Receptivity Curves: Educational Research and the Flow of Ideas: Expanded Version

Introduction Advocates of interdisciplinary collaboration suggest that scholarship be organized around topics rather than disciplines (Geiger and Sa, 2008; for a review, see Jacobs and Frickel, 2009). This approach, it is suggested, will enable researchers to peer over the restrictive walls of their disciplinary silos and learn about indispensable ideas being developed by scholars in neighboring fields of study. Breaking down arbitrary disciplinary boundaries, so the argument goes, will be the key to solving our most pressing and important problems, from poverty to pandemics to global warming. If a topical rather than a disciplinary focus were the key to solving our most vexing intellectual challenges, then schools of education would be at the forefront, a model for the rest of academia to emulate. Schools of education bring scholars together from disparate fields, including specialists in developmental psychology, language instruction, reading, student counseling, administrative leadership, as well as a relatively small number of anthropologists, economists, historians, sociologists, and other disciplines. No one discipline claims ownership of all aspects of education, and thus the interdisciplinary ideal is alive and well in schools of education. Yet many have been critical of scholarship in education, especially historians of educational research. For example, Labaree (2004) and Langemann (2000) bemoan the fact that education typically finds itself at the bottom of the academic pecking order. Walters, Lareau and Ranis (2009) represent an exception to the downbeat assessment of educational scholarship. Thus, it would appear that organizing scholarship around topics rather than disciplines by itself is not sufficient to overcome the intellectual challenges associated with improving our educational system. A related complaint has been raised concerning the lack of connection of education scholarship to the main disciplines. For example, Lagemann laments " …the isolation of educational study from other branches of university scholarship… " (2000:232). For Lagemann, the low status of education in the academic hierarchy is both the cause and the effect of its distance from other fields. " Clearly deriving from multiple sources, the low status that has plagued educational scholarship from the beginning has