TOWARDS A META-RESEARCH AGENDA IN SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL-EDUCATION

This paper begins by establishing the existence of a debate in the broader educational community about the nature, meaning and significance of educational research, and its recognition that different approaches to educational research do not simply represent different strategies for data collection but rest on and express different ideologies that implicate different political attitudes among teachers, students, subject-matters, schools, support agencies and researchers themselves. Evidence can be seen that this debate is beginning to appear in the science education literature and it is believed that the arguments can be extended. It is argued that research in science education and environmental education needs to consider methodology in the political terms of ideology, rather than simply in the technical terms of method and technique. Some of the recent thinking about the politics of method in both science education and environmental education, is then considered briefly and a number of meta-research,questions are proffered that might focus further attention on the political theory of research in these two fields.