Other‘disciplinary’structures based, arguably, on themes rather than distinctive
modes of inquiry, such as School Leadership, International and Comparative
Education, or Higher Education, have increasingly shaped the organisational
structure of university departments of education. Given these arrangements,
working across specialisms and disciplines is likely to be part of the everyday
practice of education researchers (both higher education and practice-based), as
they interact with others within and beyond their own departments.
Thus, teacher education research is embedded in a complex, multidisciplinary
and multi-institutional landscape of teaching and of teacher education. It therefore
needs to work through networks that can enable the different elements of this
landscape to be connected in new and productive ways, given the“collaborative”
and“hotly contested”nature of the practice it expresses and supports. Particular
challenges and opportunities in terms of the nature of collaborative work in teacher
education research arise from the fact that many see this area of inquiry as a natural
‘meeting’of disciplines, given the combination of subject and educational expertise
involved in designing, offering and researching teacher education programmes.
Further, some see teaching itself either as a means towards the realisation of other
practices, rather than being a coherent, socially established practice in its own right
(MacIntyre and Dunne 2002 , p. 5). Teacher educators themselves may have‘hybrid’
or ‘migrant’ academic identities, having moved into teacher education from
discipline specific degrees (e.g. in the sciences, in literature, in mathematics) and, in
the process, reframed their knowledge in terms of pedagogically contextualised
school‘subjects’and‘curriculum areas’, which are different from‘disciplines’or
even from university‘papers’or‘subjects’.
In principle, there are a number of different ways in which teacher education
research can draw together different disciplines and sectors. While it is possible that
collaborations across different areas of expertise may amount to fully integrated
interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research (such as bioinformatics or neuro-
science), it is difficult to identify such areas in teacher education research specifi-
cally. Perhaps research on communities of practice may approach this model (Lave
and Wenger 1991 ), or, similarly, narrative and ethnographic research. Although
work in such areas may have roots in distinctive disciplines, it coalesces into afield
of study in its own right, with philosophical contributions intertwined with other
theoretical and empirical efforts directed at substantive, methodological and
infrastructural development of that particularfield.
In other, and arguably more numerous, cases, a research project involving team
members from different disciplinary backgrounds may simply function as parallel
disciplinary work, joined together by organisational arrangements rather than
substantive and methodological integration. Such work may consist of parallel
mini-projects, sometimes objectivised as‘work-packages’, each of which is based
on mono-disciplinary work and produces outputs separately from the others, with a
minimum of integration across the entire study. In such cases, philosophical work
may be carried out as part of a wider study and lead to important arguments and
substantive proposals, but risks to remain largely insulated from other components
of that study.
36 On the Role of Philosophical Work in Research in Teacher... 551