Narratives of Educational Research: Representations and mis-presentations in a time of interpretation

This article attempts to establish relations between teaching and learning (actions), education (the institutional level), and educational research. When education is addressed in this text we refer primarily to formal education. The article starts out by presenting some important underlying assumptions for the arguments put forward in this text. Here a reference for the notion of time and history is given. Another aspect of this is that through education a student’s capability is attested (one hopes). In the next part, about “Education as an institution of speech acts”, we try to show how education is dependent on using words to mediate a just distance (Ricoeur 2000) between generations. The main part of this article, “Making meaning of educational research”, discusses the interrelation between reality and facts, what are considered to be facts, and how facts in educational research have to be grasped together into a story, a narrative, in order to make meaning of what education is about. In the last part, we try to connect the fact that education as an institution is itself a refiguration of time and how this plays out in educational research as an obligation to be critical about what is achieved through education, as a debt towards the past. Inherent in this is a criticism of faith in evidence in educational research.

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