Sub-theme 3: Research on Education and Training: pragmatic issues

With the issue of education having strong and almost generalized social demands, we can understand the crucial relationship between research and practice. Recurrently, the challenges of their assembly have risen in different countries. The researches on education and training are being shaped by the challenges of changing practices, actors and by issues of professional development.

- What are the impacts of research on education and training on the practices, education contexts and training? For example, in a context of the aim for universal education, what effects did the results of the research on social and sexual inequalities have? On the training of the different professionals of education and training? On the didactic support? On the educational practices? On the teaching practices?&helli

- What are the links between research, training and profession? How does the research training participate in professional training? How do the research results translate into the conception of training programs? The example of the training of teachers could inspire this sub-theme.

- There has been a quasi permanent tension between researchers and practitioners (Weiss, 1996). One usual criticism goes to the social usefulness of that kind of research. In the last few years, this criticism has led to strong controversies among British researchers on education, some (Hargeaves, 1996) calling for research that would have an influence on the practices, that involve the different actors during the entire research process, the others (Tooley, 1998) highlighting the inaccessibility of the results to the professionals concerned, the lack of scientific consistency, marked, for example, by methodological weaknesses.

How do those questions which have been addressed for years relate today? To what (new) controversies do they lead now? What (new) models of assembly can we take out of them?

- Such a trend taken under the dominance of pragmatic and prescriptive issues, subtended by a applicationnist conception of the research on education and training leads to interrogation on “the risk if a normative drift of the research models” (Bru, 2002). We may ask, for example, what is the consequence of the development of collaborative researches, associating closely the different actors to the research process? What do we gain on the comprehension, intelligibility and scientific level? On the social legitimacy level? In efficiency? In creativity and innovation in terms of the practices?… The presentation and analysis of such experiments can feed this line of questioning.