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.     

Critical policy sociology: key underlying assumptions and their implications for educational policy research

In recent decades, educational policy researchers have considered critical policy sociology, mostly known as ‘policy sociology’, as a useful research methodology for analysing educational policies. However, despite its increasing popularity, policy sociology has been a confusing concept hence it is often used interchangeably with other terms such as policy analysis. In the main, there is a dearth of literature outlining its key underlying assumptions and how this methodology helps policy researchers to analyse social, political and economic issues related to educational policy. By reviewing current body of literature in the field, this paper identifies policy sociology as one of the four major traditions in the policy analysis field. The paper presents six key underlying assumptions of policy sociology – value based study, political study, historical study, multidisciplinary study, assemblage study, and discourse study – and discusses how researchers have used policy sociology as a research methodology for analysing educational policies.     

The intellectual landscape of critical policy analysis

What counts as critical policy analysis in education? Over the past 30 years, a tightening of national educational policies can be seen in the USA and across the globe. Over this same period of time, a growing number of educational policy scholars, dissatisfied with traditional frameworks, have used critical frameworks in their analyses. Their critical educational policy work has contributed to a unique intellectual landscape within education: critical policy analysis. This article presents a qualitative exploration of the critical policy analysis approach to educational policy studies. Participants included scholars known to utilize critical theoretical frameworks and methods in their research. Through a historical approach that makes use of oral history interviews with educational policy, we developed an understanding of the critical approach to policy studies, its appeal among critical education policy scholars, and the rationales driving its use.     

Rhetorical analysis in critical policy research

Rhetorical analysis, an approach to critical discourse analysis, is presented as a useful method for critical policy analysis and its effort to understand the role policies play in perpetuating inequality. A rhetorical analysis of Character Matters!, the character education policy of a school board in Ontario, Canada, provides an illustrative example of the method’s contributions to the field. I identify rhetorical appeals of Character Matters! texts that aim to persuade the policy’s audience to support a predominantly traditional approach to character education. I then present contributions of rhetorical analysis for critical policy research and possibilities of rhetorical analysis for democratizing policy processes. I conclude by considering possible implications for York Region if the rhetoric of Character Matters! successfully convinces its audience to support the traditional approach to character education it advocates.     

People for Education: a critical policy history

In this paper, we demonstrate how history informs how policy meanings are constructed and the rhetorical strategies used to convince others to accept these meanings. We have two goals: (a) to show how a group of non-governmental actors, People for Education, became part of Ontario, Canada’s policy discursive network; and (b) to demonstrate the utility of constructing cultural and microhistories in critical policy analysis. This article is important because it describes resistance from a critical perspective and offers a methodology for producing histories of struggles over meaning-making in educational politics.     

Understanding critical race theory as a framework in higher educational research

This paper reviews the existing literature to discuss how critical race theory has been applied as a theoretical framework to higher educational research in the United States and what its contributions are. To provide necessary context, I will discuss race and racism in the United States, the background of US higher education in relation to race, the emergence of critical race theory and its application in US higher education.     

中国高等教育大众化的理论与政策

高等教育大众化进程包括量的增长与质的变化 ,两者呈非均衡性 ;高等教育大众化的前提是办学模式的多样化 ,其核心则是教育质量的多样化 ;高等教育大众化促使高等教育融入终生教育体系。关于高等教育大众化的政策方面 ,应注意解决好规模速度、资金投入、资源的开发与合理配置、毕业生就业等问题     

The (mis)identification of ineffective classroom teaching practice: critical interrogations of classroom teacher effectiveness research

This paper critiques specific forms of classroom teacher effectiveness research. In doing so, the paper suggests that education policy-making deems and employs teacher effectiveness research as a promising and capable contrivance for the identification of ineffective classroom teaching practice. The paper engages with this policy debate by using a specific policy example from the Australian state of Victoria, the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) Blueprint for Government Schools (2003/2008). Moreover, the attention given to “teacher effectiveness” as the means by which school systems aim to reverse student under-achievement positions classroom teachers as the controlling authority over educational outcomes. Indeed, teacher effectiveness is the defining quality of a policy-making debate that at its core dispenses with broader considerations of possible influence thought to substantially affect the learning outcomes of public school students.     

A PhD In motion: Advancing a critical academic mobilities approach (CAMA) to researching short-term mobility schemes for doctoral students

ABSTRACT

Short-term mobility has been neglected in the higher education mobilities literature, which tends to focus on longer stays such as study abroad or entire degrees. Short-term doctoral mobility schemes are relatively low-cost, potentially high-value investments in the development of early career researchers. Doctoral mobilities research – and the field of academic mobilities research more broadly – is characterised by a positivist, often atheoretical orientation; this article responds to this by introducing a critical academic mobilities approach (CAMA). This approach is rooted in the ‘mobilities paradigm’, and involves (i) questioning the status of mobility as a universal good; (ii) exploring the subjectivity of mobile subjects as dynamic and shifting, but also structurally determined; (iii) a commitment to researching mobility processes as well as investments and outcomes. The article explores ‘autoethno-case studies’ of two doctoral mobility schemes funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC): Overseas Institutional Visits (OIV) and the PhD Partnering Scheme (PPS).     

Wolf cries: on power,emotions and critical literacy in first-language teaching in Sweden

Adopting a critical literacy perspective in teaching is about how experiences, social contexts, languages, learning and power relations interact in language development. In this article, we explore how students’ critical literacies are enhanced and hindered by emotional power relations in the classroom. We investigate what happens when emotionally charged texts – here texts about wolves in Sweden – are used in lower secondary schools. Drawing on two examples we illustrate different ways of enhancing students’ critical approach to the argumentative text type. The article highlights the affective aspects of teaching, and thus the unforeseeable aspects of classroom interaction. Emotionally, the wolf issue became very different objects for the persons occupying the classrooms. It invoked, e.g. homosocial relations, racist accounts and nationalistic outbursts. The article stresses the significance of teacher intervention but argues that to facilitate critical literacy in emotionally charged classrooms, the circulation of emotions, including teachers’ emotions must be brought to light.     

Advancing global capacity for engineering education research: relating research to practice,policy and industry

Findings are presented from a series of moderated interactive sessions held at international engineering education conferences between July 2007 and December 2008, where attendees discussed the current state and future trajectory of engineering education research. More specifically, this study examines how session attendees described: (1) the relationship between engineering education research and educational practice, policy considerations and industry; (2) important stakeholders, mechanisms/strategies and challenges for relating research to practice, policy and industry. Thematic analysis and open coding procedures were used to analyse the data collected at each session. In summary, frequent discussion and widespread consensus was observed about the need to relate engineering education research to the practice of engineering teaching. Discussions about relating research to policy and industry remain formative, but appear to be gaining traction. The paper concludes by proposing a cyclic model to better conceptualise how engineering education research can be strategically related to practice, profession and industry across diverse local and global contexts.     

Education policy mobility: reimagining sustainability in neoliberal times

This paper is concerned with the twinning of sustainability with priorities of economic neoliberalization in education, and in particular via the mobility or diffusion of education policy. We discuss the literature on policy mobility as well as overview concerns regarding neoliberalism and education. The paper brings these analyses to bear in considering the uptake of sustainability in education policy. We ask to what extent sustainability as a vehicular idea may be twinning with processes of neoliberalization in education policy in ways that may undermine aspirations of, and action on, environmental sustainability. Toward the end of the paper, we draw on data from an empirical study to help elucidate how the analytic frames of policy mobility can inform our analyses of the potential concerns and possibilities of sustainability as a vehicular idea. In particular, we investigate how sustainability and related language have been adopted in the policies of Canadian post-secondary education institutions over time. The paper closes by suggesting the potential implications of the proceeding analyses for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers concerned with sustainability in education policy.     

Education policy: explaining,framing and forming

This paper presents a new heuristic device for the analysis of educational policy. Through an examination of the Evaluative State and the work of Brian Fay, the paper considers the way in which educational policy is subject to rational and linear forms of policy action and implementation. To counter this, positioning theory is deployed to consider the way in which we are produced both by discourse and the language of the ‘moment’ in discursive acts. Using the work of Gee, the paper contends that policy texts and policy Discourse ‘themselves form policy, that is, they position policy-explanation and policy-framing within the bounds of the institution and so give policy form’. Problematically, such mechanisms may succumb to the ‘death of subject’ and accordingly I offer a third method by which we might conceive of education policy: the discursively produced position call. Subsequently, I propose a tri-partite theory for the examination and understanding of policy: policy-explaining, the production of policy texts; policy-framing, the ways in which all can be positioned by texts and Discourse to produce the meanings imbued upon policy; and, policy-forming, the impact of moment-by-moment conversational acts for their production of the policy text itself, that is, the ways in which policy is locally formed rather than locally mediated.     

The roots and routes of environmental and sustainability education policy research

Environmental Education Research has developed a Virtual Special Issue (VSI) (http://explore.tandfonline.com/content/ed/ceer-vsi) focusing on studies of environmental and sustainability education (ESE) policy. The VSI draws on key examples of research on this topic published in the Journal from the past two decades, for three reasons. First, to provide readers with a series of snapshots into the genealogy of ESE policy research in this field. Second, to encourage renewed attention to previously published work. And third, to offer commentary on the evolution of research trends, approaches and findings.     

加强我国高等教育政策研究的若干思考

随着高等教育在国家经济和社会发展中地位的日益提高 ,高等教育政策研究的重要性也日显突出。通过加强高等教育政策研究来提升政府在高等教育领域的决策能力 ,是当前高等教育发展中面临的一个十分重要的问题。在此基础上 ,作者提出了加强我国高等教育政策研究的几点建议     

On being critical: uniting theory and practice through emancipatory action research

This paper engages with some of the specific issues that challenge critical practice. My argument is related to the Carr and Kemmis debate on ‘staying critical’ and to ideas expressed in my current book, Community Development: A Critical Approach. I refer to critical practice as any practice that has a transformative social justice intention, and which happens in a range of contexts from grassroots community activism to more institutionalised settings, such as hospitals or schools. My own professional base is community development, and this paper is founded on emancipatory action research developed over many years in grassroots practice. It is my view that emancipatory action research, committed to the practice of social justice, with the intention of bringing about social change, is a necessary component of critical practice. In fact, I would go so far as to say that emancipatory action research is the glue that binds critical praxis in a unity of theory and action. However, all too often collective action for change is not followed through to its greatest potential, and practice remains contextualised in the immediate, local and specific without making critical connections with the structural roots of oppression from which inequalities emanate. The result is that we constantly fixate on symptoms, and leave the root causes free to perpetuate oppressions. At the same time, we find ourselves in a globalised world marked by intensifying social divisions. So, it is my intention to raise a few issues which present challenges to get beyond sticking points in critical practice as we face times in which there is an accelerating urgency to ‘become critical’.     

Game theory and educational policy: Private education legislation in China

This article presents a game theory analysis of legislating private education in China, based on set of primary and secondary documents related to this issue. The article argues that shaping educational legislation is a dynamic, repeated game of negotiation, cooperation, and/or competition on multiple occasions among various interested actors, including lawmaking institutions, each with its own goals, authorities, information sources, and strategies. This article suggests that game theory complements existing models for understanding the politics of educational legislation in China, and it elucidates the implications and limitations of using this approach to understand the dynamics and complexity of educational policymaking.     

Activity theory in empirical higher education research: choices,uses and values

This paper contributes to discussion of theory application in higher education research. We examine 59 empirical research papers from specialist journals that use a particular theory: activity theory. We scrutinise stated reasons for choosing the theory, functions played by the theory, and how the theory is valorised. We find that the theory is usually chosen for its direct empirical applicability; used for abstraction, explanation and contextualisation; and valorised for apprehending complex situational dynamics. It is rarely chosen to challenge conceptualisation of the research object; used to establish investigative paradigms; or valorised in ways that implicate wider bodies of knowledge or potential theory development. We argue that higher education researchers should reconsider how their application of activity theory is interwoven with interpretative processes, how the theory might frame research design rather than simply data analysis, and how they account for the range of roles that the theory actually plays across research endeavours.     

Environmental and sustainability education policy research: a systematic review of methodological and thematic trends

This paper reports on a systematic literature review of policy research in the area of environmental and sustainability education. We analyzed 215 research articles, spanning four decades and representing 71 countries, and which engaged a range of methodologies. Our analysis combines quantification of geographic and methodological trends with qualitative analysis of content-based themes. Significant findings included temporal spikes in published policy research occurring in the mid-1970s, late 1990s, and after 2005, as well as geographic under-representation of Africa, South and Central America, Eastern Europe, and North and West Asia. The majority of articles reviewed were non-empirical; empirical articles overwhelmingly focused on teaching and learning directives, rather than exploring the complexity of policy development or enactment. We conclude our analysis by describing key research gaps as highlighted by the review and propose directions for moving forward policy research in environmental and sustainability education. In particular, we suggest greater research attention to critical policy theory and methodology, issues of intersectionality, and climate change education policy research. By outlining in greater detail the policy research that has been undertaken to date, the review provides a platform for a broadened diversity of policy studies in environmental and sustainability education.