This is an edited version of an interview with Tina Kullenberg recently published in the EARLI SIG 25 (Educational Theory) newsletter 4/2020 (https://earli.org/node/140). The interview ranged more widely. Here I focus in on how dialogic education addresses the question of meaning in life.

[We begin the interview with Tina asking about how I began being interested in educational theory and I describe my quite critical reaction to reading Vygotsky when I began my PhD in 1992]

Rupert: Vygotsky and Piaget both seemed to share an essentially monologic – or single-voiced - view of rationality. The dialogic alternative is that meaning is always a spark across difference so it always implies that there is more than one voice in play. The aim of education, for Vygotsky and Piaget, seemed to be to draw children up from participatory contextual meaning into more systematic conceptual meaning – from embodied participation, creativity and emotion within time and space on the one hand, to an abstract rationality that is anemic, predictable and ultimately outside of time and space, on the other. [The same critique also applies to other cognitive psychology theories of education]

My objection to the rationalism of the education theory that I encountered [as a graduate student] was perhaps rooted in my personal history. I felt that this rationalist approach had the potential to damage a sense of meaning in life. Finding meaning in life has always been an issue for me and I think it is an issue that education needs to address.

Tina: Meaning in life? What, then, defines such a meaning for you?

Rupert: By meaning I suppose you could say that I mean ‘existential’ meaning but it is not a complicated idea. I mean simply the kind of meaning needed to be able to get out of bed in the morning and face the day. [Ikigai in Japanese] Although this might sound like a personal issue it is also quite general. Young people today, if anything, seem to have an even greater problem with lack of meaning than I found back in the 1970s.
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Tina: I see, and how does this kind of existential meaning relate to educational theory?

Rupert: I put some of the blame for the lack of meaning that I experienced as a young man on my education. Like almost all children I began life with a rich experience of participatory meaning. I enjoyed life. I played unselfconsciously with other children. I was in love with my mother who in turn loved me and brought me up. Then compulsory state education in the UK intervened and I learnt to be depressed. I remember asking my mother why I had to go to school and she told me that if I did not the police would come round. It turned out that I was good at learning curriculum knowledge and doing well in exams but I had a problem understanding what the point of any of it was. The content of the education I received actively downplayed the idea that anything I learnt had any real meaning. In science they emphasised the mystery of how random soulless processes might produce life. In literature I was warned against ‘the pathetic fallacy’ of projecting meaning and emotion onto nature.  In history I was told there are no big patterns, no purpose, just things happening. When they taught me how to tie a tie in school I realised that the adults teaching me saw the purpose of my education as for me to get a job, earn money, buy stuff and so contribute to society. I was not convinced.

This personal story perhaps explains why I was disappointed when I found that the newly discovered intellectual hero everyone was quoting, Vygotsky, referred to ‘participatory’ thinking – the kind of thinking he said was shared by children, and, his words, 'primitives and schizophrenics' – as something to be overcome in education in order to teach conceptual thinking. For me participation is essential for meaning and the participatory bond between children and their worlds should not be broken.

Tina: You are right. I think this concern is very important to address. Vygotskian thinkers would perhaps counter with the argument that principles as ‘higher mental thinking’ imply advanced and situated conceptual knowledge that provides existential meaning-making as well, but I somehow doubt it. Although conceptual thinking for sure offers some kind of meaning in life, this tradition seems still too focused on mental development, from what I know…
I know you believe in the role of educational dialogues. How do you think dialogic education offers meaning for young people?

Rupert: In the late 1990s Jim Wertsch’s synthesis of Vygotsky and Bakhtin was very popular. In essence Vygotsky’s account of how children learn by ‘internalising’ or ‘appropriating’ cultural tools was being augmented by Wertsch with a Bakhtinian account of learning by internalising or appropriating cultural voices. This led me to read Bakhtin and, because I had already read Buber, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida and others I realised that Bakhtin was a very different thinker from Vygotsky. Whereas Vygotsky seemed to me to be a rationalist of a Hegelian-Marxist kind, Bakhtin was working with a new ontology closer to what has become called 'post-structuralism' – this is an ontology of difference or what could also be called a relational ontology or even a dialogic ontology.  According to this ontology all meaning is a product of dialogue. So, for example, Bakhtin pointed out that the flow of meaning in a dialogue requires that there are different perspectives, if the difference between voices were ever overcome to reach unanimity then the dialogue, and therefore also the meaning, would reach an end. Meaning requires difference and without difference there is no meaning.

Tina: OK but that is quite theoretical. How does all this help young people find meaning?

Rupert: Well, meaning comes from relationship and participation. For the newborn child the face of their mother is experienced as everything, as the meaning of the universe. Later the child will learn that their mother is just one person amongst other people but early on the face of the mother is not just an individual but also represents otherness in general. This relationship to otherness in general - what Levinas refers to as the 'Infinite Other', is present behind all the others we engage with in education and in life, including, I think, the environment and natural beings. For the depressed person there is a loss of faith not only in this or that other but in life as a whole. A relationship of trust or faith with life as a whole is natural to childhood and is something education should work hard to enhance, not to destroy.

Tina: Yes, I think experiences of trust, faith and meaning are relational phenomena, ultimately, and should be treated so also in educational contexts.
Speaking about voices, Bakhtin also stressed the person’s – the speaker’s – own voice, which means finding and expressing individual opinions within bigger dialogues and polyphonic contexts. What do you say about this?

Rupert: I think the question of meaning for young people is also the question of how you find your own voice. Let us consider a limited example at first to understand the general process. A schematised and simplified version of my own experience. How does a young researcher find their voice in the field of educational theory? First they might read Vygotsky, because they are told to by their supervisor, and then they find themselves talking about mediated action all the time. They lose themselves in Vygotskian theory – they are possessed by that voice. But then secondly they also read Bakhtin and others and stand back from the field in critical mode comparing and contrasting all the different voices. Thirdly they find themselves called by the dialogic field to make a contribution, to say what needs to be said emerging out of the gaps they find between what Bakhtin says and what Vygotsky says in relation to the challenge of the time. If they have said something useful for the dialogue as a whole going forwards then they will find themselves being cited by others and – hey presto - there it is - they have found their own voice! Finding a voice then requires forming a relationship not just with this voice or with that voice but with a field of dialogue or what I often refer to as a dialogic space. 
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This is true in any bounded field of dialogue like educational theory or, say, designing a new product in a manufacturing company, or engaging with a local political issue, but it is also true to what it means to find your own voice in general. Gert Biesta is very interesting on the important role of education in allowing students to find themselves, to become, as he puts it ‘subjects’. He writes that education has three purposes, socialization, qualification and also ‘subjectification’. I agree with him about the importance of becoming a self but I think that the process is dialogic and involves relationship with a field of dialogue. The self is always double-voiced, as Bakhtin put it, meaning it is always on both sides of the dialogue at once. This means that you can only find yourself by first losing yourself in participation. First you take on the field of dialogue as a whole, which is an open and unbounded field, you allow yourself to play, to be possessed by the voices and then you find that you are called upon to speak and –mysteriously – you hear yourself respond. In true speech it feels as if the field flows back to itself through you saying what needs to be said. That is what gives authority to your voice and is why others sometimes lend authority to your voice by listening to you and allowing what you say to guide them. It is not because of you it is because they hear in what you are saying something of what they also intuitively know needs to be said and they know this because of their participation in the same dialogic space as you. The authority of a voice in the dialogue comes from shared participation. But that does not mean that you lose yourself in the dialogic space. You are likely to experience yourself as at your most individual only when you find yourself speaking for the dialogic space as a whole.

This is why Bakhtin loved Dostoevsky so much. He claimed that he found Dostoevsky open to all the cultural voices of his time and yet able to express them in a uniquely personal way. No one could say that Dostoevsky did not have a personality but his personality somehow included all the voices and allowed them all to speak through him.

Tina: A lot to think about, really. Can you just outline the theory of education that all this leads to?

Rupert: Well I think that we can use these ideas from Bakhtin and others to develop quite a simple and straightforward dialogic theory of education that preserves the importance of participatory meaning while extending cognition. New voices are called into being by others, by specific others such as mothers or fathers, by cultural voices such as the voice of Mathematics or History mediated by teachers and also by the Infinite Other. This offers a theory of education as being about education into life as whole. It is about the whole person in relation to the whole cosmos. Cognitive development is now understood as just one aspect of this larger movement of being drawn out of oneself and into dialogue - a movement in which the dialogic space opened up is constantly expanding and deepening. At each stage of education meaning comes from participation and relationship. The initial participation and relationship natural to childhood is maintained throughout. The meaning, for example, of a child’s encounter with a tree does not need to be broken or lost by the child also being drawn into the long term global cultural dialogue of science about trees. Science can tell them more about how the tree draws sustenance from the sun and from the soil in a way that enhances the child’s experience of relationship with the tree, not in a way that destroys this.  

Much of the role of formal education can be understood as drawing children and newcomers into participation in long term cultural dialogues. This fits well with the claim that there is 'powerful knowledge' which has to be taught and learnt. It is just that this 'knowledge' is now understood as a long-term cultural dialogue and the aim of education is not to teach inert knowledge but to induct children into participation in these powerful dialogues in such a way that they can find their own voice within these dialogues. This also fits well with Michael Oakeshott's idea of education as joining 'the conversation of mankind'. However, Oakeshott saw this dialogue as limited to humans, probably mainly European humans in fact, and focused mainly on entering into a dialogue with the voices of the past. But science and technology are part of this dialogue and involve us in taking seriously non-human voices, the voices of things and of nature. In science there is not just induction into a cultural dialogue but also into a dialogue with voices that speak to us from beyond culture. The idea of dialogue with the Infinite Other is another way of saying that entering into science (science means ‘knowledge’ for me so refers not just to natural science but to any shared inquiry) through which we engage in dialogue with the realm of the as yet unknown is also very much a part of education. It is understandable that education in the Print Age focussed on transmission of past knowledge and some dialogue with voices of the past. The Internet Age offers a new possibility of inducting students directly into the living global dialogues that advance knowledge and technology in every area. The larger dialogue that children and newcomers can join, if we develop an effective global education system for the future, is a dynamic real-time shared inquiry through which we understand ourselves and the world and through which we can design and build our shared future together.

One implication of the idea of the Infinite Other is that the context of meaning, the ‘meaning of meaning’, is not something far away from us but is also to be found at the heart of each present moment. Dialogue with the Infinite Other is the idea, therefore, of a kind of creative experience that can be found by stepping back from the divisions that always already define our situation, divisions such as self/other, here/there, now/then, culture/nature in order to participate in the dialogic space of potential meaning that precedes and exceeds these divisions.

I would like to see an education that helps those who feel lost realise the true nature of their individual identity as being dialogic interconnectedness. In fact, following Levinas, it is possible that identity is not a separation but a kind of singularity in space and time or a point where the cosmos as a whole turns around and looks back upon itself making each person unique because they are unbounded – each of us is ‘everywhere and forever only by virtue of being here and now’ as Merleau-Ponty once put it. That phrase might sound a bit esoteric to some people but Merleau-Ponty's point is a simple one. We can look out and see space and think about many further spaces in the past and in the future only because we have eyes located in a body that is situated here and now so it is really just a statement of the obvious reality of our situation to say that we are  'everywhere and forever only by virtue of being here and now'.

Finding existential meaning for me was about being drawn, through various encounters, into relationship not just with this or that person or idea but into a deeper realisation of my pre-existing participation in the whole of life. This involved a shift in personal identification from feeling trapped by a bounded image of the ego to identifying more with the pre-thematic or pre-individual potential for meaning which is always there before the self-other split. I think that this relates to the educational goal, which we have found through research on successful group thinking, of identification with the dialogue which means identifying with the creative flow of emergent meaning making.

Perhaps our interconnectedness with the whole of life is obvious but it nonetheless seems that it is also something that it is always possible for people to forget and indeed, it seems, for whole cultures to forget. I hope that this dialogic educational theory and the dialogic educational practice linked to it, might be able to help people who are struggling with the question of meaning as I once struggled.

Tina: Thanks for sharing your own life experiences, it helps me to better understand your well-known dialogic visions in educational matters.
 
References
Wegerif, R. (2019). Towards a dialogic theory of education for the Internet Age. In Mercer, N., Wegerif, R. and Major, L. The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education. Routledge.

The dissertation on our Master's in Psychology and Education here in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge had to be based on empirical research. With the corona crisis many schools closed and access to empirical data became uncertain. In response the examiners said students could do a 'desk-based' research dissertation if they wanted. Many students who had been preparing an empirical research dissertation now had to face the uncertainty of a new way of writing. Empirical research writing in psychology has very specific guidelines drawn up by the American Psychology Association (APA)[i]. 'Desk-based' research, by contrast, is an open space. Since I sometimes write articles that are not obviously empirical, they turned to me asking for advice. I did my best at short notice. I hope what I produced, and re-produce here in edited form, is useful.

Why 'Desk-based' research?
 
The trouble with a strong guide on the correct way to write reports is that it tends to limit the vision. Perhaps that is OK when we think we have a good frame and there is much of value to be learnt incrementally. But I am not at all convinced that education is a field where we can afford to limit the frame in this way. Progress in any and every science requires not just findings from empirical studies but reflection on the significance of findings from empirical studies. This means we need articles that 'rise above'[viii] the narrow framing to compare, contrast, refine and reflect. Desk-based research writing is not the opposite of empirical research research writing: it is an essential component of empirical research.
 
I will argue, from the evidence, that there is much less difference between empirical research papers and conceptual research papers than people often think. Both require careful argumentation in order to ground claims on reasoning and evidence. In empirical dissertations the argumentation is used to justify the methodological choices and the interpretation of the data. In conceptual dissertations the argumentation is used to justify the theories employed and the interpretation offered of other studies. The greater freedom of desk-based research can bring with it the reward of exploring the bigger patterns that can be found emerging from numerous more narrowly focussed empirical studies.

The term 'desk-based' research sounds a bit dismissive. Calling it conceptual research might be better. Concepts are the essential units of the global dialogue of science. Developing, questioning and refining concepts in the light of reason and evidence is what the long-term cultural dialogue of science is all about. However, it would be a mistake to think of research in education as ever purely conceptual or purely empirical. Both need to go together -  it is common to separate them in different journals but  they can fruitfully be combined in a single article.
 
Everything is  rhetoric
 
Some people contrast 'rhetoric' to communicating the facts. This is nonsense. Rhetoric is the art of writing well and persuasively. This is as relevant to empirical as to conceptual articles. Every article has to establish trust in the methods used and in the interpretations of the findings. This can only be done through argumentation employing rhetorical devices. Imagine yourself justifying your research to a group of critically minded peers. You cannot tell them everything, there is never enough space, so you have to select. What is relevant and what is not relevant is not fixed in advance by the APA but depends on the questions the readers ask and this will, in turn, depend on the details of each study and also on the changing cultural context. If you have in fact done great research but you are unable to communicate this effectively to the audience then you will fail to get published or - in the case that prompted this writing - fail to get a good mark for your master's thesis.
 
'Though some practicing social scientists might wish to escape the uncertainties of human discourse by embracing a single, correct, and absolute way of writing science, any model of scientific writing embeds rhetorical assumptions.' (Bazerman, 1987)
 
Creating a Research Space (CARS)
 
I think of science as a dialogue, not a local face-to-face kind of dialogue but more a long-term cultural dialogue that is global in reach and supported by communications media like print journals and the Internet. Research on the structure of academic articles supports this. John Swales looked at a wide range of academic articles and found a general two-way funnel structure. First, in the introduction, they refer to field of debate in order to establish the relevance of their study. Then they do the particular research that adds a specific finding. Finally, in the discussion and the conclusion, they move back out to the field in order to claim significance for their finding. (Figure 1a and Figure 1b) 

​Figure 1a: Swales IMRD double funnel.     Figure 1b: the desk-based double funnel

In 1999 I ran a pilot course in academic writing to test out a new model of online peer-to-peer learning. To provide materials for this design-based research project I worked with Caroline Coffin, a systemic functional linguist, to analyse the structure of successful papers in educational research journals. We used this evidence to write a short guide to standard research articles with lots of detailed moves that you might find useful (https://education.exeter.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/inspire/pages/view/research_article).

Interestingly most of the moves we found are as relevant to desk-based research as they are to empirical research. Empirical research articles generally have an IMRD structure: Introduction (including lit review), Methods, Results and Discussion (including conclusion). Desk-based research replaces the Methods and Results sections with a main argumentation section but otherwise the pattern is the same.
 
You start off broad to hook the reader by explaining why the topic you are focussing on is important, then you focus in to describe the specific problem, your research design for tacking it and your claims, then you go out broad again to explain why what you have found from this research, your claimed contribution, is significant in the larger context of the field of research and perhaps to the larger context of cultural evolution.  
 
John Swales, another applied linguist, (Swales & Feak, 2004) refers to the funnel pattern of writing an introduction to a research article as 'creating a research space' or CARS. He found three main moves with associated smaller steps. These are described in detail with illustrative examples in Coffin and Wegerif (2000). Here is a summary of this approach as found on (https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/CARS):
 
Move 1: Establishing a territory

• Claiming significance -showing that the general research area is important, central, interesting or relevant by describing the research problem and providing evidence to support why the topic is important to study
• Reviewing literature -introducing and reviewing items of previous research in the area - providing statements about the current state of knowledge, consensus, practice or description of phenomena and also synthesizing prior research that further supports the need to study the research problem

Move 2: Establishing a niche (rationale)

• Counter-claiming - introduce an opposing viewpoint or perspective or identify a gap in prior research that you believe has weakened or undermined the prevailing argument;
• Indicating a gap - develop the research problem around a gap or area of the literature;
• Question-raising - presenting key questions about the consequences of gaps in prior research that will be addressed by your study.
• Continuing a stream of literature -extend prior research to expand upon or clarify a research problem. This is often signalled with logical connecting terminology, such as, “therefore,” or  “thus” or language that indicates a need. For example; “It follows these connections need to examined in more detail....” '

Move 3: Occupying the niche

• Outlining purposes  - answering the “So What?” question. Explain in clear language the objectives of your study.
• Announcing present research - describe the purpose of your study in terms of what the research is going to do or accomplish;
• Announcing principle findings/conclusions - present a brief, general summary of key findings, e.g “This study suggests that....”]
• Outlining article structure - describe how the remainder of your paper is organised]

 
Although these three moves refer specifically to the structure of an introduction section, they give a pretty clear indication of the argument structure of the paper as a whole. They are the same for both empirical and non-empirical dissertations. The main difference lies in the way that methods are described and the use of evidence. In desk-based research in the field of education the method and results section of the empirical research paper is replaced by argumentation. This argumentation often combines conceptual analysis with empirical evidence drawn from other studies. Sometimes the findings claimed by other studies are cited directly as evidence assuming trust in the validity of their methods.
 
This means that the introduction, the critical literature review, the discussion and the conclusion sections of the paper can remain pretty much the same as they would be in an empirical IMRD paper. In the discussion section you revisit the themes and the literature that you quoted in the introduction and you show how your new findings make a contribution by challenging some claims in the literature, adding to others or perhaps re-framing the debate in a potentially fruitful way. Descriptions of how to structure these sections in our 'writing a standard article' guide (above) might be useful (although this is a little old now and there are new guides to follow including, perhaps, the APA style guides) 
 
The 'research design' of a conceptual dissertation
 
There is plenty of scope for doing unconvincing desk-based research. As Jaakkola (2020) writes,  to be taken seriously any conceptual claims you make needs to be grounded in what she calls an appropriate research design. By research design Jaakola means the key components of your argumentation, the theories, concepts and streams of literature you draw upon to make your case and the way that you string them together into a narrative argument. In empirical papers it is necessary to justify your methods for the collection and analysis of data - in a conceptual paper it is similarly a good idea to justify your research design. Why and how are these theories, concepts and literature streams relevant? Why is the kind of argument you are advancing justified and appropriate in this context? This is not just about claims and evidence in support of claims it is also about their 'warrant' or establishing the trust of the reader in your methodology.  [ix]
 
It might help to formulate the central problem or question you wish to address at the beginning of your paper, and keep this in mind at all times. Make it clear what the problem is, and why it is a problem. Be sure that everything you write is relevant to that central problem or question or issue. In addition, be sure to say in each section of the paper why what you are including is relevant to your main argument and how this section takes it forward.
 
To decide how to structure a paper I usually start with the end, that is with the main contribution to knowledge (contribution to the dialogue) that I want to claim. Then I break this down into the range of smaller claims that need to be swallowed before the reader will be convinced by my big claim.
 
There are many possible research designs for desk-based or conceptual research dissertations. I recommend finding an article that you admire, breaking down its argumentation structure, and using that as a model. Jaakkola, writing in the context of conceptual studies in management, isolates a few types of conceptual paper that I think are equally relevant for education. I adapt and summarise Jaakkola in the following sections as this might give some ideas as to the kinds of dissertations that are possible:

Theory synthesis

A theory synthesis offers a new or enhanced view of a concept or a phenomenon by linking previously unconnected or incompatible bits of literature in a novel way. Often this does not so much develop a new theory as apply a theory drawn from one area to a new area, showing how it makes sense of things that previously seemed unconnected or in need of explanation.

This might look a bit like a critical lit review but there is a difference. While a well-crafted literature review takes stock of the field and can provide valuable insights into its development, scope, or future prospects, it remains within the existing conceptual or theoretical boundaries, describing existing knowledge rather than looking beyond it. In the case of a conceptual paper, the literature review is a necessary part of the study but the ultimate objective is a new way of seeing things. The synthesis paper is about revealing “big picture” patterns and connections rather than specific causal mechanisms

Examples of theory synthesis papers in educational research are:

Goldie, J. G. S. (2016). Connectivism: A knowledge learning theory for the digital age?. Medical teacher, 38(10), 1064-1069. Applies Siemens connectivist theory of learning to the field of medical education, showing its strengths and limitations

Wegerif, R. (2011). Towards a dialogic theory of how children learn to think. Thinking skills and creativity, 6(3), 179-190. Draws together disparate literature streams to argue that thinking is dialogue and learning to think occurs through induction into dialogue.

Theory critique and adaptation

While empirical research may gradually extend some element of theory within a given context, theory-based adaptation attempts a more immediate shift of perspective. Theory critique and adaptation papers introduce an alternative frame of reference - a new way of seeing - through challenging and replacing an existing way of seeing.
 
For example, the authors might argue that certain empirical developments or insights from other streams of literature challenge an existing conceptualization such that a shift of perspective is needed to better align the concept or theory to its purpose.

Examples of theory critique and adaptation articles in educational research are:

Zambrano, J., Kirschner, P., Kirschner, F., & Sweller, J. (2018). From Cognitive Load Theory to Collaborative Cognitive Load Theory. Builds on and adapts the now popular 'cognitive load theory' (no endorsement implied!)
 
Carr, W. (2007). Philosophy, methodology and action research. In The Quality of Practitioner Research (pp. 29-42). Brill Sense. Goes back to Aristotle to challenge and re-frame the whole idea of methodology in educational research.
 
Wegerif, R. (2008). Dialogic or dialectic? The significance of ontological assumptions in research on educational dialogue. British Educational Research Journal, 34(3), 347-361. Challenges the Vygotskian view of dialogue suggesting that a Bakhtinian view might be more fruitful.
 
Noorloos, R., Taylor, S. D., Bakker, A., & Derry, J. (2017). Inferentialism as an alternative to socioconstructivism in mathematics education. Mathematics Education Research Journal, 29(4), 437-453. Does what it says.
 
Typology

A typology paper offers a categorisation of a previously fragmented and confused area of discourse, offering a coherent and explanatory set of types. The researcher often accumulates knowledge of the focal topic and then organises it to capture the variability of particular characteristics of the concept or phenomenon.

Examples of typology articles in educational research are:

Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational researcher, 27(2), 4-13. Classic paper tackling the confused area of talk about learning and arguing it needs at least two main categorisations and cannot be reduced to either one.
 
Wegerif, R., & Mercer, N. (1997). A dialogical framework for researching peer talk. Language and Education Library, 12, 49-64. Offers a three-part typology for understanding small group classroom talk.
 
Paavola, S., & Hakkarainen, K. (2005). The knowledge creation metaphor. Science and Education, 14(6), 234-255. Offers three metaphors for learning.
 
This is not an exhaustive set of types of conceptual paper, nor is each type exclusive. In selecting examples I found it quite hard to distinguish which papers are theory synthesis, adaption, or typology. In practice these types of conceptual paper can overlap a lot. Some synthesis papers offer a taxonomy and build on a critique of other approaches. Many papers are not purely conceptual but advance conceptual contributions through small case studies or re-evaluation of data presented in other papers.

Concluding words

Empirical research papers in educational psychology often have a very narrow focus, adding to knowledge only incrementally within a theoretical framework without being able to question that framing. Teaching students to slavishly follow models of good research and good writing such as those offered by the APA is not really education, it is training.  In the field of education there is no single correct method of research since almost every concept or way of framing problems can and should be questioned. Good quality conceptual research in education is not only possible, it is essential. Teaching education students how to write should be about helping them actively participate in the long-term dialogue about how best to promote human flourishing. Learning how to apply genre conventions in order to write up modest empirical studies certainly has a place in educational research courses. However, if we want to produce creative researchers who can take the field forward we need to also teach how to question framing assumptions, connect findings to 'big picture' visions and participate fully in those powerful dialogues through which we build a future together.
 
 
 References

Bazerman, C. (1987). Codifying the social scientific style: The APA Publication Manual as a behaviorist rhetoric. The rhetoric of the human sciences, 125-144. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/bazerman_shaping/chapter9.pdf
 
Coffin, C and Wegerif, R (2000) How to write a standard research article. https://education.exeter.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/inspire/pages/view/research_article
 
Jaakkola, E. (2020). Designing conceptual articles: four approaches. AMS Review, 1-9.
 
Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B. (2004). Academic writing for graduate students: Essential tasks and skills (Vol. 1). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
 
Wegerif, R. (2013). Dialogic: Education for the internet age. Routledge.
 
Notes

[i] https://apastyle.apa.org/
[ii] Wegerif, R. (2013). Dialogic: Education for the internet age. Routledge. http://www.rupertwegerif.name/uploads/4/3/2/7/43271253/deiaproofs24thoct12.pdf
[iii] https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/oakeshott-on-education-as-conversation
[iv] Bazerman, C. (1987). Codifying the social scientific style: The APA Publication Manual as a behaviorist rhetoric. The rhetoric of the human sciences, 125-144. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/bazerman_shaping/chapter9.pdf
[v] http://www.helga-nowotny.eu/downloads/helga_nowotny_b59.pdf
[vi] Lewens, T. (2016). The meaning of science: An introduction to the philosophy of science. Hachette UK.
[vii] Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. University of Chicago Press.
[viii] https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/the-rise-above-button
[ix] Toulmin, S. E. (2003). The uses of argument. Cambridge university press. see eg  https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/toulmin.pdf
[x] Stronach, I. (2007). On promoting rigour in educational research: the example of the RAE. Journal of Education Policy, 22(3), 343-352.