This talk by Dr Thomas Delahunty, School of Education aims to present some of my recent attempts to reckon with the hidden colonial character 'of scientific' educational and social science research, in particular forms of quantitative research that monopolise current era policy formation. My ultimate aim is to present some of my reflective journey from a position of a mainstream quantitative idealist to now, and to start a conversation about building more equitable decolonial approaches to this type of research in education and broader social science fields.
The current era of our global society can be viewed as a time of turmoil marked by a series of critical events, from the murder of George Floyd and rise of the Black Lives Matter movement to the rebirth of fascism in the form of the far-right extremist worldview, recently striking close to home in the arrest of a second-level teacher for refusing to accept a pupil's wish to be referred to by their gender non-binary identity. For some these events have been largely ignored and life goes on as normal, but for others these events have forced a reflection on the larger principles and practices of systemic beliefs and processes in our society. This is also true within the realm of educational research, where these types of events have lent credence to movements in critical theory and social justice. However, impact of these strands of scholarship are concomitantly undermined by the neoliberal influences on education, which catalyse scholarship that mobilises to 'make education better' in the form of improved teaching and learning practices, viewed in the political sphere as increased performances in national and international large scale assessments.
Researchers adopting the goals of improving practices mirrors other goal areas of broader social science fields, however these aims are often implicitly/unconsciously disconnected from the overall purpose or values of the very practices they wish to improve. This is inordinately apparent in the field of educational studies where the predominant knowledge leveraged in policy development and implementation is characterised as cognitive, more often than not represented as 'scientific' in nature. Researchers in this space expound the necessity for rigour, in both theory and method, and often unwittingly avoid any questions regarding the ultimate value of that which they wish to improve. Moreover, the style of research adopted is often solely quantitative in nature employing complex statistical analyses with aims of generalisable understandings often subjectively disidentifying with issues of oppression and inequality highlighted by the types of global critical events mentioned previously. In particular, these ‘scientific’ approaches to social science research fail to acknowledge the shared etiology of mainstream methods with settler colonialism and imperialism, which historically were mobilised to justify the oppression of indigenous peoples, and contemporaneously continue to be reproduced in current ‘scientific’ models of research fuelling further oppression and inequalities, often unwittingly.
The purpose of this talk is to present some of my initial attempts to decolonise my own world of research, coming from a position of once identifying with these scientific ideologies. In this session, I will draw on the work of scholars such as David Gillborn and Gert Biesta to unsettle some of the often unquestioned logics of research under this approach in an attempt to resist some of the neo-colonial logics that threaten broader attempts to achieve more equitable and valuable research impact in education research specifically. This talk will be of interest to anyone in social sciences research areas wishing to consider some of the hidden assumptions underlying mainstream scientific ideologies and methods. It presents initial thinking and analysis rather than readily identifiable solutions and will ideally help to stimulate further thinking and discussions for the Maynooth scholarly community.
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