Appraising and Reconfiguring HE in FE Through Research and Critical Perspectives

Educational research is famously ‘systematic enquiry made public’ (Stenhouse 1975: 142), but we now know it is also a public and political exercise in which groups come to share their values and beliefs in trying to understand what is happening and what actions can be taken (Shipman, 1997). We are going through a war on epistemology, as well as on ideology (Apple 2015) and in that sense, the group of scholars populating this special issue with research articles are exploring and challenging the ways in which HE in FE could be better viewed, defined and imagined in the present and in the future. In this introduction we maintain that HE in FE is a contested zone, however for clarity we need to explain that the focus of this special issue is higher education partly or wholly taught away from universities in further education colleges and their equivalent outside of England.