Validity in mixed methods research in education: the application of Habermas' critical theory

Mixed methods approach has developed into the third methodological movement in educational research. Validity in mixed methods research as an important issue, however, has not been examined as extensively as that of quantitative and qualitative research. Additionally, the previous discussions of validity in mixed methods research focus on research design and procedure, rather than validity per se. This paper presents another perspective by using philosophical and methodological insights generated from Habermas’ critical theory, especially his Theory of Communicative Action and validity claims. Theoretical assumptions and how they are consistent with principles of mixed methods research are introduced. Three types of validity claims are explained with an example and how they are applied to understanding validity in mixed methods research is further discussed. This paper concludes with implications for educational research and future directions.     

Accessions: researching,designing higher education

This brief viewpoint piece depicts educational (dis)engagements apparent in researching and (re)designing higher education in and through Accessions. Accessions, a collaborative research-design project, probed at how cultures, climates and conditions of higher education may be reproducing or reshaping social inequalities and divisions. Here, questions are asked about how these might be challenged within and potentially beyond the specific locale of one university campus. This research-design project hopes to enable a critical perspective on issues of ‘participation’, ‘impact’, ‘engagement’ and ‘internationalisation’, where regulations and measures may be resisted and disrupted.     

Ideology,rationality and reproduction in education: a critical discourse analysis

In undertaking a critical discourse analysis of the professed aims and objectives of one of the most influential curricula in the teaching of thinking, this article foregrounds issues of power and ideology latent in curricular discourses of rationality. Specifically, it documents the subtle but powerful ways in which political and class commitments are (re-)produced in the forms of thinking that are valued in schools and societies. Through a nuanced analysis of the language features of the text and the social and political ideologies that underpin it, the article argues that such curricula engage in shaping our common-sense understandings of what thinking and rationality is and should be in instrumental forms that both connect to neoliberal prerogatives and that facilitate the social reproduction of a particular fraction of the middle class.     

Transdisciplinarity in STEM education: a critical review

ABSTRACT

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education garnered significant attention in recent years and has emerged as a key field of research globally. The goal of this article is to offer a critical review of how STEM education and its transdisciplinarity were defined and/or positioned in empirical studies published during the early formulation of the field. In particular, we sought to identify how these studies conceptualise learners and learning and portray the underlying assumptions in light of the macrosystemic discourses that often serve as ideological forces in shaping research and practice of STEM education. We examined 154 peer-reviewed articles published between January 2007 and March 2018 and analysed them along several emergent dimensions: their geospatial focus, focal disciplinary areas, methodological and theoretical assumptions, and major findings. Grounded in a critical transdisciplinary perspective, we used critical discourse analysis to identify how macrosystemic and institutionalised forces – overtly and implicitly – shape what counts as STEM education research, including its goals and conceptualisations of learners and learning. Our analysis highlights the need for aesthetic expansion and diversification of STEM education research by challenging the disciplinary hegemonies and calls for reorienting the focus away from human capital discourse.     

Open education and critical pedagogy

This paper argues for a revaluation of the potential of open education to support more critical forms of pedagogy. Section 1 examines contemporary discourses around open education, offering a commentary on the perception of openness as both a disruptive force in education, and a potential solution to contemporary challenges. Section 2 examines the implications of the lack of consensus around what it means to be open, focusing on the example of commercial and proprietary claims to openness commonly known as ‘openwashing’. Section 3 uses Raymond's influential essay on open source software ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ as a framework for thinking through these issues, and about alternative power structures in open education. In Section 4, an explicit link is drawn between more equal and democratic power structures and the possibility for developing pedagogies which are critical and reflexive, providing examples which show how certain interpretations of openness can raise opportunities to support critical approaches to pedagogy.     

Adult and community education in complex societies: reconsidering critical perspectives

In this contribution, I explore how critical pedagogical perspectives can inspire adult and community education practices. The central argument is that today, in contrast with the heydays of emancipatory practices and theories, the classical critical approaches need reconsideration. The paper explores how these approaches sometimes have a stultifying effect on the participants in practice. In line with the French philosopher Rancière, a perspective is explored that departs from emancipated participants rather than from participants in need of emancipation. The theoretical investigation is inspired by reflections on art practices that struggle with similar questions on emancipation as the field of adult and community education.     

Spatializing a global education phenomenon: private tutoring and mobility theory in Cambodia

ABSTRACT

Along with the dramatic expansion of private tutoring around the world, a significant body of literature has been produced to understand this phenomenon. While many studies consider the issue of geographic location, the spatial dimension tends not to be a central focus of private tutoring studies. In contrast, the present essay applies mobility theory to research from Cambodia, where private tutoring is essential to student success. It does so in order to place private tutoring provision into a broader perspective that includes but moves beyond the economic dimensions of supply and demand and the sociological dimensions of economic, cultural, and social capital to include consideration of how private tutoring provision is constrained by a multidimensional spatial field of possibilities and how private tutoring participation is enabled by one’s position and abilities in relation to that field. The paper argues for increased attention to ‘spatial capital’ in studies of private tutoring and education generally.     

Contracting race: writing,racism, and education

This article presents the main terms of the racial contract, as they appear in the subcontracts of Mills’ theory, such as the spatial, epistemological, cognitive subcontracts. It is important to keep in mind that these subcontracts are by no means separate and represent analytical moments of the main contract. Furthermore, other than its institutional form, education is not a separate sphere from the racial contract. Finally, I end with the racial contract’s gaps to determine the possibility of its own demise, which requires the active signing off from the terms of the contract. That is, I sketch ideas about ways to counteract (i.e., counter-write) the racial contract as part of a corrective to the history that interpellates people of color as its targets. Both Whites and people of color have a stake in the rewriting of the contract, where in the end they are imagined as neither Black nor White but free. In this last portion, I spend some text on what Whites’ role may look like in signing off the contract, such as the case of white ‘race traitors’ within the white abolitionist proposal, recast as the ‘epistemological traitor’ in education.     

Chinese education and Pierre Bourdieu: Power of reproduction and potential for change

Abstract

In the edited book “Bourdieu and Chinese Education”, a group of scholars in China, Australia, Canada, and the USA engage in a dialogue with Bourdieu and raise persistent questions not only about issues of equity, competition, and change in Chinese education, but also about the value, venture, and violence in using established Western intellectual frameworks for analysing Chinese education. In response to these questions, this special issue analyses and discusses Chinese rural education, teacher education, language education, health and physical education, and transnational education; and proposes a series of new conceptualisations, for example, regression- and network-based field analysis, Bourdieu-Chinese philosophy encounter, field of mediation, localised pedagogical capital, and new Chinese habituses (e.g., contemptuous habitus, diasporic cosmopolitan habitus, habitus (re)structuring). Such collective effort responds to the strident, and sometimes misleading, castigation of Bourdieu for determinism; and also disputes the non-reflexive, celebratory tone that consecrates the French sociologist and his canonical theorem, and hence reproduces the symbolic violence in the doxic academia. In this vein, the special issue is respectful for, but not restricted to, Bourdieu’s sociology, showing no timidity in questioning and contesting the framework of the famed thinker when research problems and findings demand so.     

Towards a framework for critical citizenship education

Increasingly, countries around the world are promoting forms of ‘critical’ citizenship in the planned curricula of schools. However, the intended meaning behind this term varies markedly and can range from a set of abstract and technical skills under the label ‘critical thinking’ to a desire to encourage engagement, action and political emancipation, often labelled ‘critical pedagogy’. This article distinguishes these manifestations of the ‘critical’ and, based on an analysis of the prevailing models of critical pedagogy and citizenship education, develops a conceptual framework for analysing and comparing the nature of critical citizenship.     

Improving the pedagogy of Islamic religious education through an application of critical religious education,variation theory and the learning study model

This study presents a new theoretical and pedagogical framework based on the theories of Critical Religious Education (CRE), Variation Theory (VT) and the Learning Study model with the purpose of improving teaching and learning in Islamic Religious Education (IRE). It reports a Learning Study conducted in a secondary girls Muslim school in London on the topic of ‘Islam and being Muslim’. The aim of this research study is to examine if and how the proposed framework can be applied to IRE lessons, and how it affects the students’ learning. Thirty students of two seventh grade classes and their religious education teacher participated in the study. The data was collected through interviews and written tasks with the students before and after their participation in the study, video-recordings of the research lessons, and meetings with the teacher. Phenomenography and VT were utilised in the analysis of the data. The results suggest that the use of CRE, VT and Learning Study in teaching Islam contributes to students’ learning outcomes by means of helping teacher consider students’ diverse perspectives on religious phenomena when planning and implementing the curricular content, increasing students’ awareness of the ontological and epistemological dimensions of their faith as well as allowing them to make informed judgments about religious phenomena.     

Achieving social justice within and through higher education: the challenge for critical pedagogy

While the term critical pedagogy embraces a range of writers and literature, a common feature of all is a belief that education and society are intrinsically inter-related and that the fundamental purpose of education is to improve social justice. However there are perceptions that critical pedagogy has been more successful in critiquing educational and social practices than in achieving actual change. In this paper I explore two areas that critical pedagogy can address to move beyond critique: the importance of a movement formed by diverse elements, in which difference and disagreement are harnessed to help drive change; and the use of this diversity to direct change at a range of levels. My analysis draws specifically on literature that challenges managerialist assumptions about change as a simple, technical process, focusing instead on the complexities of the social world and the attendant complexities of achieving educational and social change.     

A networked-hutong siwei of critiques for critical teacher education

This paper offers a conceptual basis for refashioning the formulation of critical teacher education. It argues that current critical teacher education is uncritically constructed upon key theoretical departures from critical theories. Drawing on Boltanski’s critique of critical theories, the paper examines the ways these theoretical departures limit the structure of critique and therefore impede critical teacher education in its effort to empower educational actors, including students. Specifically, it analyses how critical theories’ justification of the goal of emancipation for educational actors hinges on intellectual inequality, the ignorance-knowledge continuum, and the hierarchical perception of social relations. This paper introduces networked-hutong siwei to reconceptualise critical teacher education that centres on developing teachers’ predispositions and skills to better mobilise and engage the critical capabilities of educational actors.     

我国教育社会学研究的回顾与前瞻

我国教育社会学自恢复以来,经过20余年的发展,形成了两种理论框架(注重体系和问题取向)及两种理论视角(社会学和教育学),具有了初步的学科自我意识。但总的说来,目前中国教育社会学研究似乎进入了"高原期",有待新的提升与突破。     

Creating a niche in the education market: the rise of internationalised secondary education in the Netherlands

The past decades saw a rise in internationalised education in Europe. Based on case studies at Dutch schools, I argue that the introduction of this type of education can be understood by the increased need for schools to adapt to the social reproduction strategies of privileged social classes. School managers regard internationalised streams as a way to counter a decline of pupils or as a strategy to improve an already secure position. In both cases, they resisted protesting staff in their efforts to establish an exclusive image of their internationalised stream. I argue that school managers’ inclination to emphasise the exclusive and ‘high‐quality’ profile of their internationalised streams and their propensity to celebrate the abilities of their pupils stem from their competitive engagement with local education markets.     

高师公共教育学课程中批判性思维的培养

素质教育的重点是培养学生的创新精神和实践能力,这离不开批判性思维的教学,因此需要教师具有批判性精神和批判性思维。在"高师公共教育学"中注重师范生批判性思维的培养,有助于他们学以致用,创新教学,适应课程改革的需要。     

Wasteland revisited: defining an agenda for a sociology of education and migration

Abstract

In 2007, we argued that, when it comes to sociology of education, the lives and education of refugee children were invisible. Sociology of education was ‘a wasteland’ as far as studies of the social effects of migration were concerned. Here, we revisit this argument exploring whether education and migration has been developed into a viable specialism in the discipline, and whether one of the great societal challenges of our age is being addressed. Examining the work published on migration and education since 2005 in BJSE, we see that the majority of studies focus on the global mobility of students and on school experiences of migrant children. While these are valuable foci, what is missing is a more extensive consideration of how ‘the age of migration’ and the characteristics of global migration in the 21st century challenge the values, the policies and practices associated with state education institutions and social order.     

Black on black education 2.0: critical race perspectives on personally engaged pedagogy for/by black pre-service teachers

ABSTRACT

Public schools have increasing numbers of its teachers fitting into one demographic, white and female, while the numbers of Black/African American teachers decrease. This trend has not changed since the publication of Black on Black Education: Personally Engaged Pedagogy for/by African American Pre-Service Teachers. Furthermore, African American collegiate students who decide to enter teaching may face a chilly climate because of their cultural and educational experiences as they encounter devaluation in the classroom. This work provides a critical race reflective examination into the teaching and learning experiences and dilemmasI using personally engaged pedagogy as a means of enhancing the quality of the learning experiences for African American pre-service teachers. Critical race theory (CRT) and Critical Race Feminism (CRF) will be used as the theoretical framework for understanding the role of race and gender in teacher education. Critical autoethnography is the methodological approach used to examine the subject phenomenon. Field notes, research journaling, and student memoirs provide data for this critical autoethnography. This work highlights the significance of CRT/CRF’s unique voice of color and CRF’s multidimensionality to engaged pedagogy, creating a personally engaged pedagogy.     

Reconsidering the social and economic purposes of higher education

In this article I seek to reconsider the social and economic purposes of higher education. It begins with the premise that there appears to be a general trend towards governments positioning higher education primarily in terms of the economic role that it can fulfil. Such a trend, however, has attracted considerable criticism. In this article I argue that the problem for higher education is not it having an economic role, but the narrowness of the way in which that role is often conceptualised. Drawing on critical theory I explore the interrelation of economic and social factors within higher education and the wider society in which it is situated. This article argues for a redefinition of the purposes of higher education to ensure that both universities and workplaces are sites of human creativity and that the profound and exciting work within institutions of higher education benefits all members of society.