Seven Basic Professional Questions on Educational Research, as Answered by 14 Life Stories

• In Event: 29.022 - The Making of an Educational Researcher: Life Experiences From Different National and Disciplinary Backgrounds

Abstract

This intervention will address the contents of the 14 biographies in order to compare, contrast, and analyze the way 7 basic professional questions have been answered according to the life experiences and the selected remembrances voluntarily recorded of researchers from so different international and interdisciplinary backgrounds:
1) Identity: what are we? Scholars, academics, or educational researchers? How do we identify and summarize a now long life career? 2) Coming from so very different disciplinary or intellectual orientations including curriculum development, economics, educational measurement and statistical analysis, history, philosophy, policy analysis, program evaluation, psychology, and sociology, why –and how- did these 14 fellows chose education as main field of inquiry ? 3) What was the role of family nurturing, schooling, or professional experience in the ways we learnt to research in the fussy and elusive field of education? 4) How difficult was the road to educational research, to initiate it and to pursue it as a life career? 5) Coming from many different countries: Australia, Belgium, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Israel, Mexico, South Africa, and the USA, was educational research a recognized field for research, were the institutional working conditions for doing educational research, similar, different? 6) Working in different institutional contexts and different countries, what was the priority given to research among other academic and or professional tasks? 7) Which have been the factors that may explain the consolidation of a life career in educational research among people coming from so many different backgrounds?

Author

• Maria De Ibarrola, Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas Center for Advanced Studies and Research