Overview
Education, Universities and Educology (2015) turns the educological lens on the institutional home of educational scholarship: the university department of education. Christensen argues that the confusion between education as phenomenon and educology as knowledge has produced organizational structures that are internally incoherent — that mix the training of practitioners (a practical activity) with the development of educational knowledge (a scholarly activity) without adequately distinguishing the two or providing organizational structures appropriate to each.
The Dual Mission and Its Tensions
University education departments typically serve two distinct missions: professional preparation (training teachers, administrators, counselors, and other educational practitioners) and scholarly inquiry (conducting research and developing theory about educational phenomena). These missions are not incompatible, but they are different — they involve different activities, require different expertise, and serve different constituencies. Christensen argues that universities routinely conflate them, with the result that professional preparation programs are weakened by their subordination to scholarly research agendas, and scholarly research is weakened by its subordination to the practical demands of professional training.
Organizational Implications of the Educological Framework
The educological framework suggests a different organizational model. If educology is the fund of knowledge about educational phenomena, then a university department devoted to educology should be organized around the systematic development of that knowledge — analytic, normative, and empirical. Professional preparation programs would draw on this fund of knowledge but would not be coextensive with it; they would apply educological knowledge to the practical preparation of practitioners, just as medical schools apply biological and clinical science to the preparation of physicians.
This model implies a clearer division of labor within university education departments, with explicit recognition of the different kinds of expertise required for scholarly inquiry and for professional preparation. It also implies different criteria for faculty appointments and for program evaluation — criteria appropriate to the activities being performed rather than criteria borrowed from other disciplines or from generic research university norms.
Implications for Curriculum Studies
A particularly important implication of Christensen's analysis concerns the curriculum of professional preparation programs. If the purpose of such programs is to equip practitioners with the educological knowledge they need to practice effectively, then the curriculum of these programs must be organized around the structure of educology — analytic, normative, and empirical — rather than around the organizational convenience of existing academic departments or the historical accidents that have shaped existing programs.