Enquiry

Abstract

The paper explores the potential for a critical realist approach to researching learning in international and comparative education (ICE) with a particular focus on the emerging post-2015 education and development agenda. It provides a critique of existing empiricist and interpretivist approaches to researching learning. It is suggested that whilst both have strengths, they are based on an ontologically reductionist view of learning with implications for research, policy and practice. As a ‘third’ research approach critical realism has the potential to build on the strengths whilst avoiding the pitfalls of both empiricism and interpretivism. Such an approach it is argued, needs to start from an ontologically inclusive and laminated view of learning. Further, it is suggested that comparative research should focus on the development of theories of learning that are able to explain the natural and social structures and causal mechanisms that give rise to and inhibit learning at different scales and levels and in different contexts.

Speaker

Biography: Leon Tikly started his career as a science teacher first in London comprehensives and then in a school for South African refugees in Morogoro, Tanzania. He completed his postgraduate studies at the University of Glasgow. His PhD thesis is on Education Policy in South Africa Since 1947. He then worked as a policy researcher at the Education Policy Unit, University of Witwatersrand during the transition period between apartheid and democracy in South Africa where he helped to formulate education policy for the new provincial and national governments. On returning to the UK, Leon worked as a lecturer in international and comparative education at the University of Birmingham before taking up a position at Bristol. His areas of research interest are: education quality in low income countries; globalisation and education policy; the achievement of minority ethnic learners in the UK; education management and policy in South Africa.

All welcome

For registration, please email Will: at douglas@ied.edu.hk