A reflection on Nicole Brunker’s “Escape Oppression Now: Disrupt the Dominance of Evidence-Based Practice” (EduResearch Matters, AARE, June 2024)
Not long ago, I shared a thoughtful, peer-reviewed journal article on pedagogy with a colleague. It offered a nuanced and evidence-rich critique of a dominant instructional trend — exactly the kind of piece that could spark meaningful professional dialogue. Their response? “It’s just too long. I don’t read educational research.”
It wasn’t said dismissively. In fact, it reflected a more troubling truth: that in our current system, the structures for deep professional engagement with research have largely evaporated. Teachers are overwhelmed by ever-mounting demands. But we are also professionals — and in moments like this, that means choosing complexity over convenience. Reading the research isn’t optional. It’s essential.
That moment returned to me as I read Nicole Brunker’s excellent piece, Escape Oppression Now. It is both a critique of evidence-based practice (EBP) and a call to action. It insists that education is not just about what “works” in narrow terms, but about purpose, complexity, and professional judgement.
The Spreadsheet Mindset and the McNamara Fallacy
Earlier this year, I wrote about the McNamara Fallacy in education — the tendency to value only what can be easily measured. In schools today, data reigns: NAPLAN scores, ATAR rankings, student growth percentiles. But what’s absent from the spreadsheet?
- Students’ growing ethical sensibilities
- Their sense of agency and capacity for civic action
- Their curiosity and love of learning
- Their historical imagination and commitment to justice
- Their sense of community, empathy, and wonder
As I wrote then: “None of these fit neatly into a spreadsheet.”
Brunker strikes at the same problem. She writes:
In other human fields, EBP has been questioned, challenged, and modified or even replaced while Australia’s education systems continue to promote a narrow base of evidence as ‘what works’ for student achievement…
More than twenty years of critique on EBP exists in academia, alerting us to problems for the teaching profession, initial teacher education (ITE), student learning, wellbeing, and life outcomes, democracy, and more. Central to the problems of EBP is the removal of discussion on the purpose of education and in turn the limiting of education to learning. Perhaps the most pernicious problem is the simplification of practice that is immensely complex.
Other professions have already begun to question and move beyond the narrow, reductive version of Evidence-Based Practice – so why is Australian education still clinging to it? I completely agree with Brunker. EBP flattens teaching, sidelines purpose, and reduces our work to delivery, when what we really need is space for complexity, context, and meaning.
Misreading the Methods: The False Binary of Inquiry vs Explicit Teaching
One of Brunker’s most important contributions is her clear articulation of a troubling trend: the positioning of explicit instruction (particularly Direct Instruction) as superior to, and in opposition to, inquiry-based learning.
Positioning explicit teaching… in opposition and superiority over inquiry-based teaching, creates a false binary. This is constructed through misunderstanding and misrepresentation of inquiry based teaching. It neglects the essential inclusion of explicit teaching within inquiry based teaching along with a range of approaches necessary to build relationship between teaching and learning with the diversity of students.
This is a false binary I encounter frequently in my work as a history educator and researcher. Historical thinking – particularly the kind that develops agency, empathy, and civic literacy – requires explicit teaching of concepts, yes. But it also demands ambiguity, open-ended inquiry, and student voice. The two approaches are not enemies. In well-designed pedagogy, they are partners.
Fast-Food Evidence and the Erosion of Professionalism
Brunker goes further, offering a searing critique of how EBP is presented to teachers – often in “pre-digested” summaries that eliminate context and complexity:
“Such pre-digestion of research is selective presentation of evidence to promote desired practices. It further removes teachers from engagement with research evidence.”
She highlights the example of CESE’s widely circulated Cognitive Load Theory materials, noting that the key source is “widely critiqued as a strawman fallacy” – and yet this flawed document is used to justify sweeping pedagogical mandates.
In my own practice, I’ve questioned the unquestioned: Why are we applying strategies developed in early years literacy and numeracy to senior secondary history? Why are we encouraged to teach critical thinking with rigid scripts and preloaded “success criteria”? And why is so much of the research we’re told to trust so worryingly thin?
The Culture We Need: Reading, Critique, and Inquiry as Professional Norms
We need to re-emphasise – and resource – in schools a professional culture of teaching where rigorous engagement with educational research is not exceptional but expected.
Let’s make space in our weekly rhythms for genuine professional learning communities. Not just meetings against the clock. Communities. Places where teachers read full texts – not dot-point summaries – and critically interrogate what they mean in our contexts. Where all teachers – especially early career teachers and PSTs – are supported to see themselves not merely as implementers of programs, but as co-creators of theory, practice, and pedagogy.
This vision is at the heart of my own action research in transformative historical thinking. When we treat teachers as researchers – when inquiry lives at the centre of our practice – professional agency thrives. And more importantly, students experience education not as delivery, but as invitation.
AI as Invitation: Reclaiming the Purpose of Education
We stand at a critical historical moment. I see Generative AI as offering us a historic opportunity to revisit how teaching is done in schools.
Generative AI isn’t just disrupting what happens in our classrooms. It’s inviting us to reimagine it.
It challenges us to ask deeper questions:
- What is the purpose of our subject area knowledge?
- Who gets to construct it? Why? How? What are the justice and ethical implications of this process?
- How do we prepare students not just to navigate change, but to shape it as agents in their world?
This is not the moment to double down on compliance, on top-down prescriptions, on rigid “gold standards” of practice that ignore context and complexity.
This is the moment to reframe, reconnect, and reimagine.
We need to see AI not as an end to education as we know it – but as an opportunity to make it more liberating, expansive, generative, and reparative.
Brunker gets this. In discussion of her own research program into Evidence Informed Practice (EIP), she writes:
Threaded through this program of research will be ongoing exploration of work with PSTs positioning them as agents for change …
That idea – of positioning future teachers and students as agents of change, not technicians of compliance – is one I find that I return to constantly.
So Here’s the Call
Let’s build – and resource – authentic professional learning communities within schools that are more than tick-the-box sessions.
Let’s make the reading, critique, and discussion of robust research a normal – even essential and non-negotiable – part of every teacher’s professional life.
Let’s resist the reduction of our complex, relational work into neat, performative slogans.
Let’s support early career teachers and PSTs to step into their roles as thinkers, designers, and co-creators of what education can become.
Let’s shift from passively receiving “what works” to actively shaping what might be possible.
Because our work is complex. Our students are complex. And the future we’re helping them imagine – one entangled with AI, uncertainty, and hope – demands more than shortcuts.
It demands curiosity.
It demands courage.
It demands wisdom.
Disrupted History 