Potentials for empowerment in critical education research

Abstract

Within the typology of research orientations commonly represented in the social science literature — empiricist, interpretive and critical — it is the methodologies of the critical orientation that are burgeoning. Significantly, the moral imperative in the critical theorising which drives and shapes these methodologies is empowerment and emancipation. That is to say, critical educational research is potentially empowering because of its emancipatory intent. However, as cogently argued and demonstrated by a number of researchers, “an emancipatory intent is no guarantee of an emancipatory outcome” (Acker et al., 1983: 431). Just being informed by critical theory then, is no guarantee that a critical research approach will be empowering, or be empowering in a way we recognise as significant. This paper has been prepared with two objectives in mind: to clarify three ways empowerment has been conceptualised in the literature, and to use this conceptual scheme as a template to ascertain the empowerment potentials in critical educational research methodologies.