The curses and joys of educational categorisations (2020)

  • The field of education is overloaded with categories. “Good” and “bad” students, instruction and teachers being the foremost, but also categories of e.g. gender, nation-ness, race, and class, and categories of feelings such as performance anxieties and stress is operating. So is politically formulated categories such as “inclusion” and “competence”. As social science-humanities scholars of education, our research often focus on exploring such categories, but also we bring in preconstructions of such categories in our theoretical apparatus and due to our reading of the history and practices on the field we are studying.

     The course targets the challenge and question of how to establish categories in empirical material in education research with a focus on sociological, historical, political science and ethnographical approaches.

     

    How do we as education scientists establish theoretical approaches in the form of categories as optics to study the empirical material? How to establish a conversation with the material and the actors we are studiying? How to make the empirical material answering us back?

    Thse methodological questions are crucial challenges for scholars working empirical with researching education and upbringing, and the disciplines of history of education, educational sociology and ethnography and education policy studies offers different possibilities and problems in this context.

     At this one-day course we will establish a common laboratory for phd-scholars across the educational sciences to discuss and get inspired by senior scholars who work with similar challenges. We will share our laboratory work and challenges with each other.

     The learning objectives is

    -        to develop the competence of the participants to establish dialogues between empirical material and theoretical tools with a special focus on the question of categories and the process of categorization

    -        To extend the knowledge of the participant concerning the newest methodological development within the empirically and social-science/humanities (SSH)-based education sciences.

     The course provide and put into dialogue:

    - insights from the laboratory of four senior scholars speaking from respectively a transnational ethnography of education perspective (Li); a history of emotions of education-perspective (Buchardt); an applied pedagogical ethnology-perspective (Schmidt) and a Policy Ethnographic perspective (Brøgger).

    - discussion of and response to problems and data from the participants own laboratories.