Thinking in Education Research: Applying Philosophy and Theory by Nick Peim

Abstract

“Why not?” I was prompted to ask myself, as I began to read Nick Peim’s book, Thinking in Education Research: Applying Philosophy and Theory. As I progressed further into his text, the Peim-effect took hold. More questions began to propose themselves. “Why doesn’t educational research methodology, on the whole, concern itself with questions about the purported nature of the very objects of its study?,”  “What is it that educational research believes that it is studying?,”  “How is it that a silent, assumed, numbing fog of consensus appears to have settled over what education is, what its purposes are for, what its effects must be, and how its values should be assessed and determined?”  By the time I had finished reading his book, the Peim-effect had had its epistemological way with me, and the following was much clearer: Thinking in Education Research: Applying Philosophy and Theory is both a critique of what have become standard methodological approaches to doing educational research, as well as a provocative indication of what educational research could be.