Consistency, Understanding and Truth in Educational Research

What do Elliot Eisner's discussions of objectivity mean for the strength of the link between consistency and truth in educational research? Following his lead, I pursue this question by comparing aspects of qualitative educational research with appraising the arts. I argue that some departures from the highest levels of consistency in assessing the arts are compatible with truth and objectivity, and that this is at least suggestive for how consistency in qualitative educational research should be viewed. In the final part of the paper I look at some problems inherent in comparing the value of works of art, and consider whether similar issues arise when we attempt to grade different kinds of educational research.     

Institutional Researcher Reflexivity: How IR Professionals Can Utilize Researcher Reflexivity in Qualitative Studies of Community College Students

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I argue that researcher reflexivity, a common qualitative practice, is a specific tool that institutional research professionals endeavoring to conduct qualitative research studies involving Students of Color can use to unpack issues of power and privilege that exist between the researcher and the researched. This may be particularly useful among institutional researchers working within community colleges that serve a disproportionate number of racially minoritized populations and other vulnerable student groups. I offer a reflexive account of various experiences related to race, gender, and social class that I encountered in a qualitative research study of Black and Latino males I conducted as an institutional researcher. The purpose of this reflexive account from the field is to support the argument for more qualitative approaches to institutional research, while also advancing the argument that critical qualitative research be leveraged with the explicit purpose of advancing racial equity from the context of IR not traditionally associated with equity, advocacy, and qualitative inquiry involving race.     

The use of modelling for theory building in qualitative analysis

The purpose of this article is to exemplify and enhance the place of modelling as a qualitative process in educational research. Modelling is widely used in quantitative research as a tool for analysis, theory building and prediction. Statistical data lend themselves to graphical representation of values, interrelationships and operational systems. This article argues that qualitative data can likewise be modelled, to enable further analysis of the phenomenon investigated, to stimulate theorising about the relationship of factors within the modelled system, and to enable predictions for future scenarios to be formulated. Although this approach has been advocated by qualitative research theorists, it is not commonly used in the field of educational management. The extended example offered in this article therefore demonstrates how modelling can be used as both a conceptual and a practical tool in this field of study, enabling both the construction of theory and the process of organisational development and decision making.     

The qualitative imagination: neoliberalism, ‘blind drift’ and alternative pathways

In this paper, we argue that the non-positivist origins that provided the impetus for the qualitative imagination over the past half century in educational research has undergone subtle, but nevertheless profound change and transformation as neoliberal forms of governmentality have increasingly colonised social and educational research. We examine contemporary responses and challenges to this process from within and outside the academy. It is our contention that unless educational researchers critically engage with these new methodologies, particularly as they are generated by and through social movements, qualitative research is likely to become subject to what CW Mills (Mills) referred to as ‘blind drift'.     

From silence to stillness: decolonial feminist ontologies and the mattering of history in educational research

This paper explores undocumented adolescent Latina becomings that move beyond Western, white dominant cultural values and recognize egalitarian entanglements of difference. I begin by recognizing my positionality in this work that speaks to my own feminist theoretical entanglements of this project that draw upon new materialist and post-qualitative embodied, inspirited, affective becomings. In the second half of this paper, I resituate this project within a decolonizing framework that parallels discussions of feminist new materialist and post-qualitative work in an effort to begin thinking differently about educational research, schooling, and the impact of oppressive and colonizing practices on undocumented immigrant youth in this country. Finally, I do not offer this research project in the conventional qualitative structure, but am not claiming this research as post-qualitative either - as it lies somewhere in between - and resides in a liminal methodological space.     

On being transgressive in educational research! An autoethnography of borders

Autoethnography and narrative inquiry, with their focus on researching the personal dimensions of human experience, are overlapping realms within the field of qualitative research. While the dominant ways of knowing and researching in the academy remain that of empirical observation and critical analysis from a distanced perspective, these approaches attribute little meaning to the culturally relevant and reflexive accounts of those involved in the autoethnographic and narrative inquiry. In this paper, I critically reflect on my experiences of negotiating identities as an academic and educational researcher over time against a backdrop of professional anxieties produced by policy and political imperatives that have increasingly pervaded modern higher education in the UK. Adopting an autoethnographic style, I contemplate the complexities and opportunities that have inscribed my various identities as an educational researcher over a career, crossing from traditional research to creative narrative and arts-informed approaches.     

A Feminist Posthumanist Multispecies Ethnography for Educational Studies

The animal or more-than-human turn in the humanities and social sciences has challenged nature/culture binaries in the fields of environmental education and early childhood studies, yet the field of educational studies has yet to confront its humanist roots. In this article, I sketch a nascent conceptual framework that outlines how multispecies ethnography, as a methodology informed by critical strands of feminist posthumanism, can begin to address and redress both social and species injustices in educational studies. To do this, I first provide a brief overview of educational humanism to situate the article within the animal and more-than-human turns in education. I then define multispecies ethnography and briefly review educational multispecies ethnographic research. Next, I sketch the conceptual framework, which is guided by feminist posthumanist theories of performativity and intersectionality, providing ethnographic examples from my own research projects and the research literature. I conclude by drawing out the implications for educational studies, with a consideration of how animal performativity and intersectionality open up new lines of inquiry to explore animal concerns, as well as social ones.     

Market Movements and the Dispossessed: Race,Identity, and Subaltern Agency among Black Women Voucher Advocates

Critical educational researchers in the United States and elsewhere are missing something essential in their inattention to considerable support among Black urban women for market-based educational reforms, including vouchers. While the educational left has engaged in important empirical and theoretical work demonstrating the particularly negative impact of educational marketization on the disenfranchised, not enough attention has been paid to the crucial role the educationally dispossessed have actually played in building these otherwise conservative reforms. Engaging with Michael Apple’s arguments concerning processes of identity formation within conservative movement-making, we can begin to conceptualize the importance of subaltern groups in market-based educational reforms. Yet ethnographic work conducted with Black voucher mothers, school officials, and community leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, shows that this subaltern process of conservative formation does not always occur in the manner theorized by Apple and his colleague Anita Oliver, in which ideologically relatively unformed parents and families are “pushed” to the Right by an intransigent state. Although the conceptual tools they provide are the foundation of our ability to imagine a more compelling theorization of dynamics and social actors in Milwaukee, significant conceptual—not to mention empirical—work remains to be done. In this essay I renovate Apple and Oliver’s arguments concerning conservative modernization in order to make them more resonant with the processes of race, gender, subaltern identity formation and agency evident in my ethnographic field research with low-income African-American women choosing vouchers for their families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Aided by critical, feminist, and post-structural theorists both within and outside educational disciplines I assess the utility and limitations of Apple and Oliver’s framework in explaining the mobilization around ‘parental choice’ and vouchers in Milwaukee. Based on my conceptual and empirical findings, I retheorize pro-voucher African-American politicians, community leaders, and poor and working class women (and their families) as representative of a subaltern ‘third force’ in conservative formation. Their tactical investments in fleeting conservative alliances and subject positions, I argue, are likely to play an increasingly significant role in educational and social reform both in the United States and elsewhere. Thomas C. Pedroni is an assistant professor of secondary social studies methods, educational foundations, curriculum theory, and qualitative research methodology at Utah State University. His recent research has centered on issues of identity formation and subaltern agency among urban low-income predominantly African-American and Latino parents within otherwise largely conservative coalitions for publicly financed private school vouchers. His research interests also include the development of composite critical and post-structural approaches in educational theory and research, the identification of persistent exclusionary power/knowledge regimes in state-level educational reforms, and the analysis of the increasing colonization of the global educational sphere by neo-liberal and managerial forms.     

Beyond ‘talking out of school’: educational researchers as public intellectuals

This conceptual article explores the notion of educational researchers operating as public intellectuals. To do this, I situate my analysis within a broader tradition of public intellectual work in the American academy. I also offer a framework for three specific forms of public intellectual work, supported by relevant examples, which can be taken up by educational researchers. I then raise critical issues, concerns, and tensions that complicate such work, and conclude by offering suggestions for better linking educational research to the broader public. Although this article focuses largely on researchers working within the university context, particularly tenure-line faculty, many of its insights are applicable to independent researchers, policy analysts, or others working within the broadly defined field of educational research.     

Should education be transformative?

ABSTRACT

It has become commonplace within the educational research community to invoke the transformative power of education. The call to adopt a ‘transformative’ approach to teaching and learning can be heard in fields as different as adult education and school leadership and as estranged as social justice education and educational psychology. While there is undoubtedly great promise in the idea of transformative education, the fact that it involves deep psychological restructuring on the part of the student requires ethical justification. In this article, I analyze the three most pressing ethical problems that arise within a transformative educational environment: the problems of transformative consent, controversial direction and transformative trauma. In the concluding section, I argue that this ethical analysis urges us to adopt an approach to transformative education as a process of initiation.     

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.     

Feyerabend revisited: Epistemological anarchy and disciplined eclecticism in educational research

Discussion between the adherents of various orientations within educational research has often generated more heat than light. A pervasive analogy drawn in these discussions has been between the philosophy of science and educational research. In this paper I explore the value of several influential perspectives within twentieth century philosophy of science as means of understanding what researchers in education do, and why. I suggest that Paul Feyerabend’s ‘anything goes’ epistemological perspective has much to offer in supporting rich educational research. If positivist standards of validity and reliability are no longer considered appropriate for some forms of educational research, however, new standards for justification and representation, explicitly stated within the research, will be necessary.     

A methodological framework for studying policy-oriented teacher inquiry in qualitative research contexts

System-based and collaborative teacher inquiry has unexplored potential that can impact educational policy in numerous ways. This impact can be increased when teacher inquiry builds momentum from classrooms and teaching practices and simultaneously addresses district, state, and national discourses and networks. In this conceptual paper, I encourage scholars and practitioners to consider ways to methodologically, theoretically, and collectively strengthen teacher research and inquiry to increase its impact on policy. I propose a methodological framework for policy-oriented teacher inquiry that highlights multilayered research approaches and collaborative inquiry. I situate my arguments and the proposed framework in the context of qualitative research and Marx’s dialectic method.     

Asking queer(er) questions: epistemological and methodological implications for qualitative inquirers

This collection of distinct scholarly essays deliberatively turns to queer experience and theorizing as a resource for constructing vibrant qualitative research designs. Queer theory offers a breadth of epistemological and methodological possibilities for qualitative projects that are too frequently overlooked for many reasons. These reasons include frequently strict association of queer theory with queer research topics and researchers, as well as a concurrent reluctance to interrogate the representational needs of heterosexist culture served by the metaphor of the ‘closet.’ Queer theory also compels inquiry that takes up the unique circumstances of queer subjects. Locating educational inquiry within globally complex socio-historical dynamics and a post-Obergefell/post-2016 election U.S. context, this article poses multiple trajectories through which various scholars explore queer(er) qualitative inquiry in educational studies. These perspectives invite researchers to rethink qualitative inquiry designs through engagement with the queer, inclusive of research topics not initially perceived to be queer.     

Urban abstraction in a central city high school

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore urban secondary students' preceptions of their school and community in teh changing economic and social context of postindustrial life. Students and teachers worked and played in a landscape which I have characterized as one ofurban abstraction, a term synthesized mainly from the work of Manuel Castells. The construct helps explain the complex, contradictory, and dynamic conditions of late-20th-century capitalistic life and their impact on the emotional and material realities of urban residents. It also helps to explain the reactions and negotiations in which students and teachers engaged in the face of a constant threat of violence and a lack of community within the school and its surrounding neighborhoods. Ramela Bettis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations, Leadership, and Technology at Auburn University, where she teaches courses in qualitative research methods and educational foundations.     

Narrative analysis as philosophical research: Bridging the gap between the empirical and the conceptual

There is a longstanding debate about what can be expected from philosophy of education and what its place can be in educational theory. A remarkable resemblance can be found between the debate about the usefulness of qualitative research methods and the kinds of insights they produce. The debate between proponents of empirical (quantitative) research and of qualitative research can be traced to the opposition between the need for understanding and the desire to manipulate. We argue that empirical qualitative research is of a similar nature to philosophical research, its aim being mainly to understand a human practice. We offer a framework that allows the clarification of what may be expected from an educational science and consequently from qualitative research methods: taking as one?s starting point human experience, providing comments, and thus trying to open the eyes of others to particular human realities.     

Feyerabend revisited: Epistemological anarchy and disciplined eclecticism in educational research

Discussion between the adherents of various orientations within educational research has often generated more heat than light. A pervasive analogy drawn in these discussions has been between the philosophy of science and educational research. In this paper I explore the value of several influential perspectives within twentieth century philosophy of science as means of understanding what researchers in education do, and why. I suggest that Paul Feyerabend’s ‘anything goes’ epistemological perspective has much to offer in supporting rich educational research. If positivist standards of validity and reliability are no longer considered appropriate for some forms of educational research, however, new standards for justification and representation, explicitly stated within the research, will be necessary.     

Seekers after truth? Images of postgraduate research and researchers in the twenty-first century

Western cultural practices contribute to our understanding of the purpose of higher education and how we are to conduct ourselves in educational contexts. In this article, entitled ‘Seekers after truth?’, I analyse recent works of popular fiction which draw on and contribute to the idea that postgraduate research is a process of locating and amassing clues leading to the revelation or discovery of a truth. These novels re-inscribe the metaphor of the postgraduate researcher as detective or ‘seeker after truth’. This article considers the contradictory and productive meanings that arise from the trope of the researcher-detective. In addition, I argue that, although there are challenges in bringing the work of one field to bear on another, analyses of discourses which are not produced within higher educational contexts can nonetheless promote reflection on educational concepts. In this case, fiction enables us to consider ideas about what it is to do postgraduate research and to be a postgraduate researcher.     

Ethnographic locations: the geographies of feminist post-structural ethnography

The feminist post-structuralist emphasis on social location has yielded crucial insights within debates about power and reflexivity in educational research; however, spatial location is also at play in the formation of educational ethnographies. Reflecting upon various aspects of a research project with rural students in Ontario, Canada, this paper explores three key elements of what I call the geography of ethnography. These include: (1) the spatial politics involved in constructing a research ‘site’; (2) the shifting location of the ethnographer in research practice; and (3) the liminal space of the focus group. Anchored in specific interactions in ‘the field,’ the paper demonstrates how integrating insights from cultural geography and feminist post-structuralism can yield new ethnographic understandings. I argue that educational ethnographers need to better account for the geography of ethnography in order to attend to the power-laden sphere of ethnographic research.     

Connecting instructional and cognitive aspects of an LE: A study of the global seminar project

My research problem is based on the lack of unifying conceptual cohesion between the discourses concerning cognitive and instructional aspects of learning environments (LE). I contrast that lack with practical developments of LE studies connected at the level of practical implementation and evaluation. Next, I briefly review the LE boundaries, which are established within cognitive and instructional domains of LE research. This study aims to bring the aforementioned discourses together via reconsidering and clarifying LE conceptual understandings. Using the case of a global seminar project (GSP), my goal is to define an LE as a conceptual phenomenon and a practical model with the two objectives of determining the GSP??s components that establish the course in a context of higher education; and the GSP??s specific contributions to deep learning. Within a qualitative research framework, I used three forms of data collection: 20 open-ended interviews of the GSP instructors; 11 direct observations of the GSP classroom; and the GSP??s written documents and artifacts. Noting the contextual significance of the suggested LE framework that resulted from this study, I propose a definition of an LE as a conceptual phenomenon and educational model. Here, I introduce the key understandings of an LE and outline its significance based on a broader analysis of the results. I conclude with an interpretation of the results and potential limitations of my approach.