School of Education
Research and Enterprise Conference
Keynote: 10.15am to 11am
Education: The State of the Discipline
Professor Dominic Wyse
Founder of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy, UCL Institute of Education, UK. President of the British Educational Research Association.
Learning and teaching are phenomena that are uniquely human, and part of the very long history of humans’ development over thousands of years. Education as an organised academic discipline has a much more recent history yet its roots lie in human development. Following some brief introductory historical notes about education the first part of the talk addresses the nature and importance of education as an academic discipline. The idea that a weakness of education as a discipline is its relationship with education practice is critiqued drawing on a recent empirical study of ‘close-to-practice-research’, and other work.
The second part of the talk explores some of the theories outlined in the first part through an examination of the nature of academic writing and writing more generally in schools and in society. The talk concludes with opportunities for education, and next steps, in a society no longer in lock-down.