University of Illinois

Nicholas C. Burbules, “The global context of educational research.” Research in International Education: Experience, Theory, and Practice, Liora Bresler and Alexander Ardichvili (Peter Lang: forthcoming).

The term “international research in education” can be read in two different ways: one is as research on education in an international context: the study of different national educational systems, often comparative in nature, the study of international institutions that influence educational policy and practice in countries around the world, and so on. But the other reading, the one I will explore here, focuses on the ways in which the conditions of educational research have themselves become increasingly internationalized. I will argue that these changes have significantly altered the practices of educational research, broadened their potential audiences and scope of influence, and transformed their purposes and methods in some very fundamental ways.

It will not be difficult for academics to recognize the changes I am referring to here. One is increased international travel, for conferences, sabbaticals, faculty exchanges, or consulting relations. Not all academics make such trips regularly, but a growing number do; and even those who do not travel themselves are influenced by the changes wrought by this dimension of internationalism. New participants from other countries appear at one’s own conferences and professional societies, colleagues bring back stories and information gained from their travels, and so on. The effect of these trends is that the professional academic is becoming more and more a global citizen, one for whom the topics of research, the opportunities for collaboration, and the audiences for his or her work are being influenced by a broader and more internationalized context.

For educational research in particular, the increasing similarity of educational institutions, policies, and practices in most developed societies in the world means that there is a growing interest in sharing knowledge and experience gained from reforms, evaluation studies, or basic research. Certainly this relation is not entirely symmetrical; the increasing similarity among national educational systems has been largely due to the flow of westernized influences and practices into other parts of the world.

A second dimension of this shift is the changing nature of scholarly publishing and the increasing concentration of publications in the hands of a relatively small number of large global publishing firms. This has meant that international marketing for books and journals has become more aggressive; and it means that research that is judged to speak to scholars in other parts of the world is given more visibility than that which does not — in small ways and large this changes the topics and forms of representation scholars choose in preparing their work. Along with this change, publication in “international journals” has gained even higher prestige as a mark of successful academic work, linked in material ways to judgments about tenure, promotion, and salary. Not incidentally, this system of publication advantages authors who write in English, or who have access to resources to translate their work into English.

A third dimension of these changes is the influence of new information and communication technologies, which increasingly constitute the medium through which a good deal of what people term “globalization” is happening. Scholars communicate through email; post their papers on the Web; disseminate drafts electronically to receive commentary and feedback; and collaborate in scholarship (and, to an increasing degree, in teaching) with others they may rarely or never see face to face. These changes have served to distribute more widely the activities of doing research and preparing it for publication, and have broadened the conception of what “publication” means.[i]

In addition, these changes can influence the motivations for why particular areas of research are undertaken. The rise of “market” discourses, and the awareness that prospective readers and students in other countries will often pay a premium for ideas or credentials perceived as higher status (because of where they come from), has meshed with the substantive interest in exploring international or comparative issues to give work done with, about, or for international audiences a higher value with many funding agencies and/or publishers. In other instances, it is not a matter of choice, but of real or perceived necessity.

One of the ideological effects of arguments about “globalization” is the air of inevitability given to the notion that public policies must address the transnational character of economic, political, and cultural processes; that in the context of education specifically research must help us understand how the content of learning, the processes and activities of learning, and the institutions in which learning takes place are being “globalized,” shaping and being shaped by the movement of people, ideas, and material goods across national boundaries. From this perspective, no significant area of educational inquiry can claim to be unaffected by globalization: issues of policy and practice must confront changing student populations, changing job markets, and changing media and technology influences outside the school, all of which are being influenced by such global trends. This much, I believe, is difficult to deny. [ii]

But the discourse of globalization also serves to promote particular substantive views toward those trends as well: the necessity of promoting “free markets” for products, services, and the flow of ideas; the diminished autonomy of the nation state in serving and protecting the interests of its own citizens; the growing irrelevance of local or traditional cultures and values, for the sake of a new conception of cosmopolitanism. Assumptions such as these get taken for granted. At this point, globalization — or, better, particular ways in which “globalization” is being talked about and promoted, often by the same transnational corporations and institutions that have the greatest stake in benefiting from expanded markets, etc. — serves, ironically, to restrict the available range of possibilities talked about for the direction and aims of social development. An expectation of exponential growth and potential rewards, a perception of necessary competition with other institutions in a global race, and an air of epochal transformation all combine to make actors and institutions feel that they must change to respond to these imperatives and opportunities, whatever their personal preferences.

Institutions of higher education have responded in their own ways to these twin imperatives of necessity and opportunity, and an increasing number of the faculty within them are redefining their work with an eye toward this larger world stage. As I have suggested, educational researchers have a special stake in this internationalization of research, because education itself is one of the primary focal points for the global spread of policies, practices, and reform ideas. Nations increasingly regard the educational experiments of other countries as testing grounds for changes they may be considering also; and the substance of these changes is being shaped by neoliberal assumptions promoted by the most globalized (and hence presumably most successful) individuals and organizations — the values of entrepreneurship, market-based reforms, rational management, formal accountability, and technological innovation.

As these values reshape the globalized and globalizing institutions of higher education, scholars working within them, including educational researchers, are responding to their own perceptions of necessity and opportunity: in identifying funding sources for their work; in selecting topics to investigate; in defining their methods of inquiry; in thinking about the potential audiences for their research; in forming collaborative partnerships with other researchers around the world; and in rethinking the breadth of the stage on which they see themselves performing.

But these trends have additional effects as well.

II.

As scholars come to share, and reinforce, assumptions about the inevitability, or desirability, of globalization, they add their weight to the active processes of shaping public opinion about what globalization means and whether it is a good thing or not. At the same time, by contributing to the legitimation of globalization discourses, academics in institutions of higher education are in many ways serving their own interests as well, as we have seen. Whether these trends will serve the interests of future generations of university-based scholars is more doubtful: the impact of promoting the aforementioned neoliberal policies within the context of higher education may well impinge upon traditional faculty privileges such as tenure or academic freedom; may tend to encourage higher expectations for productivity, including more fundraising through research grants, etc.; and may involve faculty with more travel, more reliance on distance technologies, and more teaching as an entrepreneurial endeavor (increasing student numbers, marketing courses and programs internationally, and so on).

Viewing these trends in a larger context, the emergence of a global elite stratum threatens to create an even larger gulf between the cosmopolitans who benefit from a world system and the vastly greater numbers who have little or no access to such interactions. Technological networks exemplify and reinforce this stratified class structure; elsewhere Callister and I have termed it a technological caste system, because these divides tend to be self-reproducing and tend to grow greater over time — those with access to the benefits of globalized information, learning, and job opportunities gain greater and greater advantages over those who do not.[iii] A global professional academic elite, including researchers and those who sponsor their research, may be engaged in studies with real significance for the educational problems and opportunities of those not part of the elite, but clearly this is a gaze from above, defined however good the intentions may be by the dynamics that fund, produce, disseminate, reward, and give credence to scholarship — and as I have argued, these dynamics are increasingly dependent upon a global order. Furthermore, as the saying goes, globalization isn’t a global phenomenon: large parts of the world are left out of its opportunities and benefits.

Yet for the work that is being done in this context interesting new possibilities are being discovered. One, already noted, is the potential of new information and communication technologies to support distributed forms of collaboration that bring together scholars from many parts of the world to share their research with each other, and to generate new knowledge through cooperative endeavors. In certain areas of educational research this makes possible novel approaches to methodology, data-gathering, and analysis; it portends a greater engagement across cultural differences; and it could help to alleviate some of the researcher/practitioner divides that trouble field-based studies.

Nor is this potential for collaboration limited to workers in formal educational institutions; increasingly, educationally relevant knowledge is being generated in a variety of settings, including foundations, professional organizations, think tanks, government departments, and corporations working in fields related to educational markets (publishing companies, for example). Here again the dynamics of globalization are shaping the nature of these alternative institutions, their missions, and their capacity to collaborate across national boundaries with university-based researchers and with each other.

While globalization is often seen as an entirely homogenizing, “westernizing” trend, these collaborations make possible new kinds of hybrid vocabularies and perspectives that may enrich the possibilities for understanding educational phenomena in more multifaceted ways. But whether these trends have primarily homogenizing and narrowing, or primarily hybridizing and enriching, effects will be a consequence of the particular arrangements and circumstances in which these researchers work together; and one crucial dimension here is the extent of their willingness, and capacity, to reflect upon the pressures brought upon them by the very same imperatives of entrepreneurialism, market-based strategies, rational management, outcome measures, and technology that may have made their collaboration possible.

Hence we see a paradox of sorts: that processes of centralization and decentralization are both operating simultaneously. The activities of funding, producing, and disseminating research, like everything else in a global market, are being consolidated and centralized; yet at the same time the means of producing and publishing new ideas (for example, on the Web) are in the hands of more people than ever before. There is no reason why university-based researchers, especially in a field like education, need to be limited to the conventional forms of funding, producing, or disseminating their research; and universities are in a special position to acknowledge and encourage these possibilities, to explore new ways of collaborating on research, new ways of doing research, and new ways of distributing and sharing the results of research.

But will they do this? The trends are ambiguous and it is difficult to extrapolate future directions. Universities have traditionally supported innovation and have tried to be future-oriented in protecting and rewarding postconventional ideas; yet at the same time the actual practices of universities (for example, in evaluating and rewarding faculty performance) often communicate the opposite message — that online publishing, for example, even though it might reach and influence a much larger number of readers than conventional journal-based publication, is barely credited as legitimate and worthwhile. Will collaboration with certain global partners be rewarded as much as collaboration with others? What about the educational researcher who prefers to stress connections with domestic racial and ethnic groups, rather than addressing diversity on a global scale: Is studying educational reforms in Latin America more prestigious than studying reforms in Latino neighborhoods in Fresno, California? Most of all, how will universities balance the tension between the values of entrepreneurialism, market-based strategies, rational management, outcome measures, and technological innovation with the fundamental academic values of free inquiry and contrarian dispositions? As universities become in many ways more corporate (and more global), will they exhibit pressures toward conformity, productivity, and ends-oriented thinking?

There certainly is resistance to such trends. On an individual level, many researchers react against the growing pressures to raise money to fund their research; to produce more; to work more hours; to travel more; to make more compromises with home and family activities; to keep more balls juggling in the air at the same time (“multitasking”) — and, in short, to define the value of their research and teaching more and more in terms of revenues to be garnered from them. The rise in online teaching — often termed “distance education” — has had a major impact today in bringing the language of entrepreneurship, long part of the academic discourse of grantwriting and funding research, into the discourse of teaching and program development as well. [iv] In the long term these pressures will have an effect on who goes into this profession and who remains in it; many of the effects will be, I believe, unintended, but may have implications for the gender, racial, and ethnic composition of many faculties. These effects on the composition of knowledge workers, in turn, may also shape the kinds of knowledge that they produce. We could find that certain types of research — critical studies, for example — are being marginalized in terms of their visibility, stature, or availability through conventional forms of publication, simply because they do not have the “market-value” of other approaches to knowledge (the same may become true of teaching as well).

In summary, the conditions of globalization tend to promote neoliberal discourses of entrepreneurialism, market-based strategies, rational management, outcome measures, and technological innovation; yet also make possible the conditions for looking outside of those assumptions and questioning them. Increasingly, I have suggested, these factors are shaping the contexts of higher education in a manner that could constrain, rather than enlarge, the vision of educational research.

III.

In part, these tensions are intrinsic. For example, most educational research carried out in an international context is going to be in English (like most conferences and most international journals). Some common language is necessary for research, and discussions about that research, to go forward with any coherence at all; but then the question is, Whose language? The answer is invariably English. Very few educational researchers are fluent in second languages, unless they are bilingual in the other direction (with English as their second language). As a result, their activities need be viewed as another part of the process by which dominant languages and cultures dominate or replace others. But if their research is important, there is no other way for it to be produced, written, and discussed, as things stand. The World Wide Web plays an important part in this process as well, since it constitutes a global medium predominantly maintained in English — particularly the most popular and widely-used sites.

Doing more international educational research also means doing it in new ways. A comparative perspective changes the terms of data analysis, highlighting questions of difference as well as similarities across different contexts, and inviting questions about where those differences have come from and what they mean. Often these analyses can only proceed with the assistance of collaborators or informants who can explain the differences from a local perspective. This suggests several important dimensions about doing this kind of research.

The first is that it invites new forms of collaboration, whether formally or informally, as educational researchers need the assistance of translators (of language) or, more broadly, interpreters (of culture) if they are to work effectively in these cross-national settings. Direct observations, interviews, documentary evidence, etc., stand as data that need interpreting, and international research highlights the shortcoming of analyses that depend on only one analytical point of view. As many observers of international travel or ethnography have pointed out, you may be able to describe what you see but you can’t always talk about what it means without a member of the group to explain it to you. How this collaboration is structured in the research process, and how much this assistance is explicitly acknowledged as an integral part of the research study, will vary; but it will always play a central role, whether it is acknowledged or not. To add one final layer to this topic, there is the question as well of international scholars from other countries studying ours (and not only we studying theirs); sometimes these studies are especially perceptive because they come from outsiders. Americans remember that one of the greatest and most revealing books on the U.S. political culture was written by a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville.

Another dimension of doing this kind of research, linked to the preceding one, is interdisciplinarity. Because it is more difficult to draw in advance the boundaries of “control variables” that will or will not be relevant to one’s hypotheses when dealing with a new and unfamiliar context, it is harder to address these questions through only one theoretical or methodological lens. One may have found that family or kinship factors were not important factors when studying a problem in one national and cultural context, for example, but cannot assume that in others. Interdisciplinary approaches make it more likely that unexpectedly relevant variables will be identified in unpacking the complex stories that other contexts present to us. In a field like education, where practices and content are so richly entwined with culture, tradition, and history, such considerations are especially important.

And this touches upon a third dimension of doing international research, which is that it can be fundamentally challenging to the smooth application of research protocols that are presumed to support certain kinds of validity. Certainly no research context is hermetic, and the unexpected can occur anywhere. But international contexts multiply enormously the factors that cannot be controlled for because they cannot be anticipated when one is working in a new and relatively unfamiliar environment. From one perspective, this is a problem because it increases methodological imperfections. From another perspective, however, it is one of the benefits of doing this kind of research that unexpected events and complexities which our presuppositions and methods can’t anticipate create occasions for reflecting back on those aspects of our own research practices, our own views of knowledge, and our own values and habits. Often the thing we learn most about when studying others is ourselves.

New information and communication technologies also introduce a host of opportunities, and problems, when applied to the matter of international research. I have already discussed the ways in which these new technologies can support new forms of collaboration, data gathering, and writing among participants who may be distributed widely around the world. At the same time, these technologies reinforce some of the homogenizing aspects of globalization, especially around issues of language.

These technologies are becoming indispensable to the ways in which scholars do their work: it will be interesting to see how they create new research approaches in years to come. For example, will increased use of digital video, and new ways of analyzing and representing visual information, change the way scholars do research, and the forms in which they publish it? Will access to extremely large volumes of quantitative data require new analytical techniques? Will the comparative dimensions of international research, discussed previously, open up new ways of studying contexts in one’s home country — in other words, will all research be in one sense “international,” because researchers increasingly recognize the interdependence of processes that affect even apparently “domestic,” local events? This is the legacy of globalization, I believe: that one sees in the increased movement of people, ideas, media, currencies, language, and customs back and forth across national boundaries a condition that challenges easy distinctions or generalizations. The view of globalization as the simple spread of western or American products to the rest of the world oversimplifies a much more dynamic and unpredictable set of changes; what we are finding instead is that the creative interaction (and tension) between local and global pressures works its way out differently in every country, including the “dominant” ones. Education, for reasons discussed here, is a particularly salient field for such dynamics; and the processes of international educational research can help us to understand these processes better in every country, including our own.

IV.

Finally, there is the impact of these considerations on the individual researcher. I have stressed already the institutional rewards, and sometimes the pressures, to redefine one’s academic work in light of a presumed global imperative. At the personal level too there are opportunities and challenges.

First, there are new questions about who one’s colleagues are, who one’s students or research assistants are, who one’s co-researchers or collaborators are, who one’s audience is. Being more cosmopolitan means complicating one’s life as a teacher and researcher: partly because of the travel and work load entailed in contacting and studying other countries around the world, partly because of the disorienting, if exhilarating, experience of crossing back and forth between so many national and cultural boundaries.

With these questions come others about who one is one’s self. As one tries to deal respectfully and understandingly with so many others, what happens to one’s own commitments and verities? The traditional idea of a cosmopolitan — a citizen of the world — had strongly virtuous connotations. But doing more international research, collaborating, teaching, lecturing, and so on, also has an entrepreneurial angle to it today (indeed, the most cosmopolitan people today are the corporate elite). When does opportunity become opportunism? Of course there are tremendous benefits to having one’s perspective on human life and variety broadened; and as noted there are certain kinds of research questions that can only be investigated using a cross-national methodology. But when does the effort to understand and deal with so many diverse others on their own terms reduce one to a floating signifier?

Most important, there is the responsibility one has as a researcher to reflect upon the effects one’s work has on those one is studying. Who is benefiting from the knowledge gained? Who is paying for it? What will it be used for? These questions are hardly unique to the international context; but because of the ambivalent character of globalization and its highly uneven effects in greatly helping some people while drastically harming others, it seems that the stakes are higher here. Earlier I discussed the increasing similarity of educational policies and practices in nations around the world; to what extent is international educational research studying that phenomenon, and to what extent is it driving it? Is this kind of growing homogeneity a good thing (or is it, whether good or bad, inevitable anyway)? Are there forms of what might be termed international action research that can support local efforts to resist globalization and to maintain national autonomy and distinctiveness — or is that a contradiction in terms? These kinds of moral and political questions have echoed throughout this essay; they serve as a crucial corrective to tendencies to justify educational research in purely instrumental terms, or to regard it as simply the dispassionate and nonpartisan pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. One of the benefits of globalization discourses, I believe, is that they have sensitized us to the subtle chains of effects and consequences that link even the most innocent acts to ramifications that reach far and wide, and that can have diametrically opposite effects to what we might intend. In an increasingly interdependent world, then, dispassionate inquiry seems a chimera; and here again, it is our encounter with others that reminds us of this important lesson.