In my earlier work, I describe these policy agendas as colonizing discourses (Burke 2001, 2002), an idea I then developed in later work to bring attention to the problematic relation between the institutional positioning of 'the professional' (who is often situated within particular White, middle-class cultural values and power relations) who then is expected to correct the attitudinal dis/position of the student constructed through a deficit and homogenizing lens of disadvantage (Burke 2012). There is often a slippage into medical discourse that sets out to provide 'treatment' to those with perceived impoverished aspirations, with deep classed and racialized implications of who is seen to 'know' and who is seen to 'lack' and this is reflected in evaluation methodologies that foreground random control trials to measure the impact of the 'treatment' provided or not. Such perspectives have led to a legacy of educational policy and practice committed to raising aspirations through government funding of widening participation activities such as, in England, 'Aimhigher' (which was later disbanded). The work of Aimhigher professionals was to develop outreach through partnerships between higher education institutions and schools with the aim to support children and young people to aspire to higher education. Although there are many instances in which the work of Aimhigher teams was embedded in a more nuanced social justice and communitybased framework, the policy emphasis on children and young people (and their families and communities) who are constructed as suffering from 'low' aspirations reinforces deficit misframings of the problem and leads to reductionist, remedial and instrumentalist views of the ways that aspirations are formed. This *misframes* widening participation as a set of activities focused on changing individual attitudes with minimal attention to the historical, intergenerational and deeply entrenched social and cultural inequalities in which children and young people (and adult learners) form their aspirations. Nancy Fraser's concept of 'misframing' reveals the damaging, distorting, pathologizing effects of multiple injustices at play across material and structural maldistribution, cultural and symbolic misrecognition and political misrepresentation (Fraser 2003, 2010). In my work, I have *reframed* aspiration through the lens of feminist poststructuralism, conceptualized as part of a process of becoming, profoundly tied to identity work, in which a person's aspirations are developed in complex, social and cultural contexts, in relation to social structures, wider discourses and experiences of pedagogical spaces that are felt in the body and in a sense of selfhood:

The discourse of 'raising aspirations' ignores the ways that gendered and classed identifications are re/fashioned through the discursive sites and practices of schools, colleges and universities (Mac an Ghaill, 1994). It emphasises individual aspirations without understanding the interconnections between a subject's aspirations and their classed, racialised, (hetero)sexualised and gendered social positionings and identifications, ignoring the social and cultural contexts in which certain subjects are constructed, and construct themselves, as having or not having potential or indeed not choosing to participate in higher education for a range of valid reasons (Archer & Leathwood, 2003). Furthermore, when gender is recognised, it is often because boys are seen to be losing out in comparison to girls. (Burke 2006: 722–3)

These concerns remain for me, as they did for Geoff. He and his colleagues, Annette Hayton2 and Sarah Tang, were concerned to challenge the 'poverty of aspiration' narrative underpinning policy and practice and to bring attention to the dangers of such discourse in reproducing social and educational inequalities. However, they also emphasized that it is important to address the contradiction that, despite the problematic nature of these deficit discourses, due to the historical inequalities at play, the contribution of equity practitioners in creating awareness that higher education is a future possibility for those from under-represented communities remains valuable work.

Without the changes in awareness brought about by Aimhigher and similar provisions among prospective students, their families and their teachers, change might have been far slower (Doyle & Griffin, 2012). Collaboration between institutions through Aimhigher in particular allowed for more efficient targeting of resources and its focus on widening participation in general instilled confidence in schools and colleges that HEIs' [Higher Education Institutions'] efforts to increase progression to higher education were not merely part of a recruitment drive for a particular institution. *While Aimhigher had many limitations, it should be noted that few universities had seriously engaged in outreach work targeting*  *underrepresented groups before these New Labour initiatives*. (Whitty, Hayton and Tang 2015: 38, emphasis added)

Geoff and his colleagues bring attention here to the importance of raising awareness and developing collaboration, both of which underpin the reframing of our widening participation outreach approaches in CEEHE. As we were building CEEHE, which included both research and practice, the Aim High programme at the University of Newcastle (drawing its namesake from university's marketing language that also reflects linguistically the Aimhigher programme in the UK) was relocated to CEEHE. The programme was a large-scale outreach initiative aiming to engage with aspirations across the New South Wales Hunter and Central Coast region of Australia through partnership with schools. As CEEHE developed praxis-based approaches, creating time and space for critical reflexive discussion across theory and practice, our CEEHE team became increasingly concerned that, while embedded in 'strengths-based' and community-centred orientations, the Aim High approach was still problematic. 3 Eventually Aim High was replaced with a number of other community-based initiatives, driven by new foundational principles. Collaborative, ethical, contextualized and participatory frameworks were developed that could recognize the different knowledge, histories and experiences of our diverse participants and create relational spaces of lifelong learning, connection, belonging, representation and participation through our outreach work. Matt Lumb, at the time CEEHE praxis fellow (now a CEEHE associate director), traces his experiences as a practitioner to tell a cautionary tale about widening participation and the problematic discourse of raising aspiration:

Policy and programme language underpinning this agenda consistently deploys the term aspiration in disrespectful ways, misrecognising and misrepresenting individuals and communities. As an outreach practitioner, the young people I was working with certainly had aspirations. Often these aspirations explicitly involved further and higher education. Without a 'legitimate' framework to understand patterns of difference between and among groups of young people, and perhaps to share appropriately the richness of these aspirations, it is easy to fall into a trap. (Lumb 2018: 97)

Engaging sociological theory that foregrounds the interrelationship between processes of forming a sense of self with aspiration, Lumb repositioned his outreach work to understand how young people imagined their future selves. Warning of the tragedy of the bureaucratized individualization of educational processes, he points to the ways participatory, praxis-based methodologies open up spaces of hope for young people. Drawing on 'pedagogical methodology' (Burke, Crozier and Misiaszek 2017), Lumb points to the value of 'opening up space for the development of sociological imaginations, and for the slow interrogation of power and of discourse circulating in the young people's lives' (Lumb 2018: 107). Such reframings of widening participation foreground questions of value in e-valu-ation, through feminist and critical praxis (Burke and Lumb 2018). Such rich discussions shaped the heart of our work in forming CEEHE to create a unique, praxisbased framework underpinned by social justice principles (Burke 2002, 2012). This approach enables participants to be active in the process of co-creating inclusive pedagogical spaces, to subject the assumptions of equity researchers, evaluators, policymakers and practitioners to interrogation by committing time to develop relationships that help build a sense of trust and connection through ethical praxis.

This has included the development of a suite of innovative programmes that reconceptualize widening participation as a participatory and relational project of social justice. The focus is on creating the conditions for meaningful, ethical pedagogical relationships that nurture co-development and a love of learning. This is about recognizing (at an institutional level) that we are all learners and we all have valuable experiences, histories and insights to contribute to participatory pedagogical processes. Rather than a focus on changing the perceived impoverished character and aspiration of individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, our reframed community-based outreach programmes work with children, young people and adults in the wider contexts of their lives to understand the kinds of learning and knowledge that they deeply value, generating a sense of belonging, connectedness and capability. The reframing of equity in higher education is to redistribute its resources to enable high-quality pedagogical opportunities to emerge through the co-development of widening participation programmes within and across heterogeneous communities. Through such relational inter/actions, university practices and understanding of equity is subjected to questioning and transformation, embedding evaluation as contextualized, ethical praxis. The aim is to open spaces of critical reflexivity for all participants including children, young people and adults but also local community organizations and institutions (schools, colleges and universities). The experiences, histories and knowledges of diverse and under-represented communities are brought into conversation through enabling pedagogies that value learning in all of its diversity *and difference*. Critical approaches are developed in which children, young people and adults who might have previously experienced a sense of alienation from formal learning might discover a sense of re/connection with and through education *through* (rather than despite) their differences. However, the primary focus is to re/position higher education as a vehicle for social justice, as a dynamic institution that has the transformative potential to become inclusive, redistributive and equitable through enabling pedagogies of hope, com/passion and empathy. It is also to reframe notions of ac/count/ability in relation to ethical praxis and social justice principles. This is seen as an ongoing, cyclical, iterative and dynamic process that requires deep forms of critical reflexivity as universities seek to redress complex, historical and entrenched inequalities across formations of difference.

#### Getting a grip on widening participation

It may therefore be that we need to consider students' social and cultural capital and not just their socio-economic status if we are to get a grip on patterns of participation. (Whitty, Hayton and Tang 2015: 47)

Geoff and his colleagues make the important point that the focus on socio-economic status that occupied the minds and imaginations of policymakers and practitioners tended to overshadow engagement with a deeper and more complex picture in relation to developing social justice in and through higher education (and schooling). In particular, Geoff was interested in the complex relationship of social class to educational privilege and disadvantage and much of his work focused on this (e.g. Whitty and Clement 2015; Whitty, Hayton and Tang 2015; Whitty 2002; Whitty 2001; Whitty, Power and Halpin 1998). In addressing questions of access to higher education, he considered the significant *social* (rather than individual) differences in 'who you know' (social capital) and 'knowing the ropes' (cultural capital and more specifically academic capital) and its effect on higher education applications, admissions or student success (Whitty *et al.* 2015; Burke and McManus 2009) and 'choices' about what and where to study (see Reay *et al*. 2005). With his colleagues Hayton and Tang, he wanted to bring attention to the ways that:

some quite complex interactions between home, school and university cultures pose a considerable challenge for those seeking to widen participation and fair access in higher education and these help to explain why only limited progress has been made to date. (Whitty *et al.* 2015: 51)

These are important insights for policymakers and practitioners alike, as despite a significant commitment to equity and widening participation over many decades now, inequalities continue to persist in relation to access, participation and outcomes for students from historically under-represented backgrounds. The complex relationship between socio-economic background and other structural factors, as well as the ongoing impact of class, gender and race on access and participation in higher education must be considered through appropriately nuanced theoretical tools (Webb *et al.* 2017). Engagement with questions of how social and cultural capital play out in the insidious reproduction of inequalities in education has been a long-standing concern in Geoff's work as well as that of many others.

Indeed, cultural and social capital has become a part of everyday understanding around access, equity and widening participation, but some scholars have raised concerns that this constrains the sociological imagination and its impact on practice (Webb *et al.* 2017). The disconnection of the concept of 'capital' from the full range of Bourdieu's theoretical toolbox conceals the significant insight that social structures become internalized in sensibilities of self. The ways that students are differentiated and live out those differentiations through practice is embodied and perceived as about differences in (innate) potential and cap/ability rather than as the interplay of embodied dis/positions, the intersubjective relations of the field and social structures (McNay 2008: 187). As Skeggs (2004: 3) explains: 'We need to think how bodies are being inscribed simultaneously by different symbolic systems; how inscription attributes difference and how we learn to interpret bodies through the different perspectives to which we have access'. Bringing together Bourdieu's concepts of capitals, habitus and field provides a compelling theoretical framework for understanding structural, cultural and discursive inequalities as embodied. Habitus is the incorporation of 'the regularities and tendencies of the world into the body' (McNay 2008: 181). In the context of widening participation in higher education, habitus illuminates the ways that unequal relations of power become internalized and naturalized so that decisions to participate in higher education (or not) are misrecognized as freely made individual choices. As I have pointed out in *The Right to Higher Education*:

The concept of embodied identities emphasizes the working of power and difference and the ways that these are marked and inscribed on the body, as well as resisted or subverted through 'practices of the self'. This is powerful for thinking through difference and transformation in the context of policies and practices of widening participation and the ways that different bodies are positioned, mobilized and regulated in relation to complex inequalities across space. Embodied identity helps to think through the ways different bodies take up and use the different higher education spaces available, and the ways that higher education spaces are constructed and re/shaped in relation to the different bodies that move through and are positioned within them. (Burke 2012: 61)

In drawing on such sociological insights, it is important to explicitly discuss the experiences and feelings different students and staff have of institutional contexts such as schools and universities. Often, the architecture of university spaces re/form the exclusive histories and practices that are felt in our personhoods as shame, alienation, intimidation or unworthiness (Burke 2002). How do memories of not belonging, of feeling misrecognized or disconnected, linger over time to become a persistent sense of not being capable?4

Sociological insights about the complex workings of inequality have led me to continue to argue that praxis-based approaches to equity and widening participation work is urgently needed (e.g. Burke and Lumb 2018; Burke *et al.* 2017; Burke 2012; Burke and Jackson 2007; Burke 2001). A praxis-based approach enables deeply reflexive, ethical, reciprocal and dialogic approaches to widening participation informed by research, theory, practice and lived experiences. Geoff engaged closely with these arguments and together we developed the CEEHE, *decentring the centre* with the aim to create a deeply embedded approach to equity and widening participation to counter equity-at-the-peripheries misframings (see Burke 2012; Jones and Thomas 2005).

#### Reframing equity through a sociological lens

Geoff and I agreed that critical theory must inform the development of equity in higher education, and as sociologists our understanding of this was inevitably framed by the insights of sociology. Both Geoff and I were deeply influenced by the IOE's rich foundations in building the sociology of education; Geoff's esteemed career at the IOE of course included his position as the Karl Mannheim Chair of Sociology of Education and I was shaped by my formative years as an Economic and Social Research Council-funded doctoral student at the IOE. 5 Although our intellectual trajectories and our subjective positionings were of course very different, we both agreed that an eclectic theoretical reframing of equity and widening participation policy and practice would help form a powerful methodology for change. We agreed that embedding this through a praxis-based framework would bring different perspectives, histories and experiences to bear on transformational processes. In our recent publication together (Burke and Whitty 2018), we argue these points in relation to equity in teaching and teacher education. Drawing on sociological insights, we argue that:

Teacher education reform (like widening participation more broadly) has to be linked to broader struggles for social justice in order to engage the complex dynamics of equity. Only transformative policies, in the realms of recognition, redistribution, and representation, can move beyond superficial remedies and address the underlying sources of inequality (Burke, 2012; Whitty, Power, & Halpin, 1998). This requires critical reflexivity and praxisbased approaches that provide teacher educators and student teachers with the framework to consider the complexities of equity issues in relation to selection processes, pedagogies, curriculum, and epistemic access. (Burke and Whitty 2018: 281)

We agreed that there were no straightforward solutions to the problem of creating greater equity; the problem was deeply entangled within the web of social, cultural and symbolic inequalities. Thus, one-dimensional analyses would not generate the conceptual power required to address the deep-rooted, persistent and stubborn nature of social inequalities that shape educational and pedagogical experiences, relations and identities. We worked to create a participatory and theorized reframing through our collaborative work in developing the CEEHE. Drawing on my research (Burke 2012), Nancy Fraser's (2003) three-dimensional social justice framework of redistribution, recognition and representation, together with critical and feminist post/structural theories of inequalities and difference, provided us with ways of re/thinking through how we might form the CEEHE to create a different vision of equity beyond the conventional approaches and logics. Through this we aimed to open up reflexive, praxis-based spaces for researcher-practitioners, practitioner-researchers to:

acknowledge the discourses of deficit and the politics of misrecognition at play within our own practices; discourses that construct underrepresented groups in particular ways, preventing the possibility of more socially just educational realities. We wanted to provide space for critical questioning and dialogue. (Lumb and Roberts 2017: 23)

As I have argued elsewhere, 'widening participation in HE is fraught with dilemmas and tensions, with multiple layers, histories, and forms of inequality running through a range of social and educational contexts and pedagogical relations' (Burke 2017: 6). In developing the CEEHE, Geoff and I wanted to create different ways of understanding and approaching the policy and practice of equity in higher education through dialogue with sociological theories, while inviting collaborative engagement across different contexts, disciplines, perspectives and dilemmas. A key strategy was through a praxis-based approach to professional development.

#### A praxis-based approach to professional development

Following on from Burke's work on exclusionary practices in admissions . . . Burke *et al*. (2013) explored the attitudes of higher education staff through a series of in-depth interviews and discovered that staff held very conflicted views about 'widening participation' students. They concluded that, in order to address unintended bias, university staff need information about research findings, opportunities to reflect on their own practices and greater ongoing engagement with prospective students from underrepresented groups. (Whitty, Hayton and Tang 2015: 54)

Over many years, Geoff quietly supported my commitment to provide the highest quality, critical, in-depth professional development embedded in a praxis-based framework to support the agenda to widen higher educational access and participation and to develop more equitable educational frameworks. In 2004, with Geoff's support in his role as IOE director, I created and launched the course Widening Participation: Policy and Practice, drawing research students together with widening participation practitioners to interrogate policy and practice through conversation with theoretical perspectives, particularly those emerging across history, sociology and philosophy. The course created opportunities for participants to bring into conversation their extensive knowledge, expertise and experience with critical theories and research in the field, engaging with colleagues, peers and scholars, to think through the conceptual and practical challenges posed by persistent and insidious educational inequalities. As part of the course, the widening participation practitioners developed a project that engaged significant theoretical insights with key empirical issues within their professional contexts. The course aimed to create ongoing conversations across research, theory and practice, by creating spaces that otherwise do not exist to examine the assumptions, values and insights underpinning policy and practice. The connections made through this course led to further projects, including *Art for a Few: Exclusion and Misrecognition in Art and Design Higher Education* (Burke and McManus 2009), to which Geoff and colleagues refer in the above extract (Whitty *et al.* 2015: 54) and which led to significant changes to the admissions processes for one of the most selective degrees in the field of fine arts in the English context. This shows the power of praxis and opening up dialogic spaces to interrogate the assumptions that shape policy and practice. These earlier iterations of praxis-based reframings of widening participation have continued to characterize my commitments and approaches, leading to a number of professional development projects, including 'Teaching Inclusively: Changing Pedagogical Spaces' (Burke and Crozier, 2017), a series of film 'think pieces' (Burke, Bennett and Burgess, www. equityhe.com) drawn from research on *Capability, Belonging and Equity in Higher Education* (Burke *et al.* 2016), and the Inter/national Writing Program (Bennett *et al.* 2018).

My commitment to high-quality professional development as a key part of the wider project of equity and social justice in higher education emerges from my own observations as a researcher and practitioner. As argued above, the equity policy gaze tends to be on individuals constructed through a deficit lens who must change themselves to conform to the hegemonic values imposed from a position of privilege in order to be 'included'. This not only obscures from view the persistent re/privileging of identities, values and dis/positions legitimized by powerful institutions such as universities but also places the weight of achieving 'equity' on the shoulders of staff who themselves are often marginalized through institutionalized hierarchies (Burke 2012). The constant gaze on the 'disadvantaged individual' and the individual equity practitioner conceals the ways that educational structures, cultures and practices tend to be *reproductive* of inequalities rather than *transformative* for social justice. Sociological analysis reveals that creating equity in higher education is impossible if we only look at individualized forms of change, ignoring complex relations of power and formations of difference. Attention is required to the external, structural and discursive forces that largely undermine equity agendas such as the commercialization, marketization and corporatization of higher education, as well as the competitive, performative focus on particular forms of 'excellence' and 'success'. It is crucial to recognize the experiences and knowledges of those who undertake deeply complex and challenging equity work in higher education in a context where those tasked with creating greater equity often themselves experience inequality and misrecognition (Burke, 2012).

Sara Ahmed points to 'equity fatigue' and the ways equity – and the failure to achieve it – often gets caught up in the bodies of those conducting equity work. The use of terms such as 'equity' and 'diversity' helps to 'conceal the operation of systematic inequalities under the banner of difference' (Ahmed 2007: 236). Ahmed's analysis of the circularity of equity work in higher education is powerful:

The repetition of the term [equity] is in a way the repetition of failure: we 'say' the term because it has failed, and it fails because we 'say' it.  Rather than terms acquiring currency through repetition, this implies that the more terms are repeated over time the more resistance there is to 'hearing them'. Indeed, such resistance also involves attributing the term to specific bodies: the practitioner who uses the term 'equity' is not heard precisely as the failure of the term is assigned to her ('oh here she goes'). (Ahmed 2007: 239)

Although individual educators can make a difference, the project of equity and widening participation must be addressed at wider and deeper levels, beyond the individual person or institution. Transformational change for social justice requires that individuals and institutions are fully supported to address the complex multidimensions of social injustice. This includes attention to structural inequalities and the redistribution of resources and opportunities. It also demands a focus at the cultural and symbolic levels of the recognition of difference and the valuing of knowledges, identities and experiences that have historically been delegitimatized or cast in the ugly light of deficit discourses. It also requires the political reframing of equity through the representation of voices, perspectives and experiences otherwise silenced, made invisible or marginalized. This requires a shift away from individual professionals carrying the responsibility to redress generations of disadvantage and inequality to methodologies and practices that bring people together across 'communities of praxis' to make a difference.

The insights of such different ways of working for equity in higher education has framed the CEEHE's approaches and programmes, aiming to open up reflexive, critical, iterative spaces of transformation through praxis-based professional development. The programmes are underpinned by social justice principles and questions. For example, how might we create professional development programmes that *redistribute* resources for equity? How might we draw on those resources to *value* and *recognize* those knowledges, histories and identities that have been largely marginalized through educational policies and practices? How might we create spaces for the *representation* of different voices and perspectives that have often been silenced or invisibilized? How might we *reframe* equity, widening participation and social justice in ways that recognize the lived and emotional experiences of inequalities – the symbolic violence that is experienced by so many students and staff? How might we develop *methodologies* that understand inequalities as *embodied*?

#### Towards pedagogical methodologies for equity and widening participation

A social justice focus on participation places attention on the shifting and dynamic cultures, practices, and values that produce inclusion and exclusion across intersecting social and cultural differences. It also demands close attention to pedagogical relations of power and inequalities in the processes of forming a sense of personhood (Skeggs, 2004) and in the context of becoming. (Burke and Whitty 2018: 278)

The establishment of the CEEHE has created a unique and transformational praxis-based social justice framework for equity and widening participation, aiming to open up critical, reflexive, dialogic 'timescapes' (Adam 1998) that recognize spatio-temporality as interwoven in the fabric of inequalities. Breaking down the problematic hierarchical divisions between research, theory and practice, the aim is to disrupt the peripheral approaches that are symptomatic of equity and widening participation policy and practice, in which a specialist unit is set up to support students, which tends to have a number of problematic implications. This includes reinforcing remedial approaches embedded in deficit imaginaries, structuring equity as separate from the core educational dimensions of a student's journey through higher education and fragmentation and/or piecemeal strategies that fail to acknowledge the imperative and complexity of developing inclusive institutional cultures and practices. Equity policy and practice that is devoid of the insights of critical research tends to pay rhetorical lip service to equity while doing little to challenge deeply entrenched historical, structural and institutionalized forms of racism, misogyny, heterosexism and classism that perpetuate inequalities. Furthermore, academic research that is abstracted from the challenges of policy and practice and is communicated in obscured and esoteric ways is unable to contribute to deeper levels of educational transformation for social justice. In developing the CEEHE, Geoff and I emphasized the importance of making theoretical insights (that shed light on the complex workings of power and inequality) accessible to educators regardless of their disciplinary and/or professional location. This led to the development of equity programmes underpinned by the social justice principles of *redistribution* of resources, *recognition* of difference and *representation* of diverse communities and groups, framed by 'Pedagogical Methodologies' (Burke and Lumb 2018; Burke, Crozier and Misiaszek 2017) or **PPOEMs** (**P**raxis-based **P**edag**O**gical **E**thical **M**ethodologies).

PPOEMs underpin the reframing of equity research and evaluation, moving away from 'evidence-based' to broader research-informed policy and practice. This intentionally moves away from a narrow focus on collecting 'evidence' to attention to broader methodological concerns including epistemological and ontological contestations and framings. Inequalities are reproduced through the hegemony of methods that focus narrowly on modes of objective measurement, which work to dehumanize, class/ify, homogenize and decontextualize the lived and embodied experiences of multidimensional injustices. Hegemonic discourses tend to conceal the value judgments at play in knowledge formation and claims to truth, focusing on measurement and data collection, making processes of interpretation invisible while ignoring the subtle power relations that place value through the lens of privilege and particular social positionings. Building on critical realist evaluation approaches that foreground the question '*What works, for whom, in what circumstances, over what duration, and why?*', PPOEMs refocus attention on a prior question – '*What is valued, by whom, in what circumstances, over what duration, and why?*' (Burke and Lumb 2018). Uncovering the 'hidden values of those conducting the research and the evidence produced [that] is shaped by those values' (Burke and Lumb 2018), PPOEMs generate understanding through the lens of difference and social justice commitments, taking heed of Narismulu:

Challenging assumptions about the assignment of value is central to tackling the chauvinisms and bigotry that are still rife in our society and the world. (Narismulu 2016: 88, cited in Burke and Lumb 2018: 18)

In PPOEMs frameworks, *research becomes a pedagogical space* in which diverse communities of participants engage in a collaborative process to generate knowledge and understanding.

The purpose is to create and open up collaborative, collective, dialogical and participatory methodologies and spaces, which through research and evaluation, engage participants in processes of collaborative sense- and meaning-making. Such spaces create opportunities for refusal, resistance, and doing things differently, provoking our pedagogical imaginations. [Pedagogical Methodologies] help to broaden the ways we think about 'pedagogies' in higher education; to create pedagogical spaces through research and evaluation practices and frameworks. Pedagogies are conceptualized not as methods of teaching and learning but as relational spaces through which we engage the politics of difference (Weedon, 1999) and the circle of knowledge (Freire, 2014). Participants work together to challenge those exclusionary processes that regulate practices and personhood through maldistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation. Through the circle of knowledge, participants co-produce meaning and explicitly examine the values circulating across and within particular pedagogical spaces and contexts. (Burke and Lumb 2018: 20)

The CEEHE's Excellence in Teaching for Equity in Higher Education (ETEHE) research programme is shaped through PPOEMs. This programme was developed to redress the misframing of equity as a remedial project located outside of the core work of education and to create critical timescapes and conceptual resources to engage participants in the complexity of making sense of and generating inclusive pedagogies. The misframing of teaching reinforces assumptions that 'best practice' is situated within student service infrastructures for equity in higher education in which students identified as 'at risk' are provided an array of support services, which are 'delivered' outside of their programmes of study. A marketized, decontextualized, transactional model tends to be privileged without critical attention to complex relations of power located in the unequal institutional positioning of 'academic', 'higher education professional' and 'disadvantaged student'. Although support services can often provide students with valuable resources, the assumption that equity work lies outside of pedagogical relations conceals the ways that inequalities are reproduced through core educational practices, including teaching, curriculum design and assessment.

Furthermore, an equity-as-student-services model has wider implications that require critical attention. This model constructs 'the problem' in remedial terms around what students 'lack' and as disconnected from students' educational participation, decision-making practices and pedagogical experiences. It conceals the complexities of equity, for example the ways that spatio-temporal inequalities are deeply entangled with deficit imaginaries and the misrecognition of capability, through the assumption that equity is about correcting poor time management (Bennett and Burke 2018) or the ways that social inequalities of class and gender are reproduced through higher education structures and practices (Bunn *et al*. 2019). It also tends to approach 'inclusion' as the 'transformation' of the individual student who must change themselves to fit into the hegemonic practices cultures, practices and values within a particular field of practice (e.g. mathematics, science, health and so on), not re/cognizing that such constructions of 'inclusion' produce profound forms of misrecognition and symbolic violence. ETEHE opens up reflexive spaces of ethical praxis, deepening participants' engagement with equity as teachers-researchers-practitioners. In generating collaborative communities of praxis, institutional, community-based and personal transformation is facilitated through processes of peer exchange to co-produce meaning and practice.

#### Final reflections

I have traced through my personal journey with Geoff Whitty to co-develop a praxis-based social justice reframing of equity and widening participation. This journey has been deeply dialogic, shaped by multiple and often contradictory encounters with the field of equity and social justice over two decades as a researcher-practitioner dedicated to the challenging project of reconceptualizing equity and widening participation. This project has now come to life in ways I could not have imagined when I first embarked on my PhD in 1998 and has been sustained through conversation with diverse participants across, between and within multidimensional contexts and practices, including Geoff and many other valued colleagues in and affiliated with the CEEHE.

In conversation with Geoff, I have argued that praxis-based re/ framings offer a powerful force for the project of transforming higher education for equity and social justice (Burke 2012). As Geoff and his colleagues Hayton and Tang articulate so clearly:

In this context, we recognise that our own discussion here addresses only what Gale and Hodge (2014) (after Ball, 1993) call first order effects. In other words, we (like most of the policies discussed here) have focused on changing current practice without directly transforming prevailing relations of dominance (second order effects). However, while incremental progress is necessarily compromised and partial, reflexive engagements with policies and practices in contested fields such as widening participation have the potential to illuminate underlying cultural and economic inequalities, which can then be challenged. Furthermore, having a wider cross-section of the population engaged in higher education with the capacity to contest prevailing discourses is itself a significant driver of cultural change. The alternative is that universities, and especially elite universities, continue to serve only those from higher socio-economic groups to the detriment of the academy, society as a whole and especially those from under-represented groups who will remain excluded from higher education and the opportunities it offers. (Whitty, Hayton and Tang 2015: 59)

Praxis-based approaches open up critical time, space and resources for collaborative, reciprocal, reflexive and ethical ways of reframing equity and widening participation. Drawing on Adam's (1998) notion of 'timescapes', the CEEHE has articulated the ways that intricately interwoven spatio-temporal relationalities re/produce inequalities in multidimensional and subtle ways through taken-for-granted discourses and practices (Bennett and Burke 2018). Through collaborative and critical discussion across the CEEHE, eclectic, multidisciplinary insights are re-engaging 'Pedagogical Methodologies' in creative directions through the concept of PPOEMs. A central aim is to engage all participants across timescapes of difference and power in the research/ practice nexus, opening up access to the theoretical, methodological and conceptual tools to illuminate and examine the complexity of inequalities, as well as then translate these insights for policy and practice within a deeply embedded ethical framework. The focus on methodologies is intentional to interrogate the hegemonic preoccupation with 'evidence-based' policy and practice, which emphasizes only that which is measurable and observable, perpetuating the privileging of positivist-oriented methods and hiding from view the always interpretive processes of engaging with data. By developing this reframing through the CEEHE, Geoff and I worked together with many others, in the hope to generate both first- *and* second-order effects. Over years of critical and generative collaboration in re-searching the contestations and contradictions of 'doing' equity in and through higher education, the creation of the CEEHE has opened up new timescapes for critical and ethical praxis for social justice.

#### Notes

#### References

Adam, Barbara. 1998. *Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards*. London: Routledge.

Ahmed, Sara. 2007. 'The Language of Diversity', *Ethnic and Racial Studies* 30 (2): 235–56.

### Chapter 15 Quality, Impact and Knowledge Traditions in the Study of Education

John Furlong

#### Introduction

I first met Geoff Whitty in 1973 or 1974. At that time I was studying for my PhD at the City University in London, but because its Faculty of Social Sciences was new, it had virtually no books in its library on either sociology or education. What I soon discovered was that if I was quiet and studious and did not actually ask to borrow any books, I could sneak into the University of London Institute of Education (IOE) library and work there undiscovered – I did so every day for more than a year! And it was here, in the IOE library, that I first met Geoff. At that time he was a student at the IOE and was often to be found mooching around the library in the late afternoons. We soon noticed that we had a common interest in the same books and so struck up a friendship; a library coffee shop kind of friendship where we chatted, rather formally at first, about our research and about what we were reading.

The 1970s was the time of the 'paradigm wars' in education and Geoff and I found ourselves on different sides of the divide. At that time he was a Marxist and I was a symbolic interactionist, although even then, each of us was curious and appreciative of the other's point of view. I think it was because of this appreciation of our differences that eventually Geoff and I became such good friends and colleagues and remained so for the next 45 years, working together on a number of projects. My strength was always in analysing the fine grain of empirical evidence; Geoff's was in providing the bigger picture. The longest project we worked on (nearly 10 years) was the MOTE project ('Modes of Teacher Education'), which examined the changing face of initial teacher education in England and Wales as it responded to the hostile challenges of the Thatcher and Major governments (Furlong *et al*. 2000). But the stimulus for this paper is our much more recent work together on what we called 'knowledge traditions' in the study of education. It was to be Geoff's last major project.

Our research came about as a result of comments made to me by Geoff on the book I published in 2013 entitled *Education: An Anatomy of the Discipline* (Furlong 2013). It was an ambitious book, trying to examine the university-based study of education across the UK as a whole: its history; its current formation (institutional locations, courses offered, research topics addressed, methodologies used, etc.); and the reasons the discipline was shaped in the way that it was. The fourth and final section of the book was intended to be a kind of manifesto, setting out what I thought universities *should* contribute to the study of education in the future. At the 2012 British Educational Research Association conference, Geoff gave a paper in which he welcomed the book, even saying he wished he had written it himself, but then going on to roundly criticize it because it focused only on the UK. How do we know, he asked, if the university-based study of education is the same in other countries?

I could see his point, and so in 2015 we began working on a new project together funded by the British Academy in which we examined different ways in which education, as a field of study, is conceptualized in a range of different jurisdictions around the world. Our edited book, *Knowledge and the Study of Education: An International Exploration* (Whitty and Furlong 2017), includes evidence from seven countries: the UK, France, Germany, Latvia, China, Australia and the USA. Our extended introductory chapter (Furlong and Whitty 2017) draws on those international case studies to develop a synthesis of different 'knowledge traditions' in the study of education; knowledge traditions that we found in most of the countries we examined. What our review firmly shows is that rather than being a single discipline, or even a coherent field of study, education is made up of a range of different intellectual traditions, each with its own distinctive epistemological assumptions and methodological predilections and each with its own distinctive relationship to the world of practice. In all of the countries we surveyed, researchbased knowledge is riding high at the moment in terms of its knowledge claims, particularly when those claims are based on what we call the 'New Science of Education' – a movement that we observed in all seven countries we examined. What our survey also reminds us of is that there is a rich array of different research-based traditions in education and that there are a number of other rational knowledge traditions that are not, or not primarily, based on research at all.

But what does all of this diversity mean for our understanding of quality and impact in the study of education? Concerns about the quality of educational research are long-standing in this country and internationally as Geoff was himself well aware (Whitty 2006), and there is now an equally strong focus on 'impact' – stimulated in part by the demands of research assessment systems (Whitty 2016). But if there are different knowledge traditions, based on different epistemological assumptions and if those different traditions have different relationships to the world of practice, then surely we need equally diverse notions of both quality and impact as well. Should we expect all research-based knowledge and all other forms of knowledge in education to conform to the same quality criteria? As I will argue below, this would seem to be the suggestion of Bernstein and his contemporary followers (Hordern 2017; Maton 2014; Young and Muller 2014; Bernstein 1999, 2000) who insist that academic rigour – methodological and theoretical robustness – is the only route to 'powerful' knowledge. Our work would suggest that discussions of quality and impact need to be somewhat more nuanced than that.

The aim of this chapter is therefore to explore these questions by drawing on and extending my earlier work with Alis Oancea on quality in applied and practice-based research (Oancea and Furlong 2007; Furlong and Oancea 2006). That work, which was widely influential at the time, considered the very different conceptions of quality implicit in some 'practice-based' traditions such as 'Action Research', when compared with traditional academic approaches, such as in the foundation disciplines. With the wider range of different traditions identified in my more recent work with Geoff Whitty, this chapter will seek to present a more inclusive discussion of both quality and impact in the study of education.

#### Knowledge traditions in the study of education

But what are knowledge traditions? In our analysis, Geoff Whitty and I took a broad and inclusive view of education as a field, seeing it as made up of a collection of different traditions each of which has its own distinctive conception of educational knowledge. Traditionally, disciplines are discussed from an epistemological point of view where debate focuses on questions such as the nature of knowledge, on research methods and on protocols for the establishment of 'truth'. While epistemological questions are important, we also recognized that knowledge traditions have a sociological dimension. They are expressed in institutional arrangements (types of institutions, qualifications, lectureships and professorships), in national regulatory frameworks (teacher standards, research assessment frameworks) and in networks (learned societies and journals). Moreover, they change over time as they are challenged, debated and defended. Knowledge traditions therefore have a political life – they are social projects.

In addressing the epistemological dimensions of different knowledge traditions we argued that, following Durkheim, it is helpful to distinguish between those that that are 'sacred' (developed and circulated distant from the world of practice) from those that are 'profane' (developed and circulated close to education as a field of practice). This is a distinction that Bernstein (1999) also recognizes, characterizing it as the difference between vertical and horizontal discourses. As Hordern (2017), a contributor to our book, argued, for Bernstein vertical discourses are 'specialized symbolic structures' that are 'systemically principled'; they are based on context-independent knowledge and conserved through intricate social formations (such as academic communities) that enable abstract conceptualization, conjecture and hypothesis-building, taking the thinker beyond their immediate experience. By contrast, horizontal discourse is 'local, context-dependent', 'everyday' and 'common sense' knowledge. That is not to suggest that it is not sometimes 'inflected' with elements of academic knowledge – ideas that are borrowed, translated, applied; nevertheless, horizontal discourse, for Bernstein, is always 'contextually specific', 'consumed by that context' and circulated and exchanged through fluid and unsystematic social processes (Hordern 2017).

Drawing on examples from around the world, we therefore proposed that it is possible to identify three broad clusters of knowledge traditions in the study of education. The first cluster brings together those knowledge traditions that foreground academic knowledge; these traditions are often (though not always) distant from the knowledge that circulates in education as a field of practice. A second cluster brings together those traditions that are based primarily in the world of practice, even though they sometimes draw, unreflectively, on disparate elements of academic knowledge. A final cluster includes those traditions that explicitly attempt to bring these very different forms of knowledge (academic and practical) into some kind of relationship with each other. The different examples we discussed in our paper are set out in Table 15.1.

**Table 15.1:** Knowledge traditions in the study of education

*Source*: Furlong and Whitty (2017: 20)

In the sections below, I only have space to provide a brief summary of some of the main characteristics of the different knowledge traditions we discuss in our book.

#### Academic knowledge traditions

In looking at academic knowledge traditions, we again drew on the work of Bernstein to examine what he calls 'singulars'. As Hordern (2017) explains, these are academic disciplines that have a specialized discrete discourse with their own intellectual field of texts, practices, rules of entry (e.g. physics, maths, psychology) and where there is agreement among the research community on key epistemological questions such as the nature of knowledge, the nature of proof, methodologies, etc. Hordern argues knowledge of this sort is also likely to be strongly distanced from everyday knowledge in the field of practice such as education.

Our first example of a singular tradition in education is the 'Disciplines of Education' tradition or what the French call 'Sciences de l'Éducation'. Examples here are of the sociology, psychology or history of education. Epistemological assumptions and methodological strategies are taken from parent disciplines (sociology, philosophy, etc.), and perhaps most important of all, the questions that are to be investigated are 'framed' by those parent disciplines; they are questions that would be recognized by those working in mainstream sociology or philosophy or whatever. The strength of the approach is what Bridges (2006) characterized as 'the discipline of the disciplines' – agreement within a particular community as to what counts as rigorous methodological and theoretical work – and the fact that these agreements allow for the development of cumulative knowledge. The weakness is that because of the fundamentally different theoretical and methodological assumptions made in each tradition, the approach is always, and at best, multidisciplinary not interdisciplinary. It also results in knowledge that is specialist and expert, often distant from the world of educational practice.

Our second example of a singular in education is the traditional conception of educational theory that was, until relatively recently, dominant in Germany (see Schriewer 2017). The approach is distinctive in a number of key respects. In contrast to the Disciplines of Education, the German tradition 'does not start from "other" disciplines and their perspectives on education, but is depicted as a field in its own right' (Biesta 2011: 184). The analysis starts and ends with processes that are distinctly educational with core concepts such as 'Bildung', 'Didactiks', 'Erziehung' and 'Pädagogik'. Perhaps even more importantly, traditional German Educational Theory has not been concerned with influencing the world of practice in a direct way; its concerns historically have been primarily philosophical and ultimately moral with most researchers focusing on what Stokes (1997) would characterize as 'pure basic research'.

German Educational Theory and the Disciplines of Education are both good examples of 'singulars' in Bernstein's terms; there is strong agreement among the research community on key epistemological questions such as the nature of knowledge, the nature of proof, rigorous methodologies, and so forth. As such they are different from what Bernstein calls 'Regions' – these are academic traditions where a number of different singulars are held together by their interest in a common field of practice such as medicine or engineering or indeed education. As knowledge traditions they 'face both ways', towards the intellectual fields that make up the discipline and towards the field of practice (see Hordern 2017).

In our analysis we describe two different knowledge traditions that function as 'regions'. The first and by far the largest research tradition in education is what we call 'Applied Educational Research'. The approach is highly eclectic theoretically and methodologically, united by a concern with educationally defined topics such as early years, teacher education or comparative and international education. The strength of the approach is that research questions are taken from the world of practice; there is therefore a far greater chance of the resulting knowledge being directly applicable. The weakness of the approach is that because there is little epistemological agreement among different researchers on either methodologies and theories, the academic quality of research is immensely variable; that lack of agreement also means that the knowledge produced is far less likely to be cumulative.

Our second example of a 'region' has emerged, or more correctly re-emerged, in recent years, partly in response to the perceived lack of rigour in the Applied Educational Research tradition. It is what we call the New Science of Education. It is an approach that is increasingly powerful in many countries around the world, promising as it does significant improvements in educational outcomes by finding out 'what works' through the application of 'rigorous research' – typically defined as randomized control trials (RCTs) and/or systematic reviews. The strength of this knowledge tradition is indeed its methodological rigour, though as Paine (2017) argues, it brings with it a reductive conceptualization of complex educational processes. But its principal weakness is that despite its general orientation to the world of practice, its methods are highly technical in nature and necessarily result in forms of knowledge that are significantly distant from the forms of knowledge that circulate in education as a field of practice. Although its aspiration is to guide practice, this tradition's way of doing that can sometimes seem to provide expert technical knowledge that reduces the scope for professional judgement and thereby turns teachers into technical functionaries.

#### Practical knowledge traditions

The language used by Basil Bernstein in his discussion of knowledge traditions is far from neutral. As we have already noted, academic discourse, whether it takes the form of a singular or a region is seen as 'sacred'; it is a discourse that is principled, that enables abstract conceptualization, hypothesis-building, 'taking the thinker beyond their immediate experience'. By contrast, the discourse that all of us inhabit in our everyday educational practice is characterized as 'profane'; it is personalized, localized and always contextually framed. It is 'sacred' knowledge that is the most appropriate for the analysis of complex issues such as education. However, this characterization overlooks the fact that there is an important cluster of knowledge traditions in education that are closely linked to the world of practice – knowledge traditions that have a deep history and are perhaps of growing significance today. These include, 'Competences and Standards', the 'Normal College Tradition', 'Liberal Education + Craft Knowledge' and 'Networked Professional Knowledge'. Given the limitations of space in this summary, I will touch on only two of these traditions.

The first is the 'Normal College Tradition' of teacher education, which has a 300-year history in Europe; it was and remains widely influential in China and to a lesser degree in France even today. As Hayhoe and Li (2010) make clear, the term 'normal' in English can only be properly understood with reference to its French roots, where it means 'setting a moral standard or pattern'. However, this normative emphasis was only one of a range of ways in which the Normal School and later the Normal College was different from the traditional university. Whereas traditional universities have a strong emphasis on value-neutral, specialized disciplines of knowledge, the Normal College Tradition is more morally directed and focused on integrated learning areas. The tradition also has an explicit emphasis on personal nurturing of the student in contrast to the more impersonal environment of the university. And perhaps most importantly of all, rather than focusing on a deep level of understanding and long-term change, the Normal College Tradition focuses on a craft conception of knowledge, on action-oriented field-based knowledge and on the development of high standards of practice. We argue that many of these craft-based assumptions live on, in subtle ways, in the day-to-day practice of some contemporary universities, especially those that have grown out of older teacher education institutions.

Another example of a much more recent practical knowledge tradition is what we call 'Networked Professional Knowledge'. The intellectual history of this model of knowledge production originates in the work of Gibbons *et al.* (1994) and what they called the 'new production of knowledge' (see also Nowotny *et al.* 2003; Delanty 2001). Gibbons *et al.* distinguish between what they call Mode 1 knowledge production, where problems are set and solved in a context largely governed by the academic community, and Mode 2 knowledge, which is generated in the context of application. As such, Mode 2 knowledge, they argue, is more socially accountable and reflexive, more context-specific, more frequently located within individuals themselves and their particular working context than in scientific journals.

Over the last 20 years, authors such as David Hargreaves (1999) and Michael Fullan (2005) have led the proselytization of this approach to knowledge production in education. Instead of waiting for externally produced answers they argue that schools need to take ownership of problems and innovation, seeing solutions as available from within the school system. And they need to collaborate in order to do this. In England, it is hard to overestimate the significance of this new approach to the production of educational knowledge; it forms the background assumption to a host of substantive educational policies – from the development of academies and multi-academy trusts to the development of 'school-led' initial teacher education. In all of these innovations it is assumed that networks of schools will increasingly work together, developing a knowledge base for problem-solving and innovation that is more directly relevant to their own situation than that provided by traditional knowledge hierarchies of university-based research and scholarship.

#### Integrated knowledge traditions

So far we have examined knowledge traditions that are either primarily academic or primarily practical in their genesis, although as we have also noted, in practice the distinctions between these knowledge traditions are far from straightforward. There are, however, some knowledge traditions where academic and practical knowledge are not conceptualized separately; rather, they are both seen as central to the process of knowledge production itself. These we call 'integrated knowledge traditions' and they form the final cluster we examined. Again, given the limitations of space, I will consider only two of the four examples we gave in our original paper.

The first example of an integrated tradition is Action Research or what is sometimes called 'Practitioner Enquiry' (Groundwater-Smith and Mockler 2009; Groundwater-Smith and Sachs 2002). The approach is strongly normative in that it takes as its starting point the need to challenge the distinctions between the researcher and the researched. Because the ultimate aim is to improve practice in some way, the context under study is continuously evaluated, and practice, as well as the research design, is constantly modified as the project moves forward. In short, therefore, Action Research is different from other traditions in that it is constituted first and foremost through a particular set of *practices*. It is those practices that, in turn, have important implications for the forms of knowledge that are generated – primarily for practitioners themselves. The strength of the approach is that it is a genuinely integrated one. It develops forms of knowledge that are indeed based on systematic enquiry and are often, though not always, informed by theory. At the same time, the knowledge produced is close to the world of practice. It also has a significant potentiality for the capacity development of practitioners who engage in this type of enquiry. However, its weaknesses stem from the very fact that it is practitioners who lead the process: it is they personally, rather than some established epistemic community, who select theories and methods; it is they, rather than other researchers, who evaluate the adequacy of the findings for illuminating their own professional concerns. As a result, Action Research is often less than rigorous in academic terms. And because it is so contextually specific, the knowledge produced is also seldom cumulative.

Our final example of an integrated tradition, 'Learning Sciences', is relatively new (ISLS 2009) having emerged only in the 1990s, though it can perhaps best be understood as a development of the New Science of Education tradition described earlier. As an approach it is strongly interdisciplinary, bringing together researchers from a range of different fields including education, computer and information science, cognitive science and psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, sociology and anthropology. Learning Science's most distinguishing feature is that it is a 'design science' in ways that make it similar to engineering and computer science. It insists on an engagement with the real world, with empirical investigations of learning as it occurs in wide a variety of settings. The explicit aim of those investigations is to improve learning outcomes by the use of a 'design-based research methodology' where interventions are conceptualized, implemented, observed and then revised. In some ways this cycle of development – trial, observation and revision – has something in common with Action Research or Practitioner Enquiry. Where Learning Sciences differs, however, is both in its explicit commitment to draw on particular disciplinary perspectives and in its commitment to 'rigorous' research methods. In ways that are similar to the New Science of Education, the research methods used are predominantly statistically based, with a particular emphasis on RCTs. Where it differs from the New Science of Education is that research in this tradition is strongly theoretically framed; the explicit intention is to contribute to both theory and to practice (ISLS 2009).

#### Quality and impact in educational research

These then are some of the main knowledge traditions we observed in our survey of the study of education in seven countries. Though sometimes organized differently, based in different types of institutions, most of them were observable to some degree in each of the countries we studied (the only real exception was German Educational Theory). But if the field of education is so diverse in its knowledge traditions, how can we really understand quality; and given its importance in contemporary research policy debates, how can we understand impact? In considering these questions, I return to the aforementioned research that I conducted in collaboration with Alis Oancea (Oancea and Furlong 2007; Furlong and Oancea 2006).

The background to this particular project was concern, following the UK's 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), that insufficient attention had been paid to recognizing the value of 'applied and practice-based research'; there was a widespread feeling that debates about quality had been almost entirely conceptualized in terms of conventional academic protocols. This was a particular concern for those in the education community, though the implications were far wider and recognized in disciplines as diverse as social work and engineering.

Partly as a result of such criticisms, the 2008 RAE made a specific commitment to ensuring any researcher, including those engaged in applied and practice-based research, should be able to submit their work for review if they considered it to have achieved 'due standards of excellence'. RAE subject panels were therefore urged to: 'define appropriate criteria for identifying excellence in different forms of research endeavour, while attaching no greater weight to one form over another; and . . . to make provision to recognize the diversity of evidence for excellent research' (UK Funding Bodies 2005: para 16). But of course, as previous RAE exercises had demonstrated, simply having the aspiration to ensure 'parity of esteem' for all forms of research did not mean that it would happen in practice. At that time there was little current agreement as to what applied and practice-based research actually was let alone any agreement as to how to define its quality.

In order to help prepare the research community for the forthcoming RAE, in the spring of 2004 the UK Economic and Social Research Council commissioned myself and Alis Oancea to undertake a short project to bring some conceptual clarity to different approaches to applied and practice-based research with a view to developing appropriate quality criteria for the academic, policy and user communities.

The outcome of the project was the development of two key papers that explored the 'expressions of excellence' of different models of research including applied and practice-based research. The papers were widely influential, being taken up directly by the 2008 UK RAE education panel, and taken into account by every other UK subject panel as well (UK Funding Bodies 2005). They were also influential in helping to reframe research assessment debates in a number of other countries, most particularly Canada and New Zealand (PBRF 2009; SSHRC 2008).

#### Expressions of excellence

What our research revealed was that quality in applied and practicebased research was peculiarly difficult to pin down precisely because of researchers' insistence on mixing different forms of knowledge; mixing their theoretical claims and concerns with practical ones. As a result, though in principle it might be possible to judge applied and practicebased research from a purely methodological perspective, this left out the most interesting part of the problem – their relationship with practice and policy. Part of the task of seeking a more rounded judgement was therefore to see how notions of quality might respond to the diversity of ways in which applied and practice-based research placed their emphasis on the relationship with practice (including policy) and with practitioners and users.

In trying to understand that diversity and possible different conceptions of quality more clearly, we turned to the work of Aristotle (1975) who operated with a distinction between several different domains of knowledge (or of engagement with the world), each with its own forms of excellence that could not be reduced to others. In our account of quality in applied and practice-based research we focused on three such domains: *theoresis* (contemplation); *poiesis* (production); and *praxis* (social action). Within each of these domains, following Aristotle, we argued that there was space for excellence, or 'virtue', epitomized by three further concepts: *episteme theoretike* (knowledge that is demonstrable through valid reasoning); *techne* (technical skill, or a trained ability for rational production); and *phronesis* (practical wisdom, or the capacity or predisposition to act truthfully and with reason in matters of deliberation, thus with a strong ethical component). The concept of 'quality' we developed therefore recognized: first, that, despite the fact that each of the three domains (*theoresis*, *poiesis* and *praxis*) were different and could not be reduced to any of the others, they were still compatible and, in fact, complementary; second, that it was possible to identify different forms of 'excellence' or virtue in each of these different domains. We argued that if we adopted this perspective, then the problem in defining quality in applied and practice-based research would not be one of fine-tuning a single set of criteria, but rather, one of capturing the deep distinctiveness of the three domains and of their various 'expressions of excellence', while at the same time allowing for compatibility.

To give a little more detail, the first domain of quality we considered was *Episteme – demonstrable knowledge* or 'contemplative' knowledge – that is, the type of rational activity that Aristotle calls *theoresis*. Excellence in this mode of knowledge involves developing what we might today call 'scientific' knowledge that can lead to 'judgement[s] about things that are universal and necessary' (Aristotle 1975). Researchers concerned with epistemic excellence, therefore, see themselves as contributing to the (methodologically rigorous) search for articulated and justified knowledge. Expressions of excellence in this domain might include a concern with: *trustworthiness* (in different research traditions defined variously as validity, reliability, groundedness, dependability, believability); *contribution to knowledge*, building on what is known and contributing to the wider stock of knowledge; *transparency and explicitness* so that others may take part in its evaluation though, for example, peer review.

The second domain was *Techne – technical skill*. Here the emphasis is on 'production', or *poiesis*, aimed at installing order and increasing human control over underdetermined circumstances. From this perspective, we argued that practice is seen as the pursuit of predefined ends through the careful selection of suitable means; at its best, the process involves design or planning, trial and error and a concern for the efficient use of the resources available. Expressions of excellence in this domain might include: *fitness to purpose*; *specificity*; *concern for enabling impact* (e.g. active dissemination, closer links between researchers and practitioners, etc.); *operationalizability*; and importantly the *strategic and economic value* (or the propriety) of the research.

The final domain we discussed was *Phronesis* – *practical wisdom*, which is concerned with praxis (virtuous action in the public space). From this perspective, the entanglement of research and practice becomes akin to a way of life – it is both personal and moral. Practical wisdom is not a discrete skill, but is embedded in who we are, individually and as a community. As such, the distance between possession and application of skill that characterized *techne* disappears: practical wisdom is a way of being and acting in the world, and so it cannot be possessed, forgotten, or 'applied' imperfectly; in other words, it cannot be instrumentalized. Expressions of excellence in this domain could include a consideration of: *transformation* resulting in genuine ethical and educative action; *deliberation*, *reflexivity and criticism*, where research contributes to self-reflection and self-development; *engagement in and with research*, including partnership and forms of involvement of practitioners/participants in the process of research; *plausibility*; *timeliness*; and *receptiveness* – to the practitioner's viewpoint, among professional researchers, but also to building receptiveness to research among practitioners, policymakers and in the larger public sphere.

The different 'domains of quality' we defined are expressed in Figure 15.1.

**Figure 15.1:** Domains of quality

*Source:* Oancea and Furlong (2007: 113)

These then were the basic conceptual tools that Oancea and I deployed in our discussion of quality in applied and practice-based research. Our aim was primarily to raise discussion. We did not claim that our approach covered all possible criteria, or that it brought them to harmonious agreement, capable of securing full consensus within the education research communities. Rather, what we put forward was a discursive tool for catalysing the ongoing conversation about quality, and a way of playing with the possibility of opening this conversation up to perspectives that went beyond traditional oppositions between academia and policy, theory and practice, blue-sky and applied research, and so forth. As a tool, we were very clear that it could not create consensus where it was inherently lacking. Nevertheless, as has already been noted, as a discursive tool, our research was indeed highly productive.

But are these tools still relevant today? And most pertinently, are they relevant to the more recent work that Geoff Whitty and I undertook in documenting not just two or three but a whole array of different knowledge traditions in education that draw on different epistemological assumptions and that have quite different relations to the world of practice? In the final section of this chapter I want to argue that they are indeed still relevant and provide us with some important insights in assessing both quality and impact across the field of education as a whole.

#### Discussion

I want to begin this final discussion by returning to the work of Bernstein and his contemporary followers. As we noted, there are clearly value positions implicit in Bernstein's characterization of vertical and horizontal discourses. Young and Muller (2014, 2016) also see vertical discourses as more powerful than horizonal discourses. For a number of years Michael Young (2008) has argued that we need to 'bring knowledge back in' to education, especially in the context of the mainstream school curriculum. He uses the term 'powerful knowledge' to characterize the sort of subject-based knowledge that has, in his view, too often been hollowed out of the school curriculum in recent years, especially for disadvantaged students. In his more recent work with Muller (Young and Muller 2014), Young has extended these ideas to a discussion of the education of the professions, where, drawing on the work of Bernstein (2000) he has begun to develop a theory of what we might call 'powerful professional knowledge'.

Young and Muller therefore question the shift away from what Bernstein calls 'singulars' (pure disciplines) and even from 'regions' (multi and interdisciplinary applied fields like medicine and education) to 'generics'. Accordingly, they are critical of Gibbons *et al*.'s work on Mode 2 knowledge and that of Schon and others, who place 'reflective practice' at the heart of professional education (Young and Muller 2014, 2016). These they see as examples of horizontal discourses that lack the structure of disciplines and treat knowledge as infinitely pliable for different local and context-dependent purposes. Hordern (2016: 367), who takes a similar position, even implies that they somehow constitute 'fake' knowledge that lacks the 'inherent value' of disciplinary knowledge forms. This charge resonates with Bernstein's view that connections between the world of practice and the inherent structures of disciplined knowledge get lost in 'generic modes' (e.g. through a focus on 'core' or 'functional' skills). This, in turn, can make such knowledge open to manipulation by governments and employers and potentially destroy the identities (and autonomy) that professionals traditionally acquire through immersion in disciplinary knowledge. It thereby facilitates a shift from professional education to professional training, which may at least as well be undertaken 'on the job' as in the academy.

However, what my work with Oancea would suggest is something different; something more nuanced. Not all knowledge traditions can or indeed would claim to be excellent in all of the three domains we discussed – epistemic, technical and phronetic. While theoretical and methodological robustness are powerfully important in many knowledge traditions, this is not universally so: in other knowledge traditions there may well be other ways of expressing excellence. On the other hand, our work would also challenge the dominant mantra of relevance and impact at all or any cost. As Geoff Whitty himself so powerfully argued (Whitty 2006), some knowledge traditions need to stand outside this discourse and insist that they are judged on their own terms.

So to return to the knowledge traditions that Geoff Whitty and I set out, it is clear that what we called *academic knowledge traditions*, on the whole, do have the potential to demonstrate excellence in the domain of *episteme* in terms of theoretical and methodological robustness, transparency, ability to contribute to cumulative knowledge, and so forth. But even so they do vary. As we have already noted, each of the Disciplines of Education, for example, have their own epistemological and methodological criteria; questions and indeed answers are by definition drawn from the discipline or at least framed by the discipline. This is therefore potentially a strength from an epistemic the point of view*.* At the same time, this approach means that any direct opportunities for use value (*techne*) or indeed value for people (*phronesis*) by, for example, drawing practitioners into research design are much more challenging to achieve.

Similar problems exist for the New Science of Education, which, as we discussed earlier, prioritizes methodology. It does draw its questions from the field of practice so that its opportunities for providing knowledge that is strong in terms of use value are much higher, but at the same time its methodological preoccupations mean that there are only limited opportunities for practitioners themselves to become closely involved in the research process itself. Its potentiality for the development of *phronesis* are therefore more limited.

Applied Educational Research, we argued, is much more open, much more eclectic. Here, because of the emphasis on drawing research questions from the world of practice, and because of the potentiality for multi and interdisciplinary work, it would seem that there are far greater opportunities for using research as a form of personal capacitybuilding while at the same time providing useful knowledge. But as we also argued, in practice this often comes at the cost of research that is sometimes not as methodologically and theoretically robust as in other academic traditions; this, in turn, has an impact on the ability of research knowledge generated being cumulative.

*Practical knowledge traditions* are by definition very different. As Geoff Whitty and I argued, they may well draw on research-based knowledge but often unsystematically, even unconsciously. They are much more likely to be highly contextually and indeed personally based – they are by definition then 'profane' in Durkheim's terms. But does that mean that by definition they cannot demonstrate excellence in some form? The implication of my work with Oancea is that they can.

Competency frameworks, so long the butt of academic critiques, make their claim for excellence in terms of both their technical value (both use value and economic value) and in terms of their ability to change and develop people. The fact that they have proved their use and their economic value goes some way to explaining their enduring success in so many fields of public life, including teacher education. The issue surely here is not the fact that they are reductive – that is their nature. The question in their own terms is whether the underlying analysis on which they are based is itself robust. Too often in the field of education, competency frameworks have been reduced to a list of behaviours, with the knowledge and judgement behind those behaviours (the phronetic domain) simply expunged from view. But competency frameworks do not have to be like that – indeed in the field of teacher education there are growing numbers of standards internationally that deliberately address these more complex dimensions of professional behaviour, judgement and understanding – see, for example, the Welsh teacher education accreditation framework (Welsh Government 2018). As such they have far greater potential for *phronesis*.

The Normal College Tradition, based on a craft conception of knowledge, is probably the knowledge tradition that is most distant from the forms of rigour demanded by conventional academia. The knowledge and expertise on which it draws is by definition often weak in its ability to demonstrate theoretical and methodological robustness, transparency, cumulative knowledge, and so forth. But at the same time it does have the potentiality to demonstrate strong use value – fitness for purpose, specificity, operationalizability, and so forth. It is also potentially strong in terms of its contribution to *phronesis*, developing the person and their moral judgement. At their best, as Hayhoe and Li (2010) demonstrate, craft-based traditions can therefore represent a powerful form of educational knowledge.

Networked Professional Knowledge is also a form of craft knowledge – situationally developed, context-dependent – but then, crucially, it is shared, critiqued and utilized in different situations during the course of which it is changed and developed. That means it potentially has both use value (*techne*) and personal development value (*phronesis*). Networked Professional Knowledge often draws on academic knowledge as well, though the extent to which this is systematic or happenstance varies. As a result there are often major tensions between knowledge generated in this 'grounded' way and what is known through more conventional research. Nevertheless, as a knowledge tradition it does have significant value for practitioners themselves, which explains its popularity and power.

Finally, there are *integrated knowledge traditions*, which explicitly attempt to demonstrate excellence in two or sometimes three domains, though with different degrees of success. The first example is Action Research. As argued earlier, in Action Research it is the practitioner who is the arbiter of what constitutes a professional 'problem' to be addressed and the practitioner who is the lead person in 'theorizing' their revised understanding as a result of their intervention. The approach therefore first has the potential to demonstrate technical excellence in that research is tightly focused on practical issues that are of relevance in a particular context. At the same time, it has the potential to contribute strongly to the development of the person, *phronesis*. Insisting that it is practitioners themselves who lead the research opens up opportunities for reflection, deliberation and transformation. At the same time, however, this democratization of the research process means that it often struggles to meet the demands of epistemic quality in terms of methodological and theoretical robustness. And although Action Research projects are very practically focused, because by definition they are contextually specific, there is often a challenge in making the results of such studies transferrable.

Our final example of an integrated tradition was what we called Learning Sciences, which is probably one of the most successful in potentially offering excellence in all three domains. In this tradition we noted a serious concern with theoretical and methodological robustness and with developing solutions to educational issues that have as strong use value. Because issues are developed iteratively with those working in practical contexts, there is also a much higher possibility of producing solutions that really are practically useful. In some but not all projects in this tradition, there are also possibilities of engaging practitioners in the research process itself, which clearly has implications for the professional and personal development of those individuals.

#### Conclusion

What this reflection of my work with Geoff Whitty has made clear is the need to challenge those who would suggest that there is only one way of assessing quality and impact in educational knowledge. Yes there are canons of rigour within the epistemic domain that are potentially powerful precisely because of their methodological and theoretical rigour. But sometimes that rigour is achieved at the cost of other forms of excellence. What Geoff Whitty and I discovered, or at least reminded ourselves of, was that formal academic knowledge is not the only form of educational knowledge that is worthwhile.

So where does this recognition of greater complexity in knowledge traditions leave us? Does it mean that we should give up on trying to develop forms of educational knowledge that address all three of these major 'expressions of excellence'? Should we simply say that Action Research is incapable of developing cumulative knowledge? Should we say that the Disciplines of Education model is simply incapable of providing useful knowledge or knowledge that contributes to personal development? Clearly not. For example, Networked Professional Knowledge can become more research-informed, more systematic in the right hands, as authors such as Jenny Gore have demonstrated (2016; see also Gore in this volume). And as current efforts to demonstrate 'impact' in preparation for the UK's forthcoming Research Excellence Framework, the successor to the RAE, make clear, there are things that can be done to ensure that even the most purely theoretically driven research can have an impact, in terms of changed understandings if not directly in terms of changed practices. But we do need to recognize that these things are difficult – that it is very hard to undertake rigorous historical or philosophical research while at the same time drawing practitioners into the research process itself; that the New Science of Education tradition demands highly sophisticated research skills, which means that it can sometimes struggle to engage practitioners themselves in the research process. Just because they fail to meet this particular test should not be taken to mean that they are somehow flawed.

We do therefore need a much more explicit recognition that there are different forms of excellence in each of the major knowledge traditions that make up the field of education. While efforts should be made in each tradition to understand and face up to their potential weaknesses, we need to recognize that doing it all and all equally is likely to be difficult. That is what our return to Aristotle made clear to Alis Oancea and to me. Excellence in different domains may at times be complementary, but it cannot be reduced to one thing; it does inhabit different domains.

But that of course brings us back to Geoff Whitty's own approach to the study of education. As the richness and diversity of his biography demonstrates, Geoff recognized the importance of many different expressions of excellence, in his research, in his professional practice and in his management and leadership. Perhaps one of his greatest contributions to our work together was his insistence on reminding me of the complexity of educational processes. He always wanted to add another caveat, another counterexample to challenge my sometimes overly simplistic arguments. Geoff had the ability to recognize and embrace complexity in all of his work while never running away from the pursuit of excellence, however it was defined. And this, in my view, was his greatest contribution to the study of education. It is an example that perhaps more of us should follow.

#### References

and Humanities Research Council. Accessed 27 October 2019. http://publications.gc.ca/ collections/collection\_2017/crsh-sshrc/CR22-97-2008-eng.pdf.

### Geoff Whitty: A Biographical Note

Emma Wisby and Andrew Brown

**Figure 16.1:** Geoff Whitty Iesha Small, Centre for Education and Youth.

To a greater degree than is usually the case, and from his earliest academic publications, Geoff foregrounded what he wrote with his own educational and career trajectory, showing how that had shaped his scholarship and research. His early experiences as a teacher (as a temporary teacher working in an economically deprived community in London prior to going to university, and later as a qualified secondary school teacher) would engender profound questions for him about his own education as well as that which he was providing for others, questions rooted in a concern to pursue greater social justice and the role of education therein. While Geoff had a wide circle of friends stretching back to his school days and his time as a teacher, he acknowledged, really only in hindsight, that, beyond family life, he did not have many interests outside of his work. It is curious that he still referred to it as 'work'. There were other demarcations that did not seem to apply to Geoff, with his academic work typically speaking simultaneously to education research, policy and practice, as well as being embodied in his later leadership roles.

As Geoff recalled in 2018, his own father, a primary school head teacher, had been dismissive of more theoretical research in education, which he regarded as being 'out of touch with the realities of everyday classrooms' (Whitty 2018). By contrast, Geoff's research stressed sociological analysis as a way of engaging with policy and practice in education, and insisted that, far from being irrelevant, theory is essential for a full understanding of the life of the school and classroom (see, for example, Small 2017a). In this regard, Geoff was an important champion of the sociology of education as a field, as well as the other foundation disciplines of education. For him, it was the sociology of education that gave him the most useful framework for understanding the challenges he had experienced as a teacher, and it provided him with his primary academic and professional identity.

Geoff's championing of these fields was inherent across his research and writing, but as he took on leadership roles within the higher education sector and the subject community the need to sustain the foundation disciplines, in an invariably inhospitable climate, would define his periods in office. This is not to say that he was uncritical of work in the sociology of education. His early writing revealed his frustration with the tendency for the field to pendulum from one extreme position to another. In later years he felt out of step with some contemporary strands, and he would lament the tendency to see 'neoliberalism' as a catch-all culprit for educational inequalities and what was lacking in the education system more generally (see, for example, Small 2017b). He was neither defeatist nor naive about the challenge of overcoming educational disadvantage, while the discipline of his efforts to apply theoretically informed educational research to live issues of education policy and practice to achieve change demanded more of each community (see, for example, Power 2019).

It was once said of Geoff that if you sliced him open it would say 'Institute of Education'. He certainly had a long association with the Institute (IOE) in London, beginning as a trainee teacher in the late 1960s and maintaining a foothold there in one way or another for the next 50 years. In 2000 he would take up the helm as Director of his (postgraduate) alma mater (at which point it was an independent college of the University of London, later merging with UCL in 2014). Geoff held the directorship for a decade, a post he described without hyperbole as 'the best job in the world'.

In spite of his self-proclaimed shyness, Geoff was quick to take on leadership roles; while a student at the IOE his peers had predicted that he would one day run the place. Geoff would have many leadership roles before, during and after the IOE directorship. In all of them he demonstrated a wish to be at the centre of things and to build teams around the pursuit of social justice in and through education. His sense of fairness and purpose, duty perhaps, gave him his focus, determination and tenacity, and he demanded equal commitment from those around him. He was not one to 'count his blessings' or reflect on his achievements; instead he was always searching, always questioning. While that might not have led to the most comfortable existence, it meant that his was 'a life well lived'.

Unsurprisingly to those who knew him, he remained as focused on his work and as active as ever until, in the last few weeks of his life, it became physically impossible. As reflected in this collection, for those still continuing with the task of shaping fairer and more inclusive education systems, Geoff's legacy as one of the leading sociologists of education of his generation and his associated body of work offers an inspiring and valuable resource.

#### Education

Geoff was born in 1946 in Mortlake, Surrey, to Kathleen and Fred, who were themselves both teachers. As mentioned earlier, Fred was a primary school head teacher; Kathleen was a physical education teacher. It was a Methodist household. Geoff had one sibling, an elder brother, John 'Larry' Whitty, who he would follow to Cambridge and with whom he shared his socialist politics. Larry would later become General Secretary of the British Labour Party.

Geoff grew up in the outer suburbs of London. He won a Middlesex county scholarship to attend Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith, which was then a Direct Grant grammar school and among the most academically elite secondary schools in the country. His childhood and schooling at Latymer are evoked powerfully in an obituary written on behalf of the Academy of Social Sciences by his school friend Richard Collins (Collins 2018). From there, Geoff won a scholarship place at St John's College, Cambridge, to read history.

Perhaps far more defining for Geoff was the nine months he spent as a temporary teacher before going to university. This was at an inner-city primary school in west London, Belmont Primary School in Chiswick, which was then a disadvantaged working-class area, and saw significant immigration from the British Commonwealth, mainly the Caribbean, Indian subcontinent and Africa. This experience would expose Geoff to new communities and made him question some of his taken-for-granted assumptions, including those that had informed his own schooling at a selective grammar school. The task of teaching the traditional grammar school curriculum in this context highlighted to him how such a curriculum could so often seem to be meaningless to many pupils.

As Geoff noted of his own schooling:

For most of my career there in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I doubt if I ever asked myself, let alone anyone else, why I was studying the particular assortment of subjects presented to me or why the content of those subjects was constituted in the particular way it was . . . Only in my final term, when I read E.H. Carr's *What is History?* did I even begin to glimpse the idea that school knowledge was a selection from a much vaster range of possible knowledge and that its content might be socially determined. (Whitty 1985: 1)

Carr's book, itself only published in 1961, notably problematized the nature of historical knowledge. Geoff carried its lessons with him when he went up to Cambridge, commencing in 1965 (see McCulloch 2019). He was a reluctant student, and at the time would have preferred to go straight into teaching (he would spend his university vacations back at Belmont). He found his history course at Cambridge to be similarly lacking in intellectual stimulation, seeming to demand little more than regurgitating knowledge, and he would later criticize the course for not encouraging students to question the content of the curriculum they were following (Whitty 1985).

Whether or not as a result of the nature of his course of study, Geoff spent his three years as an undergraduate more interested in student politics and student activism than in his course, graduating with an upper second degree. This was the era of the anti-Vietnam War protests and Geoff was very active in those movements. He also got involved in the Fabian Society student group, and this is where he was exposed to the sociology of education for the first time. In asking questions about education and inequality, this work would chime with some of the questions that Geoff had already been asking in light of his experience as a temporary teacher. A lecture by Perry Anderson organized by the student left convinced him of the need to expose the social basis of knowledge to those who determined and were on the receiving end of the school curriculum.

#### Teacher education and teaching career

In 1968 Geoff commenced his teaching diploma at the IOE. In 2018 he recollected, with some amusement, how he was rejected by numerous teacher training courses, and how it took a behind-the-scenes political appeal instigated by his father to secure his place at the IOE: he would later have it confirmed that his student activism had counted against him (Whitty 2018).

He trained as a history and social studies teacher and in 1969 took up a teaching post at Lampton School in Hounslow, west London, and then a post at Thomas Bennet School in Crawley, West Sussex. But his interest in the questions raised by the sociology of education remained, and he soon found himself back at the IOE, this time as a master's student. He would later describe this course as 'the most rewarding academic experience that I had had to date' (Whitty 1985: 2), and this effectively fomented his outlook into a firmly sociological framework.

It was during these postgraduate studies that Geoff was first alerted to the possibilities inherent in a sociological approach to the school curriculum, via the lectures of Basil Bernstein, Brian Davies and Michael Young. During his time at Cambridge the 'political arithmetic tradition' had been dominant within the sociology of education. By the time he arrived back at the IOE the 'new sociology of education' was in the ascendancy, with sociologists opening up to scrutiny prevailing assumptions about what was 'worthwhile knowledge'. In particular, Bernstein would present the curriculum as just one of a number of possibilities showing how it served particular social functions.

Geoff was the archetypal idealistic new teacher of the 1960s and 1970s, 'fired with an enthusiasm to change things'. This was the era of comprehensivization, and Geoff wanted to change the experience of schooling, but also 'foster changes in consciousness that would ultimately transform society' (Whitty 1985: 2). Such was his idealism that he virtually abandoned his involvement in broader political activities to foster change through education. Increasingly, though, he saw his naivety. His postgraduate dissertation at the IOE warned sociologists not to romanticize the possibilities of radical change in and through the school curriculum alone and called for more attention to be paid to the relevant Marxist literature. Geoff was perhaps ahead of his time, as there followed a volte-face in the sociology of education to a more economically deterministic model. But this was a marked pendulum swing, towards the nihilistic position that everyday professional processes merely sustained broader structures of oppression. Alternation between extreme positions, within the sociology of education and in education policy, would be an ongoing source of frustration for Geoff.

In 1974 Geoff published part of his postgraduate dissertation as a journal article (Whitty 1974) entitled 'Sociology and the Problem of Radical Educational Change: Notes Towards a Reconceptualization of the New Sociology of Education', and from there moved from school teaching into an academic career.

#### University career

Geoff's first step into the higher education sector was as a part-time Postgraduate Certificate of Education social studies tutor at Goldsmiths College, from 1972–3. His first university post 'proper' was as a teacher educator (sociology and social studies) at the University of Bath, a post he held from 1973–80, and which later overlapped with his work as a part-time tutor in educational studies at the Open University, from 1975–82. It was also during this period that Geoff would spend time as a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education (1979–80).

At this stage, Geoff was seen as a young firebrand, associated with the Marxist turn in the 'new sociology of education'. With Denis Gleeson he published *Developments in Social Studies Teaching* (Gleeson and Whitty 1976) and *Sociology: The Choice at A Level* (Whitty and Gleeson 1976). Geoff would also publish two edited collections with his earlier tutor at the IOE, Michael Young: *Explorations in the Politics of School Knowledge* (Whitty and Young 1976) and *Society, State and Schooling: Readings on the Possibilities for Radical Education* (Young and Whitty 1977). These held on to the idea that sociological study of the curriculum would yield important insights into opportunities for radical practice in education, seeking to provide a research-informed alternative both to 'naive optimism' and to 'fatalistic pessimism', a path that Geoff would endeavour to tread throughout his career.

In 1981 Geoff left Bath to take up the post of lecturer in urban education at King's College London, which he held for three years. Even across these early posts in his academic career, Geoff was showing his leadership credentials, frequently serving as an elected member on senior committees, within the universities he worked in and the University of London, of which Goldsmiths and King's were constituent parts. It was then that Geoff took what at the time was the unusual choice of moving to the then polytechnic sector – as Head of Department and later Dean of Education at Bristol Polytechnic (now the University of the West of England). There he helped to create what many considered to be the most successful education department in the polytechnic sector. This was at a time when the education faculty was having to shape a new identity for itself, having been incorporated into the polytechnic as one of the former colleges of education responsible for teacher training, but not yet having become a fully integral part of a multi-faculty institution. During Geoff's five years in office the faculty doubled in size and soon became the highest ranking former polytechnic education department in research terms – while also maintaining consistently high ratings from the national inspectorate for the quality of its teaching. This was an early example of Geoff's leadership and strategic thinking, as well as his ability to attract and build high calibre teams in pursuit of a social justice agenda. Many of those who joined Geoff at Bristol, including Peter Aggleton, Len Barton, David Halpin, Ian Menter, Andrew Pollard and Marjorie Smith, would continue to work closely with Geoff long after they had all left Bristol, several of them later joining him at the IOE. It was during this time that Geoff became an increasingly national figure not only in his own area of scholarship, but also within the polytechnic sector and as a representative of that sector in wider arenas.

Despite having taken on more demanding leadership roles Geoff remained as prolific as ever in his scholarship. In 1985 he published *Sociology and School Knowledge: Curriculum Theory, Research and Politics* (Whitty 1985). This book he regarded as bringing together and developing his scholarship to date. It would be the first of three books to serve this function, the others being *Making Sense of Education Policy* (Whitty 2002) and *Research and Policy in Education* (Whitty *et al*. 2016). Geoff wanted *Sociology and School Knowledge* to be relevant to people developing radical approaches to educational policy and practice, and the book suggests how a sociology of the curriculum could develop closer links with pedagogical and political practice. It would certainly play a significant part in enabling the new sociology of education to become institutionalized in British higher education.

*Sociology and School Knowledge* and the works it drew together, however, were conducted against an increasingly inhospitable climate. As McCulloch (2019) notes, in England, the hopes for curriculum reform that had grown in the 1960s now faded, to be replaced by economic and industrial problems that brought down the Conservative government in 1974 and resulted in a politically fraught minority Labour government, first under Harold Wilson and then James Callaghan. In this climate, education took the blame for both industrial underperformance and social conflict. In 1976 Callaghan instigated a 'Great Debate' on education that eventually led to reforms under a new Conservative government with Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in the 1980s.

The Thatcher years provided a difficult climate for the sociology of education and inhibited the impact of work carried out in the 1970s. A more pressing frontier was created for those concerned with educational inequalities, as the discourse of choice, specialization and diversity displaced the aspiration for common and comprehensive schooling. As for many others working in the sociology of education, Geoff's scholarship moved in a new direction, to policy sociology and policy studies in education. As Brian Davies commented of Geoff's scholarship, '[Geoff] moved with some decorum, rather than any hint of "scramble" from being "new directions" first insider-critic to neo-Marxist curriculum analyst . . . to policy researcher and theorist' (Davies 1994: 14). This shift was marked by Geoff's move from Bristol back to Goldsmiths College, this time as Professor of Policy and Management in Education (1990–92), and then on to the IOE as Karl Mannheim Chair of Sociology of Education within its Department of Policy Studies.

The paradox of the inequities of equal treatment came through vividly in Geoff's work in education policy studies, drawing out as it did the dynamics of and interdependencies between middle-class advantage and working-class disadvantage in education. Geoff's key publications over this period include his evaluation of the Assisted Places Scheme with Tony Edwards and John Fitz (Edwards *et al.* 1989) and his analyses of choice policies with Tony Edwards and Sharon Gewirtz (see Whitty *et al.* 1993) and Sally Power and David Halpin (see Whitty *et al*. 1998). This work demonstrated the naivety of policy in its assumptions about the extent to which schooling could compensate for society and the potential of choice to overcome existing stratification when it came to the composition of schools' pupil intakes and pupil outcomes. It provided a powerful rejoinder, showing how marketization had further disadvantaged those least able to compete in the market. Geoff's interest in teacher education also continued. This was the topic of his inaugural professorial lecture at Goldsmiths – *Next in Line for the Treatment?* – which explored the growing emphasis on school-based teacher education within national policy (Whitty 1991). Also at Goldsmiths, Geoff had been instrumental in establishing an innovative new research centre, the Health and Education Research Unit (HERU), and he now brought this to the IOE, initially acting as its director. It was via HERU that Geoff pursued another significant strand of scholarship, on educating about sex, sexuality and HIV, including the role of teacher education therein. Conducted in collaboration with Peter Aggleton, that work would support the design and roll-out of new approaches to sex education that both destigmatized HIV and HIV education and empowered young people to protect their health. To this day, it influences some of the taken-forgranted assumptions of international agencies such as the World Health Organization and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Just one publication to stem from this work was *Learning about AIDS: Scientific and Social Issues*, a collection that Geoff edited with Peter Aggleton, Kim Rivers and Ian Warwick (Aggleton *et al*. 1994).

#### Institute of Education

Geoff's return to the IOE in 1992 was as successor to his early mentor, Basil Bernstein, as the prestigious Karl Mannheim Chair of Sociology of Education. In 1998 he was also appointed Dean of Research at the IOE, and then two years later he was appointed as its director. Of his many leadership roles in higher education the most notable is his time as Director of the IOE, a post he held from 2000 to 2010. Despite the pressures of running an organization of the size and complexity of the IOE, especially for someone like Geoff who identified so closely with his work, Geoff maintained his illustrious academic career throughout. This was aided by the collaborative approach he had always taken to his research; he was similarly notable in his support for early career researchers, often publishing with them. His key publications during this phase of his career included the 1997 Karl Mannheim Memorial Lecture, *Social Theory and Education Policy: The Legacy of Karl Mannheim* (Whitty 1997). As Geoff noted in the lecture, Mannheim had been appointed by the then IOE director, Fred Clarke, on the grounds that 'educational theory and educational policy that take no account of wider social forces would be not only blind but positively harmful' (149). Mannheim was never the detached critical observer, more a political and social strategist trying to understand so that others may be able to act. In that regard, Geoff was arguably a worthy successor.

There followed Geoff's analysis of the changing nature of teacher education and teacher professionalism, *Teacher Education in Transition*, with John Furlong, Len Barton, Sheila Miles and Caroline Whiting (Furlong *et al.* 2000), the aforementioned second in his trilogy of books drawing together his recent work, this time using sociological perspectives to explore various aspects of education policy, *Making Sense of Education Policy* (Whitty 2002), and his study of the experience of Assisted Places Scheme holders in the private school system, *Education and the Middle Class*, with Sally Power, Tony Edwards and Valerie Wigfall (Power *et al*. 2003), which would win the Society for Educational Studies book prize.

The New Labour years that would overlap substantially with Geoff's time as IOE director offered a mixed bag in terms of the concerns of sociological research in education and the relationship between research and policy. Prime Minister Tony Blair's proclamation of 'Education, education, education' brought prominence and investment to education. And there were flagship policies that appeared to recognize the link between educational performance and wider social structures and inequalities (for instance, increased early years investment and, later on, the Every Child Matters initiative). Nevertheless, the broad policy settlement of the Thatcher years, of competition and choice, went unchallenged, while the 'what works' agenda began to shape policy on research funding yet more strongly. Geoff's work with his collaborating authors would retain an important role in signalling the limitations of marketization, as well as of the 'prescribed professionalism' of 'deliverology' (as promoted, for instance, by Barber, Kihn and Moffit 2010). Geoff's work on marketization and the sociology of the curriculum in particular would return to prominence under the subsequent Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government that came to power in 2010 and its emphasis on academization and a knowledge-led curriculum for all. Geoff himself recounted these policy turns and the relationship with his own 'life with the sociology of education' in Whitty (2012).

Alongside the major research studies and publications outlined, Geoff's leadership of the IOE was sowing the seeds of its 'number one' ranking from 2014 in the annual Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings for Education. By the end of his directorship the IOE was unique among faculties of education in its size and reach, and unparalleled in its work with education systems at home and overseas. In 2007 the IOE gained the power to award its own degrees (having previously awarded University of London degrees), and in 2008 produced an outstanding performance in the national assessment of universities' research activity, the then Research Assessment Exercise. By this time the IOE was the largest and most esteemed provider of postgraduate initial teacher education nationally, accounted for nearly a third of all UK research funding in education, and was one of the top four universities for receipt of social science research funding. Geoff put his own stamp on the organization through his investment in its research intensity, the stronger foregrounding, through its investments and branding, of its work beyond education (especially children and families, health and well-being, and international development), as well as his support for the foundation disciplines of education.

Geoff would also personally embody the more public and policyengaged organization that he wanted the IOE to be. With the General Teaching Council for Northern Ireland he developed innovative new teacher standards that supported a more holistic model of teacher professionalism (see GTCNI 2005). Later he would help lay the groundwork for the introduction of Teach First in England and serve as a sounding board for those who worked on the transformative London Challenge programme. His review of school councils for the government (Whitty and Wisby 2007) would help schools harness the benefits of vehicles for pupil voice, while, as chair of the Bristol Education Partnership Board, he would help build improvement in Bristol's school system. He would serve as specialist advisor to successive House of Commons select committees on education (2005–12), one outcome of which was New Labour's rewriting of national school admissions policy in order to facilitate fairer access for children of all backgrounds. He would later serve on the board of the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, the national inspectorate for schools, colleges, children's services and teacher education. Always international as well as collaborative in his outlook, Geoff was during this time instrumental in establishing the International Network of Educational Institutes, a global think tank created to bring a global perspective to issues in education, and the World Education Research Association, an alliance of major associations dedicated to advancing education research.

The decade of Geoff's directorship saw him as active as ever in national bodies, including the British Council, Economic and Social Research Council, General Teaching Council for England, Universities Council for the Education of Teachers and Universities UK. He continued to serve on numerous journal editorial boards at this time, including: *International Studies in Sociology of Education*, *Review of Research in Education*, *International Journal of Inclusive Education*, *Education Journal*, *American Educational Research Journal* and *Asia Pacific Journal of Education*. He was also awarded many accolades: chartered fellow of the College of Teachers (2001); academician of the Academy of Social Sciences (2002); the presidency of both the College of Teachers and the British Educational Research Association (BERA) (2005–07); the College of Teachers Lady Plowden Medal (2009); fellowship of the Society for Educational Studies (2012); and an honorary degree from the University of the West of England (2001). In addition he was awarded a DLit(Ed) (by examination) from the University of London (2002).

#### 'Retirement'

Following his retirement as director of the IOE Geoff remained active as director emeritus and also went on to posts at the Universities of Bath, Bath Spa, and Newcastle, Australia. He would also spend time at Teachers College, Columbia University, and continue to serve as a visiting professor at the Universities of Birmingham and Bedfordshire, an honorary professor at Beijing Normal University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and as an honorary research fellow at Oxford University. In his valedictory interview on standing down as IOE director Geoff made a commitment to review the research evidence on ways of narrowing the social class achievement and participation gap. The former he pursued in collaboration with Jake Anders (Whitty and Anders 2014). Class differences in access to higher education was a relatively new area of research for Geoff, and with Annette Hayton and Sarah Tang he drew together analysis of participation and access trends with the literature on social and cultural capital (Whitty *et al*. 2015). In 2014, as Global Innovation Chair at the University of Newcastle, Australia, a university known for its combining of academic reputation and inclusivity, Geoff would establish the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education. In line with Geoff's earlier work, the purpose of the centre was to bring equity practice and research together to support inclusion. Penny Jane Burke was appointed as co-director in 2015 and is now director of the centre. Geoff's engagement with matters of teacher education also continued. He was closely involved in the BERA and Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) enquiry and report *Research and the Teaching Profession: Building*  *the Capacity for a Self-Improving Education System* (BERA–RSA 2014). At Bath Spa he helped to initiate the 'Diversity in Teacher Education' (DiTE) research project, which sought to understand the contemporary changes to initial teacher education in England, and which was in effect a successor to his earlier project with Furlong *et al*. (2000), known as the 'Modes of Teacher Education' project. The findings of the DiTE project, documenting a burgeoning of new routes into teaching, were published in 2019 (Sorensen 2019) and are accompanied by a foreword written by Geoff.

In 2016 Geoff published *Research and Policy in Education: Evidence, Ideology and Impact* (Whitty *et al*. 2016). This book, the third in the trilogy, brought together Geoff's scholarship from the final 15 years of his career, covering his work on inequalities in education (schooling and higher education) and his work on the relationship between education research and education policy. This period had involved Geoff much more in generic issues in education policy research, but he was repeatedly drawn back to sociological perspectives. *Research and Policy in Education* reaffirmed his roots in the sociological tradition and reasserted what he saw as its importance for understanding and confronting education policy dilemmas. The book takes these perspectives and applies them to teacher education, policy borrowing, the socio-economic attainment gap and access to higher education. It also returns to Geoff's advocacy of the need to maintain a 'broad church' of educational research. As he commented in the aforementioned 1997 Karl Mannheim lecture:

however implicated universities may now have become in the instrumental rationality of the state, if they are not to be the places to explore the relationship between education and the wider social order, it is difficult to see where that work will be done on a sustained and systematic basis. (Whitty 1997: 154)

This was also the theme of his 2005 BERA presidential address (Whitty 2006), which challenged the creeping and misleadingly simplistic 'what works' agenda of the time and the demand that educational research offer immediate relevance to current policy and practice concerns. In the intervening decade this drift in education research policy and funding would continue and indeed strengthen with, for example, the advent of the impact agenda in research funding policy and the arrival of the Education Endowment Foundation, requiring the case to be made once again for a broad church (Whitty and Wisby 2016). In what would be Geoff's final book, *Knowledge and the Study of Education* (Whitty and Furlong 2017), researched and written with John Furlong, Geoff explored education as a discipline and how this manifested itself around the world.

In this later phase of his career, Geoff's contribution would continue to be recognized in numerous plaudits: a CBE for services to teacher education (2011), fellowship of the American Educational Research Association (2015) and the BERA John Nisbet Fellowship (2017), as well as honorary degrees from the Hong Kong Institute of Education (2012), UCL (2016) and University of Newcastle, Australia (2018). By now his work had been translated into numerous other languages, among them Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese and Spanish. In 2014 two of Geoff's co-authored publications, *The State and Private Education* (Edwards *et al*. 1989), and *Teacher Education in Transition* (Furlong *et al*. 2000), featured in BERA's 40@40, which recognized influential studies in the field of education research. Further demonstrating the continued salience and relevance of Geoff's early work, and in many ways a poignant coming full circle, 2017 saw Routledge reissue Geoff's 1985 book *Sociology and School Knowledge*, in print and as an e-book.

A review of Geoff's academic and institutional career demonstrates the significance of his work and his standing as one of the foremost sociologists of education of his generation. It also helps to explain his ongoing frustration at just how much education policy (and education research) remained stubbornly decontextualized and his wish to see the sociological imagination exercised more liberally in institutional and political life (Whitty, 1997, Whitty, 2016). Geoff himself did not take much comfort in the notion that, by way of the 'double hermeneutic', the 'findings' of the social sciences might enter constitutively into the world of policy and practice that they describe (Whitty 1997: 158). But perhaps he should have, just for a moment, allowed himself the satisfaction of recognizing the impact of his own contribution.

#### References

Aggleton, Peter, Kim Rivers, Ian Warwick and Geoff Whitty, eds. 1994. *Learning about AIDS: Scientific and Social Issues*. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone.

Barber, Michael, Andy Moffit and Paul Kihn. 2010. *Deliverology 101: A Field Guide for Educational Leaders*. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

British Educational Research Association and Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (BERA–RSA). 2014. *Research and the Teaching Profession: Building the Capacity for a Self-Improving Education System*. London: British Educational Research Association.

### Index

academics of colour experience of 6, 150, 151–3, 155–61 action research. *see* education studies applied educational research. *see* education studies artificial intelligence and education research 175, 264; and policymaking in education 175; and the professions 90 assisted places scheme. *see* private schools

data and education policy 6–7, 105, 120, 174–5, 176–7, 217, 225; and teacher professionalism 217, 225 'datafication' 167, 174, 225 'deliverology' 126, 217, 221, 225, 228

education, foundation disciplines of 168, 259–60, 270, 278, 287. *see also* education studies; Whitty, Geoff education, sociology of and biological science 3, 4, 64–5; 'new', 'old' 4, 67–8, 84–7, 166; orthodoxies in (Foucauldian) 65, 68, 76 education governance. *see* governance, modes of (in education) education policy. *see also* neoliberalism