Educational Research

Manager: Dr Zdenko Kodelja

Source (financed by): the Slovenian Research Agency

Duration of the programme: 2015–2019

General objectives of the programme:

  • Interdisciplinary interconnection of social sciences, humanities, theoretical, applied, and empirical research, and evaluations cutting across the substantive field of upbringing and education.
  • Autonomous research with the purpose of developing sciences such as pedagogics, philosophy, sociology, linguistics (in its broadest conceptualisation), anthropology, psychology (as well as their subdisciplines and interdisciplinary cross-sections with the central field of upbringing and education).
  • Continuous upgrade of the programme in the framework of new paradigms, epistemological models, methods, and technical support provided to research, with the purpose of trying to respond to current changes in circumstances of both the society and education.

 

In 2018, the research programme Educational Research is planning its work in accordance with guidelines proposed for the period of the duration of the programme (2015–2019). In 2018, the main starting points of the programme continue to focus on fundamental conceptual frameworks formed during previous periods of the duration of the programme, with a particular focus of the programme team on the meaning and maintenance of the heterogeneous character of the programme. The latter is defined as the key characteristic of conception and research of thematics of upbringing and education that necessarily presupposes inclusion of sciences from the field of social sciences and humanities.

Throughout its implementation, work in the programme is also determined by current changes in the socioeconomic reality, meaning that in 2018, framework concepts and contents of research in the fundamental part will be shifted. In the year to come, we will therefore continue upgrading the programme in certain outstanding new paradigms, epistemological models, methods, and technical support provided to research, with the purpose of trying to respond to current changes in circumstances of both the society and education. We define them as three starting points of the programme: a) research of education through the paradigm of interdisciplinarity and multi-modality as key characteristics of human functioning and of the specific semiotic manner in which the world is being represented (particularly of the role and meaning of different “non-verbal” elements in the pedagogical process, from complex stimuli of the human organism to images/visualisations and new electronic media), b) development of common conceptual platforms (such as findings in the field of pedagogical and developmental psychology in the context of the use of language, or political, epistemological, and sociological theories as the interpretative framework of databases for international research studies in the field of knowledge, etc.), c) research of the possibility of reconstructing the role of humanities in education as a place to encounter values, ethically reflect on social changes, and obtain civic education.

The aforementioned directions of the programme arise from a critical perception of social changes, the key of which mostly being: democratisation and egalitarisation of all social relationships, the transformed role of socialisation obtained in school, and the influence of globalisation on educational institutions that are focusing on qualification as the dominant objective of education due to the intensified competitivity of economies, pushing the other two objectives, socialisation and emancipation, into the background, thus changing the understanding and relationship towards knowledge and its formal role in the global/local society. In accordance with such perception, we shall also substantially upgrade the thematic areas covered by this programme team, and intensify our research when it comes to the possibility of a productive, reciprocal contact between theories and theoretical applications.

 

Participating Researchers:

 

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