Inquiry In Educational Research Research Articles

Editorial: Emancipatory inquiry in educational research: models and methods for transformational learning

Editorial: Emancipatory inquiry in educational research: models and methods for transformational learning

Sorting Machines: Digital Technology and Categorical Inequality in Education

Existing scholarship suggests that schools do the work of social stratification by functioning as “sorting machines,” or institutions that determine which populations of students are provided educational resources needed to help them get ahead. We build on this theory of social reproduction by extending it to better understand how digital technology use is implicated in this process of unequal resource allocation in schools. We contend that educational resources, like digital technologies, are also sorted by schools. Drawing on scholarship from both education research and science and technology studies, we show how educational institutions have long played a role in constructing the value of technologies to different ends, by constructing hierarchies of technological activity, like “vocational” and “academic” computer use, even when strikingly similar. We then apply this lens to three areas of inquiry in education research: the use of digital technologies for instruction, school use of student data, and college admissions. Each illustrates how education scholars can view technologies as part of school sorting processes and with implications for inequality within and beyond the classroom.

Normative Analysis and Moral Education: How May We Judge?

The viability of philosophy of education as a distinct and valued field of inquiry in educational research is under significant threat. While the debate over the proper role and value of philosophy of education continues, courses and faculty positions in philosophy of education become increasingly rare. I advance the view that this situation requires philosophers of education find new ways to bring their work to practicing educators. I propose a particular kind of normative analysis, within the context of moral education, as one way to bring valuable philosophic work to the daily practice of teaching. It is argued that the use of normative criteria, comprised of certain key characteristics for moral education, can serve not only as valuable analytic tools but may also draw practicing educators into conversations that generally take place between philosophers of education in the academy.

Visual Inquiry in Educational Research

Abstract In visual culture, people would like to perceive, express, and negotiate the meanings of social world visually so that the status of the visual has reached that of written word and narrative. Therefore, social researchers are motivated to develop visual methodologies to examine the visual dimension of social worlds. According to them, the visual methodologies could generate richer information for us to understand social phenomena than the traditional quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Therefore, there is a burgeoning uptake of visual research methods in different fields of social sciences. Considering the ubiquity and importance of the visual in the world for education, the Beijing International Review of Education has organized this special issue to discuss some of the theoretical and methodological issues of visual research methods in educational research.

Portraiture as a Method of Inquiry in Educational Research

Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation SARAH BRUHN, RAQUEL L. JIMENEZ; Portraiture as a Method of Inquiry in Educational Research. Harvard Educational Review 1 March 2020; 90 (1): 49–53. doi: https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-90.1.49 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest Search

Using mixed methods to understand the mechanisms and prevalence of creative engagement in drama-based instruction

While arts integration is an increasing area of inquiry in educational research, few studies collect and analyze data on the creative engagement of adolescents in real-time. This mixed methods study employed a convergent design to transform one set of videos depicting drama-based instructional classes into a qualitative and quantitative data set. Each data set was analyzed separately and the results were compared and merged. The qualitative data analysis revealed two cross-cutting themes: autonomous gesture as active part of learning and reciprocity and shared vulnerability in student teamwork. After the video data were analyzed qualitatively for these general themes, the classes of drama-based instruction (science, health, history and an instructional class) were compared more precisely. The video data was coded quantitatively using a Likert scale (0–3) to indicate the prevalence of creative engagement in the areas of autonomy, belonging, creative resources, and competency. The quantitative data analysis revealed differences across the classes: observed expressions of autonomy were statistically higher in the health class, belonging and creative resources were not different across classes at a statistically significant level, but competency increased progressively from Grade 6 to Grade 10. The merging of the data emphasized the reciprocating features of individual enactment and group-level reinforcement during drama-based instruction and alternate explanations for the observed differences across the instructional classes.

TREE OF LIFE: TEACHERS’ REFLECTION ON THEIR TEACHING CAREER

This article discusses the use of narrative inquiry in educational research and emphasizes the importance of giving teachers opportunities to self-reflect and share their insights with other colleagues. It presents the narratives collected after the first stage, data collection, of an on-going narrative project using the tool ‘Tree of life’ to facilitate teachers’ self-reflection on their teaching career as a professional development activity. This activity provides a large amount of teacher-generated data while allowing teachers to reflect on some critical incidents in their career and gain self-knowledge which is as crucial to good teaching as knowing students and the subject they teach. By telling their stories, teachers can come to know themselves better and really appreciate how much they have accomplished and grown during their career, thereby making appropriate and meaningful plan for future professional development.

Recognising prior learning: a window onto what is wrong with higher education

Recognition of prior learning (RPL) has challenged disciplinary knowledge as the foundation of higher education, in the process widening participation, but still often within linear and standardised credit frameworks. These frameworks, however, have been challenged by models of competency-based learning and assessment in which students demonstrate what they know by showing rather than telling, and progressing at their own pace. Drawing on the work of John Macmurray and Richard Sennett, this article argues that these innovations are actually more true to the nature of knowledge than 'learning stuff' , because they are about knowing why we do something, which is also intrinsic to the critical reflection often assessed by RPL. If we know through doing, then this also raises the social aspect of 'doing', which is a rich and growing line of inquiry in educational research. The most effective 'doing' – for example as complex problem solving – combines ability with diversity; diverse teams are good problem solvers. This suggests that liberal education ideas of an intellectually challenging education only for the brightest and best are not only socially divisive but are economically damaging and, overall, less likely to develop the abilities that graduates need as the future's knowledge workers and entrepreneurs.

Geo‐spatial analyses in education research: the critical challenge and methodological possibilities

AbstractThe usefulness of spatial perspectives in education research is well known, particularly in fields such as school choice that are operationalised in multiple institutional, demographic, and local geographies. But the modes of spatial inquiry, even as they can potentially lend themselves to integrated research strategies, tend to be fragmented and isolated, failing to take into account multiple dimensions of contextual factors. Our purpose is to provide critical deliberations on geo‐spatial methods in school choice research and suggest an integrative approach to enhance research on school choice from a geographic perspective. This paper first demonstrates the linkage of spatial approaches to school choice, and then surveys geo‐spatial research as typically leveraged on this issue. We argue that there are inherent limitations to the typical conceptions of space in geo‐spatial analyses and discuss two of the major challenges to these conceptions as provided by critical theorists and geographers. But we also point out that these challenges suggest alternatives that themselves have serious shortcomings. The concluding discussion sets out some of the possibilities of a more integrated approach to spatial inquiry in education research, and school choice more specifically.

Beyond cyborg subjectivities: Becoming-posthumanist educational researchers

This excerpt from our collective biography emerges from a dialogue that commenced when Noel interjected the concept of ‘becoming-cyborg’ into our conversations about Annette’s experiences of breast cancer, which initially prompted her to (re)interpret her experiences as a ‘chaos narrative’ of cyborgian and environmental embodiment in education contexts. The materialisation of Donna Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg in Annette’s changing body enabled new appreciations of its interpretive power, and functioned in some ways as a successor project to Noel’s earlier deployment of cyborgs in what he now recognises as a ‘posthumanising’ of curriculum inquiry. Noel’s subsequent experiences with throat cancer drew us towards exploring the possibilities that concepts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblage and Karen Barad’s ontoepistemology offer as a mean of thinking the meetings of bodies and technologies in educational inquiry beyond Haraway’s hybrid cyborg. Through both collective biography and playfully scripted conversations with other theorists we explore what it means to perform diffractive interpretations and analyses in posthumanist educational inquiry. Our essay also contributes to contemporary conversations about the uses of collaborative biographical writing as a method of inquiry in educational research.

Diffracting Enfolding Futures: Critical Inquiry in Quantitative Educational Research

Digital technologies and data have become ubiquitous in social life yet a paradigmatic rift remains between critical inquiry and quantitative educational research. This article demonstrates an alternative ontological and epistemological approach to critical inquiry with quantitative methods. By building on new materialists thought, the critical possibilities of quantification are reconsidered via a diffractive methodology. This study demonstrates an alternative approach to analyzing the multiplicity of “difference” in parenting practices. Data are diffractively analyzed demonstrating how parenting practices are a result of myriad forces that cannot be reduced to pathology or deficiency but rather convey the inheritance of constraining and disenabling sociocultural and historical conditions. Concluding remarks suggests the enfolding futures of data analytics and critical inquiry in educational research.

Applying Clinical Research Skills to Conduct Education Research: Important Recommendations for Success.

Imagine a physician who wants to research options to help her patients lose weight. As a clinical researcher, she may first explore the efficacy of a medication. Not only is there an instrument that accurately collects patient weight but also the link between the intervention (medication) and the outcome (weight) has been established. Her study manipulates the behavior of the physician (what should be prescribed), and the intervention is administered to the patient, who in this case, is a relatively passive recipient.

The interspecies educator's cybernetic world

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to interconnect pedagogy and biology via second-order cybernetics.Design/methodology/approach– The approach taken is that of a synthesis.Findings– Biology can better deal with intersubjectivity within and between species by incorporating approaches and theory from education inquiry. Conversely, educators can de-anthropocentrize their discipline by entering into learning relationships with other species. By rallying around the concept of “eduction”, second-order cybernetics plays a role in both syntheses.Practical implications– De-anthropocentrizing education could have practical value in creating ecologically relevant education for children and in developing more integrated environmental impact assessments.Originality/value– Finding convergence between the study of life and forms of practitioner inquiry in education research, and connecting these to the environmental movement.

Visual juxtaposition as qualitative inquiry in educational research

Visual juxtaposition is inquiry through contrast, facilitated by side-by-side positioning of two images, or images and text. When combined with a theoretical foundation that explores interactions between the material and discursive elements of visual data, juxtaposition creates opportunities for qualitative analysis that are not as readily apparent when individual images are considered. Analytic extensions of this practice are described as archival, spatial, multimodal, and intertextual.

The Rhetoric of Care: Preservice Teacher Discourses that Depoliticize, Deflect, and Deceive

How teachers “care” for students is a well-established line of inquiry in educational research, but the ways such “care” may function as symbolic violence have received scant attention. In this ethnographic investigation of classroom disciplinary interactions, the characteristics and functions of preservice teachers’ care discourses are examined. By translating deficit discourses into expressions of praise for students’ nonacademic talents, the participants’ rhetoric of care effectively shifts blame for failure from teacher to student. The preservice teachers’ expressions of care also function to veil the power being produced in such rhetoric, to frame the teacher as victim when said care is rejected, and to reverse the carer/cared-for dynamic when teachers’ attempts to inspire academic progress are unsuccessful. Implications for teacher education and teacher development are provided as are suggestions for how to recognize and implement more authentic forms of care.

The necessity of historical inquiry in educational research: the case of religious education

This article explores the mixed fortunes of historical inquiry as a method in educational studies and exposes evidence for the neglect of this method in religious education research in particular. It argues that historical inquiry, as a counterpart to other research methods, can add depth and range to our understanding of education, including religious education, and can illuminate important longer‐term, broader and philosophical issues. The article also argues that many historical voices have remained silent in the existing historiography of religious education because such historiography is too generalised and too biased towards the development of national policy and curriculum and pedagogical theory. To address this limitation in educational research, this article promotes rigorous historical studies that are more substantially grounded in the appropriate historiographical literature and utilise a wide range of original primary sources. Finally, the article explores a specific example of the way in which a historical approach may be fruitfully applied to a particular contemporary debate concerning the nature and purpose of religious education.

The use of email interviewing as a qualitative method of inquiry in educational research

This article argues for the potential that email interviewing has as a qualitative method in educational research. The article draws on research that uses email as a way of generating online narratives in order to understand how academics construct their identities. In doing so, the article considers the challenges that email interviewing poses for researchers who might wish to use the method as a way of studying and understanding academics' lives, particularly the nature of ‘presentation’ and ‘performance’ that takes place with/in email narratives. Nonetheless, despite these challenges, the article concludes by recognising the possibilities the method has for increasing reflexivity by providing both the time and space for academics to construct, reflect upon and learn from their stories of experience.

Getting tense about genealogy

The paper responds to the growing interest in genealogical method as a means of inquiry in education research. The three authors bring together their collective understanding of the nature and purpose of genealogy as a method deriving from the work of Michel Foucault. The authors then indicate how such understandings were applied by each of them to a particular scholarly task. In elaborating the uses and the pitfalls of genealogical approaches by this means, the writers makeit clear that thereis no blueprint for genealogical use. Rather, working through genealogical methods demands from the researcher a strong grasp of the epistemological and theoretical tensions involved in asking how our present educational practices function as they do.

Experimental inquiry and naturalistic inquiry: An evaluation

AbstractIn recent years, questions have been raised about the usefulness of experimental inquiry in educational research and evaluation. An alternative paradigm, called naturalistic inquiry has been advocated by some and appears to be growing in acceptability. In this article, these two approaches are described and compared using illustrations from two science education research projects. Several strengths and limitations of each inquiry style are identified. Investigators are urged to seriously consider both paradigms in planning research and evaluation studies.