Title of talk/provocation: The Framing of Education

Dr Dominic Wyse, Professor of Early Childhood and Primary Education. UCL Institute of Education. Founding Director Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy (0-11 years) (HHCP). President of the British Educational Research Association (BERA).

Biography

Dominic Wyse is Professor of Early Childhood and Primary Education at University College London (UCL), Institute of Education (IOE). Dominic is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS), and a fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Before joining the IOE Dominic was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. He was also appointed as Churchill College Cambridge’s first Director of Music-Making, where he was also awarded a Fellowship and the role of Director of Studies for Education. Dominic’s extensive expertise in music began with his undergraduate studies at The Royal Academy of Music.

The main focus of Dominic’s research is curriculum and pedagogy. His research has contributed to understanding of the pedagogy of writing, reading, literacy and creativity across the life-course (e.g. How Writing Works: From the Invention of the Alphabet to the Rise of Social Media – Cambridge University Press; and The Good Writing Guide 4^th Edition SAGE). Dominic has extensive experience of working at the interface of research, policy and practice (e.g. see The BERA Close-to-Practice Research Project or Experimental trials and ‘what works?’ in education: The case of grammar for writing published in the British Educational Research Journal BERJ).

Overview of talk/provocation

Education research has frequently been criticised for being weak. Some of these criticisms claim that education does not have the credentials of other academic disciplines in universities. Some go as far as describing education as a ‘field’ not as a discipline. The critics often note the applied nature of aspects such as teacher education and training as another reason for education’s weakness as an academic discipline. This talk will argue on the basis of robust criteria that education is a discipline that compares favourably to other disciplines in universities. The risks of describing education as a field will be articulated including in relation to the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF).