Educational research in philosophy

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] What makes the Higher Education Academy unique in educational development circles is its firm focus on disciplinary differences. This is why it has a network of 24 Subject Centres, each with its own distinctive perspective on helping academics to improve the quality of their students’ learning. However, disciplines differ as much in their methods of research as of teaching, and at a time when the spotlight is on the relationship between research and teaching, we need to consider the implications of different research traditions for research into teaching.

The concept of the scholarship of teaching has become widely accepted, and it demands that all university teachers should be actively engaged in research into teaching – at least into the effectiveness of their own teaching. However, it is unreasonable to expect hard-pressed lecturers to learn an entirely new and foreign research methodology in order to fulfil this expectation. The methods of educational researchers are very different from those of philosophers, physicists, and practitioners of other disciplines.