The leeway of qualitative educational research: A case study

This article presents a case study into the question of how research-internal and research-external factors influence the leeway of qualitative research, and ultimately determine which questions can and cannot be addressed in research. First an overview is presented of the position of qualiative research in the field of education in The Netherlands. This position is then analysed by situating educational research in the particular research political context. In the second part of the article the authors focus on effective schools research, one of the strongest research programmes in Dutch educational studies, in order to show the consequences of the lack of a qualitative tradition.     

The Labouring Sleepwalker: Evocation and expression as modes of qualitative educational research

This paper deals with the highly personal way an individual makes sense of the world in a way that avoids the pitfalls of the so‐called private language. For Wittgenstein following a rule can never mean just following another rule, though we do follow rules blindly. His idea of the ‘form of life’ elicits that ‘what we do’ refers to what we have learnt, to the way in which we have learnt it and to how we have grown to find it self‐evident. But the reference to the ‘bedrock’, to what was originally learnt, is the only kind of situation for which it makes sense to ask whether the meaning of a concept is correctly stated. Dialogue, conversation, and exchange of ideas are the right ways to characterize all the other situations. The challenge of Wittgensteinian philosophy is therefore that of a balance of the individual and the community, of language and the world. His insistence on the third person (or the intersubjective level) is countered by the importance he gives to each individual's personal stance: persons must speak for themselves and do what they can do. Given the growing interest for the kind of educational research where the ‘personal’ is focused on, I will try to take up the challenge to see how here as elsewhere ‘language’ works. By making clear what it does for us, it will gradually become clear how this kind of research may itself have to be reinterpreted.     

Target-driven reforms: Education for All and the translations of equity and inclusion in India

This paper critically examines the ways in which inclusion and equity are constituted through education development policies in India. Programmes implemented under global and national Education for All (EFA) policies have largely involved the quantification of ‘equity’ whereby schooling processes are measured against broad targets for school outcomes – focused mainly on student attendance, retention and academic achievement. Drawing on perspectives from Actor Network Theory, the paper puts forward the view of development reforms as ‘networks of translation’ in order to trace the shifts and vicissitudes of educational ideals. Reporting on ethnographic data of two reforms in the south Indian state of Karnataka, we show how narrow understandings of equity are produced through target-driven approaches to EFA. In doing so, the paper highlights the performative effects of education development policy and its potentially counterproductive consequences in contexts of poverty and marginalisation.     

研究教育技术办好"现代教育技术中心"

教育技术是现代远程教育的基本要素。“现代教育技术中心”是近年来众多广播电视大学推行现代教育技术的新建制,探索和构建它的实践模型,研究现代远程开放教育赋予它的使命和任务,是目前阶段电大完成“试点”项目的重要内容之一。     

A theoretically driven teaching and research framework: learning technologies and educational practice

The emphasis of this paper is on the derivation of design principles from qualitative analysis of student reflections based on their participation in authentic, collaborative and technology-mediated activities. This paper reports on the initial phases of a design-based research project at a comprehensive university in South Africa where the authentic nature of the activities contributed to the depth of student reflections and ultimately led to meaningful design principles based entirely on the experiences of students. Students’ reflective reports were analysed for their content using simple inductive coding techniques leading to the identification of themes and the derivation of design principles from further refinement of these themes. These design principles, therefore, have their origins in the specific theories underpinning the learning activities that were used in the teaching and learning process, and contribute once again in an innovative way to this same body of knowledge. This theory-driven praxis thus makes a contribution to both educational theory and teaching practice which is applicable across a variety of contexts and sectors worldwide. More importantly, this can be seen as meaningful research that is socially responsible, with a high theoretical and practical value, and of relevance to a wider international audience.     

现代教育技术课程的立体化教学实践与研究

为加强师范学生的素质教育,结合近年来的教学实践,提出教育技术立体化教学改革的对策和方案。通过构建立体化教学内容、精心设计课堂教学、充分加强实验教学、合理选择考核方式,激发学生对教育技术课的兴趣,提高学生的创新意识及创新能力。     

Expanding and sustaining arts-based educational research as practitioner inquiry

ABSTRACT

As practitioner inquiry is now established as a widely-recognized research tradition and flourishing movement for educational change, we might consider ways that practitioner inquiry could be conceptualized and executed to broaden implementation, deepen understanding, and sustain inquiry within teacher education. Arts-based research may be an ideal methodology for the extension and sustainment of such inquiry as its visual, performative orientation lends itself to participant engagement and provides access in the representation and dissemination of results. This article will put forth models for advancing arts-based practitioner inquiry within the field of teacher education, by drawing from multiple cycles of a dual-layered, ABER study. This vision of arts-based practitioner inquiry is that of inclusion, increasing the number of those who conduct and interact with research; collaboration, blurring boundaries between the inquiries of teacher educators and pre-service teachers; accessibility, tapping into the power of the arts to engage and communicate in ways that scientific language cannot; and continued engagement, using learning from one cycle to inform inquiry in the next.     

Exemplarity and education: Retuning educational research

This article explores the idea of exemplarity in relation to educational research and teacher education. Exemplarity is introduced as an alternative to the paradigm of evidence and ‘what works’, which seems to be omnipresent in educational research at present. The idea of exemplarity relates to the particularity of educational practice. The claim of this article is that we need to skew the dominance of functionalistic studies of education, which focus on skills and solutions to problems, or on providing quick fixes and methods to be applied in practice. I will argue that this tactic shuts down interpretive spaces and gives the teacher an illusion of simplicity and efficacy that connects poorly with the complexities of pedagogical practice. Exemplarity provides a different way of answering the question of ‘what works’, since it does not claim generalisability, but instead offers a path to reflective engagement with the complexities of educational processes. The idea of exemplarity highlights how educators can be invited to lend an ear to practical experience and pedagogical theorising, and through these develop their tact and reflective abilities through exemplars that display pedagogical principles. This, in turn, offers the possibility of retuning one’s practice, and in the scope of this article, retuning educational research itself.     

Method as a journey: a narrative dialogic partnership illuminating decision-making in qualitative educational research

Qualitative education research is an inherently complex landscape, presenting the qualitative researcher with constant ethical and reasoned decision-making. Presented as a narrative dialogic, this paper traces and juxtaposes the method stories of two qualitative researchers who focused their work around education phenomena, but in different contexts and in different ways. One researcher’s narrative study of phenomena via interviews is juxtaposed with the other’s phenomenographical investigation utilizing Facebook status updates. Seeing researcher thinking side-by-side provides a comparison that teases out the ways in which researchers might consciously grapple with thinking around method. These twin method stories offer ways for other qualitative researchers to think about their own decision-making as they address the challenges of balancing subjectivity and rigour, authenticity of reported data, and protection of participants. This dialogic partnership points to the malleability of method. It also encourages further exploration of the complexities of qualitative education research in which the researcher is often insider–outsider or outsider–insider.     

Mapping not tracing: qualitative educational research with political teeth

In this article, we deploy ideas from Deleuze and Guattari to argue for the importance of engaging in educational research practice designed to be productive (mapping) rather than representational (tracing). First, we introduce the significance of our approach for educational research practice. Second, we unpack key constructs from Deleuze and Guattari required for constructing our argument, and we outline the shape of mapping as productive or transformative research practice. Third, we share critical summaries of several studies that utilized mapping to engage in this kind of research practice. Finally, we discuss the nature, effects, and relevance of mapping as educational research practice.     

Metaphors we’re colonised by? The case of data-driven educational technologies in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article discusses issues concerning the spread of data-driven educational technologies in Brazil. Here, as elsewhere, educational technology continues to be promoted optimistically as the bearer of a panacea for historically-rooted social problems. Whilst some of these technologies have indeed contributed to important widening-participation programmes in the last two decades, widespread advocacy of technological ‘solutionism’, reflected in gradually stronger policy demands for efficiencies to be improved through ‘innovation’, has supported a relentless marketisation of the country’s educational systems. As transnational corporations position themselves to take control of key areas of these systems, threatening to restructure the whole sector, data-driven educational technologies provide the latest example in a series of ‘new’ ideas offered in an ever-expanding market. Based on the notion of ‘conceptual metaphors’, which encapsulate specific ways of perceiving, thinking and relating with the world, this article examines key metaphors underpinning discourses surrounding data-driven educational technologies in Brazil. In particular, the article analyses ways in which these specific metaphors may be promoting perspectives that ignore difference and obscure broader questions concerning education, thus contributing to the reproduction of previously existing problems and supporting new forms of colonisation.     

Why close to practice is not enough: Neglecting practice in educational research

This article draws on normative conceptualisations of practice to reconsider the relationship between educational research and educational practice, enabling a critical commentary on the recent British Educational Research Association statement on close-to-practice research. It is argued that the portrayal of practice in the research undertaken for the BERA statement is limiting, with a tendency to view educational practice as amounting to whatever activities current practitioners are involved in. Such a view can overlook practice purposes, accountabilities and dynamics, and elevate certain forms of knowledge production that ignore core educational concerns. Instead, it is suggested, educational research should reconsider its role within a normative conception of educational practice, with the aim of making educational research more educationally meaningful.     

Growing confidence in educational research: Threats and opportunities

We live in difficult times—socially, economically and politically—and it is right that learned societies, such as the British Educational Research Association, reflect on their purpose and direction. We cannot take for granted the social contract that supports the funding of social science and educational research. This paper reflects on enduring themes and new pressures and argues for special attention to: collaboration within and beyond the community of university‐based educational researchers; support for, and recognition of, the importance of reviews of research; the development of accessible forms of communication of findings and their implications, to guide sound decision making; more direct engagement with practitioners, policy makers and the public. It argues that it is time for communities of educational researchers to have confidence to become outward looking and strengthen alliances with other groups of researchers at home and abroad, across disciplines, with different types of research institutions and also with practitioners and policy makers. What drives this should be our principal aim to pursue educational research and its application for the improvement of education and the public benefit.     

Researcher vulnerability: implications for educational research and practice

This paper explores the concept of researcher vulnerability through a review of the extant research literature and each author’s feelings of vulnerability connected to their research with vulnerable populations while exploring both sensitive and seemingly innocuous, yet important, topics in education using qualitative methodology. Specifically, a reflection of our respective study of the academic and social transitions of student combat veterans, and the academic and gender socialization of adolescent African American males is presented as means of illustrating the phenomena of researcher vulnerability. Implications of vulnerability for research, practice, and theory are discussed.     

Thinking with Trickster: sporadic illuminations for educational research

Moments of restriction or impasse – situations that are seemingly intransigent, offering no alternatives or poor alternatives, predicaments leading to less than satisfactory resolutions or unhappy compromises – abound in the practice of educational research. This paper speculates on the possibilities offered by thinking with ‘Trickster’ – a shadowy, unconventional figure of myth and folklore – in such moments of impasse, and asks if this source of inspiration may allow for flashes of illumination and thus, room for newness to enter the world. Drawing on some ‘difficult’ moments from two rather different research projects, the paper reflects on what thinking with Trickster might have to offer to the praxis of educational research, especially in terms of methodology and ethics.     

Critical Communicative Methodology: including vulnerable voices in research through dialogue

This article describes how Critical Communicative Methodology (CCM) has been used successfully to analyse educational inequalities in ways that generate real transformation towards social justice. We begin by arguing that educational research today should employ new methodological approaches that can ensure the inclusion of different voices in social science research and the production of knowledge that transforms social exclusion. We then analyse the main epistemological positions of CCM, based on Habermas’ communicative action theory, and explain how it was implemented in the European Union-funded INCLUD-ED project. Finally, we illustrate how INCLUD-ED has had a social and political impact and we argue that research with vulnerable groups, based on the principles of CCM, can generate social and educational transformation.     

Using blogs in qualitative educational research: an exploration of method

When compared with wider social research, qualitative educational research has been relatively slow to take up online research methods (ORMs). There is some very notable research in the area but, in general, ORMs have not achieved wide applicability in qualitative educational contexts apart from research that is inherently linked to the Internet, for example, research on educational technologies or students' online behaviour. This paper demonstrates how ORMs can be useful in qualitative research projects. It describes how on-going, reflective, qualitative data were collected using a popular, community-based online tool – blogs. The research project that utilized this approach aimed to trace how a group of international students in the United Kingdom responded to their new environment over six months. This article attempts to provide a new understanding on the use of blogs as a tool for data collection.