modestly, some specific improvement to be achieved. If teacher education is to be
evidence-based, values will dictate what evidence may be relevant to a particular
purpose. It cannot be a neutral technical exercise, but rather
a deeply ethical, political and cultural one bound up with ideas about the good society and
how life can be worthwhile. (Winch and Gingell 2006 , Preface)So there is work to be done establishing a coherent normative framework. This
might include: substantive work rooted in what in more popular terms are described
as ‘philosophies of education’, and in conceptions of individual and social
well-being; analytic work which examines and critiques the views that are held or
offered as the direction for educational improvement; phenomenological work
which explores the meaning and significance of teaching experience.‘Evidence’
always leaves you with the‘so what?’question, and this question can only be
answered by reference to the sort of considerations indicated above.
Having taken a wide ranging and inclusive view of what might count as
research, provided that in whatever form it is rigorous and disciplined, we take a
similar view on philosophy itself. When the philosopher, A.J. Ayer was asked
‘What is philosophy?’he gestured in the direction of a large study wall stacked with
books.‘It’s all that’was his reply. This ostensive definition (as philosophers might
call it) is not very helpful to anyone unable to view the contents of Ayer’s book-
shelves. However, it does point to philosophy as consisting centrally of traditions of
literature that have developed over at least 2000 years and which continue to be a
crucial point of reference, not just because of what they reveal about the past, but
also because of what they continue to contribute to contemporary thinking.
Some of this work provides systematic views of individual being, of the good
life and of the good society; some is focussed on what we can know and how,
feeding into a wide range of‘philosophies of X’, including science, history, reli-
gion, education. Some philosophers strive to articulate aspects of existence in
imaginative, new terms; others have a preference for plain language and conceptual
analysis. We embrace all these traditions in examining the contribution of philos-
ophy to research in teacher education.
Although this chapter is focussed on the distinctive contribution of philosophy to
research into teacher education, it is our view that philosophy should not be
something set apart from other forms of inquiry. We are all committed, as
Sect.36.4will illustrate, to a research community in which philosophers work with
other researchers in multidisciplinary teams—participating infield observation,
interviewing and test construction as well as more strictly philosophical work. Such
engagement provides a stimulus to philosophical work as well as a way of ensuring
that the contributions of this work are absorbed into every phase of the research
programme. Through this joint work,‘new knowledge emerges when people lose
some part of their discrete professional/occupational identities, in the process of
working on some common purpose’(MacLure, in Bridges 2017 : 160).
So, with these preliminaries established, let us look more closely at philosophy’s
contributions to research in teacher education. Section36.2below illustrates some of
the questions about the nature of teacher education, and in particular what kind of
542 D. Bridges et al.