Making sense of pedagogy in the era of accountability: the linguistic construction of evidence and the neutralization of the moral order in educational decision-making

Abstract

This article focuses on the language of pedagogy and the understandability for the layperson of its theoretical frame-works, methods, and application-oriented findings. As I argue, the issue at stake goes far beyond the well-known ques-tion of the translatability of a language for specific purposes and its specialized jargon into natural language. Rather raising this issue amounts at opening up a Pandora’s box. Once the relationship between language and a field of study becomes an object of inquiry, it makes relevant an epistemological query on the nature of the knowledge we construct when doing educational research, and an ethical query on the (un)avoidable moral nature of that knowledge.