Pedagogical Experimentalism and the Principle of Verification. A Quest for Non-affirmative Educational Research

Abstract

AbstractStarting from the ongoing debate over whether education should take a non-affirmative stance towards reality, we pose the question of whether adopting a non-affirmative theory of education necessarily calls for a non-affirmative concept of educational research. We argue that dominant paradigms of both qualitative and quantitative research on education, respectively, assume a specific affirmative stance, which not only leads them to ignore the productive freedom of the practice of education that they investigate but also reproduces a dichotomy between education and research instead of inscribing themselves in the project of verification of the principles that are at stake in education. We do so by revisiting, first, Benner’s early outline of Pedagogy as a practically experimenting science as an alternative to dominant research paradigms, second, Mollenhauer’s critical pedagogy and its attempt to conceptualize non-affirmative educational research, and, third, Rancière’s interventional empiricism with a particular focus on the concept of practical “verification.” In this vein, we aim to contribute to the contemporary concept of non-affirmative educational research, which allows for a more precise understanding of the ways in which such an approach is at the same time affirmative with respect to the principles which are “verified” in the practice of education.