Educational Sciences: Evolutions of a Pluridisciplinary Discipline at the Crossroads of other Disciplinary and Professional Fields (20th Century)

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Article

Reference

Educational Sciences: Evolutions of a Pluridisciplinary Discipline at the Crossroads of other Disciplinary and Professional Fields (20th

Century)

HOFSTETTER, Rita

Abstract

Educational phenomena and child development fascinate many disciplines for which they offer a tremendous field of experimentation and application. More than a hundred years ago, when educational sciences adopted the main institutional emblems of an academic discipline (chairs, diploma, laboratories, scientific network etc.), they obviously vacillated between the dream of becoming a unified science (as pedology testifies), and the claim of a rewarding pluridisciplinarity that could synergise all disciplines concerned with the child and with education. This paper asserts that the issue of pluridisciplinarity is constitutive for the development of sciences of education whose object is ever coveted by other disciplines. The first section adopts the point of view of a social history and, on the basis of voluminous archives, it describes the main lines of the shaping of this pluridisciplinary field in Geneva, representative of that which also occurs elsewhere. In the second part, it presents a more theoretical reflection on the tensions and pitfalls of what we call the ‘process of disciplinarisation' of educational sciences, [...]

HOFSTETTER, Rita. Educational Sciences: Evolutions of a Pluridisciplinary Discipline at the Crossroads of other Disciplinary and Professional Fields (20th Century). British Journal of Educational Studies , 2012, vol. 60, no. 4, p. 317-335

DOI : 10.1080/00071005.2012.729666

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Vol. 60, No. 4, December 2012, pp. 317–335

EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES: EVOLUTIONS OF A

PLURIDISCIPLINARY DISCIPLINE AT THE CROSSROADS OF OTHER DISCIPLINARY AND PROFESSIONAL FIELDS (20TH CENTURY)

byRITAHOFSTETTER,University of Geneva

ABSTRACT: Educational phenomena and child development fascinate many disciplines for which they offer a tremendous field of experimentation and application. More than a hundred years ago, when educational sciences adopted the main institutional emblems of an academic discipline (chairs, diploma, laboratories, scientific network etc.), they obviously vacillated between the dream of becoming a unified science (as pedology testifies), and the claim of a rewarding pluridisciplinarity that could synergise all disci- plines concerned with the child and with education. This paper asserts that the issue of pluridisciplinarity is constitutive for the development of sciences of education whose object is ever coveted by other disciplines. The first section adopts the point of view of a social history and, on the basis of voluminous archives, it describes the main lines of the shaping of this pluridisciplinary field in Geneva, representative of that which also occurs elsewhere. In the sec- ond part, it presents a more theoretical reflection on the tensions and pitfalls of what we call the ‘process of disciplinarisation’ of educational sciences, outlining the characteristics of this constitutively pluridisciplinary field.

Keywords: pluridisciplinarity, educational sciences, process of disciplinarisation, professional fields, Institut Rousseau

1. INTRODUCTION:THEDREAM OF AUNITEDSCIENCE?¹

Let us go back one century to August 1911 in Brussels. More than 500 delegates were meeting for thePremier Congrès International de Pédologie. Who were they? Scientists, ministers of education, teachers and parents from 35 countries.

Their ambition was to createonenew science,thescience of the child (see also other pedology projects: Blum, 1898; Chrisman, 1896). For them, science should fuseallknowledge available on the child and on education: medicine, neurology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, anthropometry, hygiene, biology, eugenism, criminol- ogy, sociology, demography, history, anthropology, philosophy, and pedagogy, of course. But, always in the background, the most important reference and model was psychology (Ioteyko, 1912).

Unification of those multiple disciplines treating the child was seen as a means for more scientific, pedagogical and social impact. The united science aimed at

ISSN 0007-1005 (print)/ISSN 1467-8527 (online)

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knowing thereal natureof the child better, and thus favouring his or her development. It was also saturated with the hope of elucidating theoriginalmystery – one knows the importance of Recapitulation Theory (Ottavi, 2001). In spotlighting the new generations, this science was, moreover, wholly projected toward the future that it hoped to improve. So, in treating theoriginand thefutureof humankind, this science – proclaimed some Congress delegates – was the ‘Queen of Sciences’: ‘La science de l’enfant reçoit aujourd’hui son sacre de reine des sciences!’ (Schuyten, 1912, p. 19). It had the vocation to be perpetual. In fact, pedology would be all but perpetual. Today, neither the word, nor the thing, nor its ambition exists any longer (Depaepe, 1987, 1997; De Vroede, 1977; Friedrichet al., in press).

That same summer of 1911, in Geneva, the pedologist, psychologist, and physician Edouard Claparède created what he called the ‘first temple’ wholly dedicated to childhood (Letter from Claparède to Bovet, November 1911, Archives Institut Rousseau). He responded to a demand by teachers who wanted to be better educated. The spirit of his project resembled that of Brussels. Its denomination, theInstitut Rousseau/Ecole des Sciences de l’Education, would, however, be radi- cally different. The name Rousseau was chosen because Jean-Jacques was deemed to be the first who proclaimed the necessity to observe the child in order to know the laws of his or her natural development and to adapt education to it: ‘Le système éducatif gravitant autour de l’enfant, non plus l’enfant couché bon gré mal gré dans le lit de Procuste du système, voilà le grande principe de méthode qui fait de Rousseau le Copernic de la pédagogie’ (Claparède, 1912a, p. 103; see also 1911, 1912b). The plurality of sciencesof education (Ecole des Sciences de l’Education) was not only new but it also became famous. Since then, it is the term used for des- ignating the disciplinary field in Latin countries. Indeed, Claparède considered that all training in the domain of education was necessarily pluridisciplinary, including the same sciences mentioned in the Brussels Congress. Psychology would always be dominant.

The Brussels and Geneva initiatives illustrate a much broader movement in Western countries – especially in the USA, Germany, Great Britain and France. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new field of knowledge emerged. Seminars, courses, diploma, laboratories, chairs, faculties, dedicated to research on the child and on education, appeared. This field covered contrasted configurations (Depaepe, 1993; Drewek and Luth, 1998; Hofstetter and Schneuwly, 2007, 2009; Lagemann, 2000) and many names: Educational Studies, Educational Science(s) or Research, Child Psychology, Child Study, Erziehungswissenschaft(en), Pädagogik, Experimentelle Pädagogik/ Didaktik, Kinder- und Jugendkunde, pédologie, Science(s) de l’éducation, psychologie de l’enfant, pédagogie expérimentale, recherche éducationnelle, Investigación educativa,Pedagogua.

This diversity, at that time and still today, is seen as richness: the dialogue between disciplines is an additional value for understanding educational phenomena. But, the opposite is also true, as it provokes doubt: education cannot be looked at scientifically; educational sciences construct their legitimacy essentially

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by paradigms emanating from other disciplines, above all, philosophy, sociology and psychology. Indeed, many researchers in education come from other disciplines; some of them even consider their presence in a department of education as failure. It is as if this field had difficulties in being recognised as a discipline. It is more like a ‘practical theory’, as Durkheim claimed (1911) – and yet Durkheim won academic recognition thanks to educational science, since he obtained a chair and became professor in this domain at the Sorbonne in Paris (1902–1917).² Educational sciences also constituted a springboard for Piaget, who did not think highly of them. However, it was precisely in theEcole des Sciences de l’Education that he established his niche in order to construct his oeuvre, which we shall see anon. In short, huge contrasts and contradictions appeared:

•

An immense ambition to study the child and to build educational sciences (pedology asthescience)versushuge disappointment and great difficulties in constructing this discipline.

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Strong social demands regarding a discipline that is presumed to solve educational problems versus permanent tensions between theorists and practitioners, the latter criticising the former as armchair professors or pedants, ‘pedagogues en chambre’, who speak about the reality of the terrain without knowing it.

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Synchronised initiatives almost everywhere in the world for constructing educational research, butunder extremely different names and forms, heteroclite configurations.

•

A dialogue in a great pluridisciplinary traditionversusa negative judgment of the field considered as less legitimate than other sciences, without proper scientific identity.

Already present one century ago, these contradictions are still active today, arousing our curiosity and prompting our research on the history of educational sciences.³

2. MAINLINES OF ADISCIPLINARISATIONPROCESS:THEGENEVAEXAMPLE

Point of View

Borrowing from certain currents of history and of sociology of sciences (Ben- David, 1997; Blanckaertet al., 1993; Bourdieu, 2001; McCulloch, 2003, 2011;

Schrieweret al., 1993), we have privileged a social history of educational sciences with four considerations in this respect:

1. It is a historylongue durée, in order to capture the main motor forces of the field’s evolution, since we were surprised as much by both the persistence as by the radical ruptures in one century.

2. It is an empirical history, based on many archives, in order to describe the concrete configurations of educational sciences and the result of their

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institutionalisation and intellectual activities: analysis of the evolutions of posts, curricula, publications, conferences, and networks.

3. It is a history contending that a diversity of actors influence the field: first of all teachers, practitioners, school administrators, parents and students but also scholars from different disciplinary horizons.

4. It is also a social history because it contextualises the evolution of the discipline. It looks at how the political, cultural, economic and social contexts transform scientific practices, and how, in return, these practices have an impact on the context.

This social history describes and analyses the evolution of the institutional forms of the disciplinary field, of its human and financial resources, of its privileged domains of investigation – proper to it or shared with other disciplines –, of its networks and associations, of its capacities to educate new members of the com- munity and, thus, to auto-reproduce itself. It shows that a disciplinary field is itself still in constant transformation – including specialisation, differentiation, professionalisation, depicted by the concept of disciplinarisation (Blanckaert, 1993;

Hofstetter and Schneuwly, 1998; Mucchielli, 1998); that it renews its objects, methods and approaches, its relationship to other fields as well as its social and institutional context. Privileging such an approach permits avoidance of a tele- ological and internal history of sciences. It shows how concrete social demands and pressures transform the entire field of knowledge. It observes the actors at work, actors whose profile, actions and networks are hybrid. It demonstrates above all that a disciplinary field never ceases to evolve: the boundaries are moving between researchers and practitioners, between scientific research and educational, and even internationalist, militancy, between science and policy, between different disciplines. In other words, since their inception, educational sciences, as other disciplines, have been hybrid and plural. Therefore, trans-, inter-, multi- and pluridisciplinarity – which are in vogue today and which will be discussed in section 3 – have resulted from a long historical construct, to which the sciences of education bear witness.

The example of the main phases of development of educational sciences in Geneva illustrates these characteristics very clearly. But, they can be observed in other parts of the world (Depaepe, 1993; Drewek and Luth, 1998; Keiner and Schriewer, 2000), with analogous tensions. Let us schematise them.

From the Institut Rousseau (1912) to the Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l’éducation (1975)⁴

A Discipline for the School of the Republic. In Geneva – as in many other Western countries – the first chair of educational science was created (1890) on the initiative of school administration, of the Minister of Education. At the end of the nineteenth century, when the State popularised scholarisation and created a public system of education, it expected pedagogy and educational

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science (singular) to contribute to the efficiency of the system and to the training of teachers. Teachers themselves asked for a better professional education. They wanted to attend university, searching for answers to their practical problems. In short, the emergence of this new field of knowledge was closely linked to a socio-professional and political demand. The first disciplinary forms were thus prescriptive; it was a moral science, permeated by philosophy.

In Favour of an Experimental Science. Many teachers and scientists soon criti- cised this speculative and prescriptive science. They united in order to build an experimental approach to educational phenomena. In Geneva, inspired by what happened in the USA, Great Britain, Germany, Belgium and France, Edouard Claparède opened his Laboratory of Psychology also for teachers. With them, he created a Society for the Psychology of the Child in 1905, and he conducted considerable experimental research in the classroom; he gave many conferences, and he wrote tens of publications.

The first resolutely scientific approaches followed a psychological paradigm;

thus the concept of psycho-pedagogy was introduced, perhaps invented by Claparède (1905) himself. It was a concept widely used in Latin countries. But biology and many social sciences also influenced their research on education. The aim was to apply discoveries emanating from other sciences to the education field, which was, therefore, considered a field of application that intellectuals from many different horizons invested in in order to test and to renew their knowledge about the child and his or her development. Those who spoke in favour of an autonomous science of the child – like the pedologues mentioned above – were not necessarily driven by pedagogical motives; their ambition was, above all, to know the child and his or her supposedly natural laws of development.

For Educational Studies. When Claparède opened the Institute Rousseau, he named it, as we have seen, School of Educational ScienceS. Indeed, he believed that in order to train teachers, many existing disciplines were useful; the first programme included all of those mentioned at the beginning of this paper.

The most important were psychology, biology, experimental pedagogy, techno- psychology, didactics, medicine, hygiene and sociology; but many others were proposed: anthropometry, neurology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, eugenism, crim- inology, demography, history, anthropology and philosophy. Claparède decided to create a private institution, without any link to official institutions, precisely because he thought that university structures compartmentalised the disciplines too much and, therefore, that they hindered pluridisciplinary courses of study that were, in his view, essential in order to guarantee a better comprehension of the complex educational phenomenon by practitioners.

But the scientific discipline Claparède and his colleagues wanted to build was dominated by psychology. And it was not by chance that many of their publications appeared in the journalArchives de Psychologie(founded by Claparède and Théodore Flournoy in 1901).

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The Années Folles of Education: a Discipline for the New Era. The Institut Rousseau/Ecole des Sciences de l’Educationsuddenly had an unforeseen influence. Students from all continents came to Geneva. Most influential scholars in the world of education arrived to deliver conferences. In fact, after the First World War, one could hear everywhere: ‘Never again!’ and everywhere the ambition to build, through education, a humanity able to live in peace. During theseannées folles,Geneva became a symbol of this ideal with the creation of many international organisations (Kott and Droux, 2012). The Rousseau Institute contributed to this pacifist educational effervescence. Its actors like Edouard Claparède, Adolphe Ferrière, Pierre Bovet, Alice Descoeudres, Robert Dottrens, and Jean Piaget devoted themselves body and soul to the cause of the child. They created schools as vivid laboratories of their research: theMaison des Petits(1913), a medico- pedagogical consultation (1913), a psychotechnic office (1918) and the Ecole Internationale(1924), with a network connected to the League of Nations. They carried out thousands of observations, tests, and experiments. They organised hundreds of conferences, lessons, seminars and international congresses – thus becoming sorts of ‘globetrotters’ (Hameline, 2002) of the science of the child.

In this same context, they created, in 1925, their own International Bureau of Education (IBE), inspired by similar initiatives taken elsewhere. This IBE was conceived as a reference point for all institutions in the world, working for intellectual cooperation, international solidarity and educational renewal through the science of the child. It had strong links with the League of Nations and the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Still in this same dynamic context, theNew Education Fellowship(NEF) was created (Calais, 1921). The Genevan Adolphe Ferrière was responsible for his French-speaking journal Pour l’Ere Nouvelleto ‘commune together in the Cult of Childhood for serving Humanity of Tomorrow’ (Ferrière, 1927, p. 262). This title and those of the GermanDas Werdende Zeitalter(edited by Elizabeth Rotten) and the EnglishThe New Era(by Beatrice Ensor) expressed the aim of the movement. Thus, in Geneva, the discipline evolved very potently while, at the same time, it had a huge international impact, thanks to its militant engagement.

Science and militancy grew by reinforcing each other, thus creating the very thriving intellectual, socio-economic and political context of the post-war period.

From Internationality to Internationalism.At the end of the 1920s, in fact, the Rousseau Institute was entirely permeated with its ambition to build a new humanity, without borders, living in peace. Education was one cause among others in order to regenerate humanity as such. The Institute also worked for more social justice, for the rights of women, the farmers and the blacks; for the diffusion of Esperanto, and for many similar noble goals. In other words, internationalism became an aim in itself. Militancy dominated science. The ambitions were, of course, excessive; the disappointments were at the height of the illusions. The 1929 Crash, the economic and political crisis in Geneva and the fragility of the League of Nations reinforced the conflicts in the Institute Rousseau itself. Indeed, the pedagogues of the Institute were entirely occupied by international, pacifist and

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humanitarian causes. Therefore, they no longer had the time and energy to carry out large-scale research projects on educational questions. The new generation, and more particularly psychologists, had a more academic vision of the institution. The gap widened between the older and the new generations and between pedagogues and psychologists whose dominance grew to the detriment of other disciplines. A new identity was required for the survival of the Institute.

Academisation, Disciplinarisation under the Aegis of Psychology. That identity was found by integrating the Rousseau Institute into the University of Geneva in 1929. The Institute, the university and political authorities agreed unanimously that such integration was the only means to save the Institute, to recognise and to benefit from its international impact. The State also conveyed to the Institute responsibility for the education of its own teachers. But the Institut Rousseau was obliged to renounce its militancy in education, its pacifism and even internationalism, in order to assume its mission in the new academic context.

Dedication entirely to science was a pre-requisite.

During the next two decades, this science focused first and foremost on psychology of the child, which, under the aegis of Piaget, expanded prodigiously.

However, education was considered a mere terrain of application, or even a vivid laboratory for psychological experiments. The tensions were very strong between psychologists and pedagogues. The plural became a singular: psychology dominated outrageously. A psychology, moreover, that under Piaget’s direction did not integrate educational phenomena, for it was interested essentially in the genetic construction of intelligence as a natural functional process of assimilation and accommodation.

This was the poorest period for educational sciences. One could even say that they hardly existed in Geneva: Piaget’s theories and methodologies dominated everything. Psychology and pedagogy ignored or despised each other.

School Explosion and Expansion of Educational Sciences as a ‘Pluridisciplinary Discipline’. At the end of the Second World War, educational sciences developed vibrantly again in Geneva as in other Western countries. With the ‘school explosion’, the education system required reconfiguration. Educational sciences were expected to advocate democratisation of the school, to educate teachers at university, to encourage economic expansion due to higher qualifications of both the working force and executives.

In Geneva, this led to the establishment of the Faculty of Psychology and Sciences of Education. In other words: to the differentiation of psychology and pedagogy and the recognition of educational scienceS as a disciplinary field in itself. An impressive number of posts were created. And for the first time, after more than 60 years, the Institute opened autonomous professorial chairs not only in psychology of education but also in didactics, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, ethnology, politics and the economy of education.

For the past 35 years, these disciplines have participated in the construction of a true ‘pluridisciplinary discipline’: scholars with plural profiles act together in

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the same disciplinary field and networks; they do collective research on the same educational questions; they enrich each other in an overt dialogue and renewal, thanks to the contribution of different disciplines, the questions and the knowledge on the educational phenomena that they have studied. The dominance of the psychological paradigm weakened in favour of a more contextualised vision of education, the individual subject, for instance, being considered henceforth in his or her socio-historical dimensions as well.

The dream of a united science was over. After decades of quarrels with psychology – in fact, not really interested in the teaching and learning processes, in their contexts – educational sciences have been recognised as a legitimate discipline, in fact, as a pluridisciplinary field.

And they exist, in large part, because, for a century, they have contributed to the education of practitioners, of teachers, above all. The moving forces of their development have derived principally from their aptitude to respond to social and professional demands: they have assisted school administrations concerned with school system output; they have also been engaged in social causes, in militant networks, favouring the renewal of pedagogical practices; and they have claimed plural approaches in order to comprehend the complexity of educational phenomena. Pluridisciplinarity, therefore, is obviously constitutive of a science that aims at responding to certain social demands, at articulating its scientific inquiry to practical perspective and at enriching its contributions by the support of all disciplines interested in the child and in education.

Several empirical research projects in other contexts (see, for example, the papers in Drewek and Luth, 1998) also illustrate this fact. Therefore, a theoretical analysis of these phenomena is useful and heuristic in order to capture their impact, their forces and tensions, on the basis of an abundance of litera- ture dedicated to the social history of sciences. This analysis also lays the basis for determining the strengths and weakness of educational sciences due to their

‘pluridisciplinarity constitution’.

3. THEORETICALREFLECTION ON THETENSIONS ANDPITFALLS OF THE

PROCESS OFDISCIPLINARISATION OFEDUCATIONALSCIENCES

Over the last century, the sciences of education have adopted the institutional forms (chairs, specialised research institutes, academic degree courses, networks of researchers, scientific tools. . .) of a discipline. They are the result of a long uninterrupted ‘disciplinarisation process’, only one example of which we have seen. This process has fostered the redefinition of issues that have been studied, and it has even led to the emergence of entirely new disciplinary fields, especially through the creation of new social and scientific communities. Many researchers have described this process from the same point of view of a social history like ours (see references above). They have paid particular attention to the process of internal and external differentiation during which domains or disciplinary fields

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redefine themselves with regard to other domains and disciplinary fields within the entire disciplinary system. This process has made use of a logic pertaining to fission, sometimes to fusion and sometimes to an extension into virgin territory (Becher, 1989). This movement becomes solidified in specific institutions, desig- nations, degree courses and in posts that professionalise research. In this way, a new domain gradually acquires the institutional assets of a discipline and a degree of institutionalisation that, conversely, will have cognitive effects.

These researchers have shown that the process of disciplinarisation has different shapes in function of various disciplines. We rely on them in order to demonstrate that the relationship with the professional fields of reference (Apel et al.; Becher, 1990; 1999) has an essential impact on pluridisciplinarity.

Relationship to the Professional Fields of Reference

In line with Stichweh’s (1987, 1994) theory, we assert that pluridisciplinarity is, in fact, a constitutive motor force in disciplines that are built in reference to professions that pre-exist them. Let us briefly synthesise Stichweh’s typology (1987).

He distinguishes two forms of disciplinarisation: ‘primary disciplinarisation’ and

‘secondary disciplinarisation’. The first category assembles the disciplines that emerge in reference to a renewal that is proper to the scientific activity itself, without a prior, clearly-defined professional field of reference. The process of disciplinarisation, in this case, is not primarily undertaken with reference to professional knowledge but essentially in relation to academic knowledge and cognitive tasks. Stichweh gives, as an example, physics whose main internal dynamic is created by the scientific approach of cognitive and scientific questions, themselves often linked to practical problems, but not to an already given profession.

Psychology is a significant discipline of this type.

The second category regroups the disciplines that originate from previously existing professional fields of reference, within which professional knowledge has been accumulated. These disciplinary fields are closely linked to the professions in their field of reference, from which the social demands, for socio-professional reasons, will mould the field’s development powerfully. Stichweh presents medicine as an example.

Since they are built on a sum of knowledge developed around previously constituted professional fields, and they respond to social demands coming from socio-professional, political and administrative domains, the sciences of education can also be classified in the second category. Their disciplinary construction is even more delicate because they are necessarily pluridisciplinary, being found at the intersection of other disciplines, with which the sciences of education maintain close, yet complex, relationships and from which the very process of disciplinarisation interferes with that of the sciences of education. All this leads to the issue of disciplinary boundaries with particular acuity (the same issue is, of course, also found within other disciplines: Stichweh demonstrates this for medicine and law).

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We reinterpret Stichweh’s typology in defining an axis with two poles: thus allowing us better to take into account the dynamic of the disciplinarisation movement whose relationship with social and professional fields of reference changes constantly in function with historical and cultural contexts. Since the relationships between disciplinary and professional fields always do evolve, we qualify the processes as ‘predominantly primary’ or ‘predominantly secondary’

disciplinarisation. In other words, the processes of disciplinarisation ‘predominantly primary’ and ‘predominantly secondary’ are not completely different, but they are dialectically related insofar as, in each discipline, the ‘sub-dominant’

trend is equally active. Sciences of education are clearly situated on the pole of the predominantly secondary disciplinarisation, whereas psychology is char- acterised by a predominantly secondary professionalisation. Both, nevertheless, are intertwined, and both, over time, change their relationship to the professional field of education: educational sciences become more and more autonomous from them, whereas psychology comes closer from the moment when the first professions of school psychologist appear. Indeed, while psychology, for example, seems to be undergoing an essentially primary disciplinarisation process, it has gradually been seeking practical fields of application (mainly for applied psychology) that are able to grant it greater social recognition, a springboard for the widening of its institutional foundation and, eventually, wider scientific recognition.

This differentiated relationship towards professional fields of reference has an essential impact on the moving forces of the disciplinarisation process.

Educational sciences are emblematic in this respect as evidenced by their claim for pluridisciplinarity and disciplinary autonomy at the onset.

Tensions as Motors of Development

On the basis of historical research that describes and analyses these phenomena, we advance the thesis that two tensions condition, in both senses, the disciplinarisation process in educational sciences: they are the conditions of the existence and development of the discipline, but they also condition their concrete evolution.

These tensions result from the necessarily contradictory relationship that the sciences of education maintain with the professional fields from which the sciences emanate, on the one hand, and with disciplines that already exist or are within the process of construction on the other hand.

1. Tension between the adjustment to social demands, linked to educational areas and socio-professional issues, and the search for scientific recognition implies a momentary suspension of the praxeological dimension.Sustained by powerful social demands and, at the same time, urged to distance itself from practice in order to construct findings without previously-defined praxeological objectives, the sciences of education are at once located at the interface of imperatives created by pragmatic or professional factors and by scientific aspects. This interface

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will have a dynamic effect on the field’s development, the selection of research subjects, the way to approach them, etc.

This tension seems to have functioned as a motive behind the emergence and ultimate development of the sciences of education primarily because of a powerful socio-professional, political and administrative demand that the disciplinary field emerge and develop. Most chairs in pedagogy in Western countries are initi- ated or, at least, heavily favoured by school administrations, and many of them are first taken over by practitioners who seek a higher qualification. Contents are, therefore, strongly articulated with social fields of reference. Inversely, the very possibility that the sciences of education should exist as a disciplinary field appeals to the construction of stabilised research subjects, recognised and reliable methods, networks of communications for research results, academic institutions that recognise the field, in short, research activity that assumes partial suspension of action.

Each of the poles of the tension becomes a force of attraction; this tension may engender two potential risks; at its extreme points, which act as forces of attraction, the tension can also provoke pitfalls:

1.1. The first pitfall relies on the fact that the adaptation to social demands becomes submission with the risk that the researchers confound their role with that of the expert or the practitioner, the special social practice of knowledge construction with educational action, and the discipline with its object. This first pitfall has as its possible consequence the orientation and appreciation of the research on the basis of the only criterion of practical incidence and of efficiency of intervention. This problem appears with particular strength when the main ori- entations of legitimate research are defined, for instance, when the researchers and the purveyors of funds define the problems and questions in function of the demands of the professional field (in the large sense defined above) and not in function of questions and theoretical needs defined from within the disciplinary field.

1.2. The second pitfall relies on the fact that the distance to the educational action negates the specificities of educational action; in other words: professional fields are treated only as fields for applying scientific theories and models, without integrating education as such into the theory.

Thus, it has, as its possible consequence, the negation of the specificities of educational phenomena because the object of knowledge, namely education, is not modelised as such; models constructed outside the field are, in a certain sense, confounded with reality itself. This risk becomes particularly evident when scientific models, which are constructed in laboratory situations, are invoked to define, by direct application, the efficiency of a reform or strategies of action in highly complex situations.

2. Tension between the phenomenon of autonomisation relative to disciplines of reference and the pluridisciplinary development of the sciences of education. With regard to the scientific positions and disciplinary foundations that are recognised

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as being legitimate, this tension concerns the relationship that both the sciences of education and each of their key players maintain with the other social sciences.

The sciences of education are in the delicate position of being pluridisciplinary, while simultaneously endeavouring to be recognised as an autonomous scientific discipline. As shown by Keiner and Schriewer (2000), this tension takes different forms in function to contrasted academic cultures.

The sciences of education have won their autonomy progressively as an academically unified field by emancipating themselves from so-called ‘mother’

disciplines, notably philosophy, psychology and sociology, while still upholding their referential plural. The development of the disciplinary field is thus closely interwoven with the development of other social sciences. The sciences of education integrate these contributions of the social sciences dynamically, while revamping them in a flow of knowledge through interactions, allowing for the emergence of new fields and issues that belong to the sciences of education.

Here we must deal with the relationship – be it distancing or referencing – to disciplinary knowledge that has been constituted and recognised as being legitimate from a scientific perspective. Again, each pole acts as a force of attraction with a potential risk:

2.1. The first one relies on the fact that the distance to disciplinary knowledge becomes negation of any disciplinary approach. The legitimacy, or even the possibility itself of a specialised, scientific approach, centered on limited dimensions of the research object, treated by methods that are (at least mentally) reproducible, is negated with reference to the specificity of the object education and its global, complex and singular character.

2.2. The reference to constituted disciplinary knowledge turns into deference and dependence, as if only the ‘pure’ disciplinary specialisations – the ‘sister sciences’ are still perceived as ‘mother sciences’ – are authorised to grasp the object education in a scientific manner.

The pitfalls or these two tensions echo each other.

The confusion of science and militancy (1.1) resembles the negation of disciplinary approaches (2.1). In both cases, practical potentialities and the immediate characteristics of educational phenomena impose the forms and gestures of the analysis of educational phenomena. Geneva between the two World Wars is an emblematic example of this. The main protagonists of the Institute Rousseau were totally engaged in a humanist, pacifist, internationalist militancy that aimed at building a new era: conflating science and militancy, the Institute itself was threat- ened with disappearance, since it hadn’t taken up the challenge of developing and preserving pedagogical empirical research sufficiently. A certain vision of transdisciplinarity that denies the legitimacy of any disciplinary approach also illustrates it.

The other two pitfalls (1.2. and 2.2) also echo each other since both, potentially, negate the specificities of educational phenomena in considering education

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as a mere field of application. The research on child development in ‘Piaget’s industry’ (Hofstetteret al., 2012) – one knows how successful it was in Geneva – exemplifies this pitfall, since the theories of Piaget and his collaborators are often used as important references for pedagogical reforms. And yet, Piaget’s theory was explicitly conceived of in abstracting any educational intervention by plac- ing, in the centre, the epistemic subject and in revealing the laws of development, based on supposedly exclusive natural, biological mechanisms such as accommodation and assimilation. The predominance of the reference to psychology in the educational field demonstrates how much this ideology continues (Smeyers and Depapepe, in press), relayed by many famous researchers.

Thus, the sciences of education are constantly evolving, in search of a balance between being permanently redefined and regained in accordance with the evolution of professional fields and disciplinary knowledge that function as poles of attraction; every researcher is urged to position himself or herself with respect to these poles. As long as a sort of epistemological, critical and constant vigilance takes place to prevent the risks that the tensions run, such tensions function as dynamic forces, offering, at least, the very possibility of renewing the disciplinary field in terms of its objects, methods and its institutional, socio-professional and disciplinary foundations.

Are the Tensions Specific to Educational Sciences?

There is no reason to believe that the two tensions described are specific to sciences of education. All disciplinary fields, and particularly those resulting from a process of ‘predominantly secondary disciplinarisation’, are continuously forced to clarify their relationship to social demands and other constituted disciplines (Gillipsie, 1988; Le Dinh, 1997; Wagneret al., 1991). But the tensions act – as we have described – with a particularly vivid force in sciences of education. Some possible reasons for that are:

1. The object of sciences of education, the ‘educational action’, very often

‘the child’, appears to be irreducible for many of the actors, quite often including researchers. Some scholars pretend that it would be illegitimate to transform it into an object of scientific investigation. Scientific approaches in sciences of education are questioned, and even challenged, suspected of being positivist, fragmented or illegitimate. It is as if the specificities of its object should also characterise the disciplinary field itself identically.

2. Education, school and teaching are objects which are strongly invested because they are important levers for action on society. Since its beginning, education has been coveted by all social sciences, for they all have seen in it not only a privileged locus of application but also an essential locus of influence to enlarge the power of each of them.

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3. More perhaps than any other disciplinary field, sciences of education are articulated to many professional fields. Although, at the origin, essentially the teaching professions, including their administrative and political links, were concerned, many other professions have been added: adult educators, social workers, educators in special education.

4. Sciences of education remain strongly dependent on the local and national structures of educational systems. Even if it is true that any discipline has its national variants and style of research (Schriewer, 2000;

Schriewer, et al., 1993), as often noted in the sociology of science (Ringer, 1992), most other disciplines are essentially oriented interna- tionally, and their evolution follows essentially a scientific logic, which is linked to the internal structure of the discipline. Sciences of education, on their part, continue to be heavily dependent on national and local contexts (Langewand and von Prondcsynsky, 1999) since they are strongly articulated to education systems.

The Pluridisciplinary Characteristics of the Educational Sciences

The pluridisciplinary dimension constitutes one of the principal characteristics of disciplines strongly connected to social or professional demands. Many disciplines with blurred boundaries and with patterns of evolution intertwine certain disciplines with others. This pluridisciplinary nature deserves particular attention with regard to the sciences of education. First and foremost, several disciplines (psychology, philosophy and sociology, for example) have, for a long time, contributed powerfully to the development of findings with regard to educational phenomena, whether within institutions pertaining to the disciplines or in other departments.

Furthermore, the very subject of this discipline – educational action – constitutes an issue that has been said to ‘cross’, ‘transcend’ if not ‘subsume’ several other disciplines; this feature calls for an approach that is simultaneously disciplinary (focused on a specific discipline), multidisciplinary (combining several disciplinary perspectives), inter- and transdisciplinary (for example: early childhood education, adult education or family–school relationships integrate different disciplines and transcend them in constituting a specific field as common object).

Therefore, we venture to use the term ‘pluridisciplinary discipline’ to characterise the sciences of education, including all these approaches.

This constituent characteristic places the discipline within a particularly dynamic, constantly changing relationship with other disciplines that occurs on, at least, three levels:

•

^The mode of socialisation and recruitmentwithin the discipline is undertaken in close proximity to the other disciplines, which have often supplied a large proportion of research personnel. Obviously a potential source of enrichment, this relationship may turn into dependence when the contribution from other disciplines is quantitatively very large, especially

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because the reciprocal situation – the possibility of recruitment by other disciplines – hardly ever takes place.

•

The boundaries with neighbouring disciplinesare extremely hazy, as historical and empirical analysis reveals (Keiner, 1999; McCulloch, 2002;

Van Santen 2008). This concerns the relationship with other disciplines, already existing or under construction, such as psychology (Norwich, 2000;

Paicheler, 1992; Parot, 1993; Smeyers and Depaepe, in press), philosophy, sociology, history or even economics; this may also integrate fields included or not included within the discipline, such as special-needs teaching, early childhood education, logopedics, or social work, for which scientific analysis, according to the historical periods and local data, may be handled by diverse disciplines or those that might constitute an autonomous discipline.

•

^Theprocess of disciplinarisation within the sciences of educationhas led to an internal differentiation according to a two-fold mechanism: the topics or fields of reference constitute (sub)disciplines; ‘external’ disciplines are pulled within the discipline and subjected to restructuring within the context of the surrounding discipline.

4. CONCLUSION

Thus, on the basis of our historical and theoretical analyses, we favour the concept ‘pluridisciplinary field’ in order to describe educational sciences as they evolve when they emerge – as they can potentially do nowadays – as legitimate interlocutors of other disciplines: to us, it means a field of knowledge that assumes the classical emblems of an ‘autonomous’ academic discipline, simultaneously situated at the crossroad of other disciplines. This discipline strongly interacts with others and favours reciprocal transfers through which knowledge is ‘re-semanticised’ on both sides. It recognises, therefore, the importance of disciplinary specialisation without conforming to disciplinary hierarchies and their drift through mechanical application, as is well known in the field of education; it also pleads in favour of approaches that transcend disciplines, and it transgresses borders in order to build new fields of knowledge by a plural dynamic.⁵

As a result of their specific characteristics, educational sciences highlight, especially clearly, tensions and contradictions that also impact upon other sciences. For this reason, this discipline is a kind of prototype on which one can study, as through a magnifying glass, modes of knowledge production in osmosis with social fields. That discipline is the origin and the basis of the dialec- tic between disciplinarity and pluridisciplinarity. More generally, it opens the question of the conditions of the existence of:

•

a real pluridisciplinarity, fashionable today, that presupposes the legitimacy as much of thematic as of properly disciplinary approaches;

•

a science that resonates in phase with the social world, its demands, pressures, and issues, but at the same time goes beyond common sense and

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ideology; this presupposes that it develops following principles that free it, at least momentarily, of practical constraints.

At the very moment when so-called new paradigms such as transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity impose new scientific norms, it seems interesting to shed light on the fact that certain disciplines, sometimes less renowned than the hard sciences, have been, for quite a long time, enriched by such dialogues between disciplines. The strength and weakness of these socio-historical processes and determinations deserve to be known in order to enrich the critical reflexivity of researchers and to evaluate their pitfalls and their potential. This reflexivity encourages a collective facing of the challenges with which the world of science is currently confronted.

As has been shown by Bourdieu (1995) for the social sciences, the reflexive study of a discipline contributes significantly to the redefinition and pinpointing of central issues tackled by researchers. ‘Social science has the privilege of being able to consider its own working and, thus, to be able to shed light on the constraints that hinder its own scientific practice. As a result, it may make use of the awareness and understanding that it possesses with regard to its functions and workings in order to overcome certain obstacles that stand in the way of the progress of awareness and knowledge’ (p. 3).

5. NOTES

1 I should like to thank Mary-Teresa Fees-Greaney for her valuable assistance in appraising my phraseology in the English language.

2 After he got the chair (1902/1906), he changed its name in order to institute sociology as an academic discipline; he held the chair of ‘science of education and sociology’

until his death in 1917.

3 A methodological approach already tested with ERHISE – in our empirical investiga- tions on the evolution of sciences of education in Geneva, in Switzerland – and with other colleagues in Europe.

4 Here we rely on earlier work, based on abundant analysis of archives; for detailed references, see Hofstetter, 2010; Hofstetter, Ratcliff and Schneuwly, 2012.

5 The concept of a ‘pluridisciplinary discipline’, therefore, is not synonymous with mul- tidisciplinarity in the meaning that Klein illustrates (2010; see the analysis of Gary McCulloch); that is, simple juxtaposition of knowledge from different disciplines that would, indeed, separate its object into different components.

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Correspondence Professor Rita Hofstetter Université de Genève FPSE SSED Uni Mail, 1211 Switzerland

E-mail: Rita.Hofstetter@unige.ch