starts by asking who are the researchers? How does research change when those whose actions are the focus of interest are not primarily research objects but among the researchers themselves? Another path starts by challenging the constraints imposed by disciplinary boundaries. Critical researchers are border crossers who seek to disarm, and perhaps to disable and displace, the disciplines that are the skeleton and muscles of the research complex. Developing alternatives to the laboratory experiment as the model for field research provides a third path. Needed are research strategies that emphasize interactions and reciprocal effects rather than discrete and exclusive variables. Focusing on overlapping, intersecting, and entangled interactions permits exploring causes that are also effects and effects that are simultaneously causes. This path understands learning as an interactive process, not something that instructors do to or for learners.
There are additional paths to be explored. The paper’s intent is generative. Its premise is that developing alternative research strategies for a world that is less unequal and less unjust requires unraveling, disrupting, and transforming the hegemonic research complex.

Author

• Joel Samoff, Stanford University