Richard Pring on making research educational research: in dialogue with R. Scott Webster

Over the many years Professor Richard Pring has been working in education and in educational research, he has consistently encouraged his readers and listeners to be heedful of the very nature of education, including what makes research in this field distinctively educational research. Pring’s philosophical focus is shared by relatively few other educators, one of whom is John Dewey (1938, p. 91), who argued that for any progress to occur in the practices of education, we must first devote “ourselves to finding out just what education is”. This remains a perennial challenge. Yet in most of the current literature dealing with education the complex concept of “education” is usually absent and in its place is the narrower concept of “learning” (Biesta, 2010). This latter term lends itself more easily to managing the work of teachers, researchers and schools, mainly through a “how to” approach of required applications.