<Articles>Collusion and Conversation in Educational Research

Abstract

This article considers how the standardisation of language in current education policy and practice, and in educational research, effects a repression of language and thought. The article then seeks to outline how we might resist this. The article takes up Paul Standish's suggestion that educational research colludes in the repression of language, and therefore of thought, that is effected in part through policy-borrowing and the global dominance of the English language. Standish refers in particular to the rhetoric of social justice. This article considers the narrative research methodologies often employed in the name of social justice and the ways in which the accompanying notions of voice, dialogue, and conversation fail to provide a critique of current policy and practice. Rather, they further entrench the discourses that repress language and thought. With reference to Stanley Cavell's notion of conversation' and Bruno Latour's notion of 'composition', the article discusses how we might proceed otherwise, exploring a mode of critique that is attentive to the conditions we find ourselves in today.