Date/Time
Date(s) - 1 September 2022
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Categories No Categories
Research Mobilities in Education
Gill Adams1, Cathy Burnett1, Petra Vackova1, Julia Gillen2, Terrie-Lynn Thompson3, Anna Cermakova2
1Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom; 2Lancaster University; 3University of StirlingPresenting
Where movements of educational research have been studied (Neal et al. 2015), no distinction has been made between the movements of different kinds of research (eg., that differ in methodology or topic). Understanding such movements matters as, if certain kinds of research evidence gain disproportionate influence or are made less visible, and/or if findings become distorted or overgeneralised as they are mediated in different ways, this will have a significant – if indirect – impact on children’s learning. Moreover, while prior research has explored how individuals and organisations broker research (Knight & Lyall 2013, Nutley & Walter 2007), there is little in-depth knowledge of how digital technologies are changing teachers’ encounters with research, for example, how algorithms, AI, machine learning, or hashtags on social media and recommender systems shape interactions between teachers and research. In an increasingly digitised environment for professional learning, these insights are needed (Thompson 2018) particularly as digital actors continue to combine in unexpected and unanticipated ways by those who design and use these digital systems (Hansen 2015). To investigate the complex actors and the relations between them that propel (or block) movements of research evidence, we adopt a sociomaterial approach that foregrounds the role of human and digital actors in mobilising research evidence (Adams & Thompson 2016, Burnett & Merchant 2020, Thompson & Adams 2020). Employing such heuristics, we will begin to examine, in this paper, how different actors combine in dynamic and often unexpected ways to generate appearances, disappearances and/or reworkings of research evidence. Our paper will therefore also offer a discussion on new theoretical and methodological resources for understanding the movements of research across education and other social sciences.