Exercise), publication (for example, the Danish bibliometric points system), and
mixed level (individual staff and organisation—for example, New Zealand’s
Performance-Based Research Fund). In several contexts, research funding is also
conditional on evidence of actual or potential impact from research, a step up from
past demands for relevance and usefulness (for example, the UK Research
Excellence Framework gives significant weight to impact; the UK Research
Councils and the European Commission also include impact in their evaluations).
As a result of these incremental changes in the wider environment, recent
research policy in the UK and elsewhere, notably in the EU, has moved towards
channelling a significant proportion of research funding into schemes driven by sets
of‘societal challenges’, practical problems, and ongoing policy priorities. Tackling
these concerns is generally seen as requiring not only different and complementary
skills and knowledge, often straddling not only sectors, but also disciplinary tra-
ditions. This trend has led to incentives (and even pressures, within particular
financial and performance management contexts) for increased collaboration among
higher education researchers and institutions nationally and internationally; as well
as between them and researchers and practitioners from a wide range of other
settings, including: schools, governmental and non-governmental organisations,
for-profit consultancies and international organisations.
Incentives of this nature have been strengthened by the recent shift towards
including consideration of‘impact’in the assessment of research. This may happen
either at proposal stage (for example, by the UK Research Councils) or output stage
(for example, as part of the UK Research Excellence Framework). An implication
of this move has been that‘user engagement’and research‘co-design’have become
common in many areas of research, including the engagement of practitioners in
education research (on which see previous section above). And this provides a
further incentive for the breakdown of the traditional disciplinary boundaries pro-
tected by the academy.
36.4.1 Collaborative Work in Teacher Education Research
Many, however, see education research as afield or subject connected with different
disciplines, rather than as a discipline in its own right—that is, to use Hirst’s( 1974 :
97) terms,“a conceptual and propositional structure”which is a (sub-set of) a
particular form of knowledge. Academic educational research and teaching practice
are framed by the structural organisation and discursive construction of education
departments in higher education institutions. Education departments are a melee of
subject specialisms, for example, psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology
and the full range of school subjects. Philosophers are also part of the mix, but they
are thin on the ground nowadays, presumably as a reflection of the fact that many
education departments are now clearly oriented towards the social sciences, rather
than the humanities, as their ideal“disciplinary matrices”.
550 D. Bridges et al.