Qualitative Research In Education Research Articles

Qualitative research in education: interaction and practice

Qualitative research in education: interaction and practice

Qualitative research and outcomes in health, social work and education

Qualitative research and outcomes in health, social work and education

Qualitative research and outcomes in health, social work and education

The purpose of this article is to outline ways in which qualitative research has a contribution to make to research on outcomes in health, social work and education. The main questions are contextualized through a general consideration of the relationship between quantitative and qualitative methods, especially in relation to evaluative research. In the main part of the article, I draw some conclusions regarding the contribution that qualitative methodology can make to outcomes research. I illustrate how qualitative research can contribute indispensably to outcomes research in four ways: design solutions; sensitivity to the micro-processes of practice and programmes; applications of symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology; and qualitative data analysis.

Troubling the Contours of Arts-Based Educational Research

The author writes in response to the article presented by his friends and colleagues in arts-based educational research, Maria Piantanida, Patricia L. McMahon, and Noreen B. Garman. Maria, Pat, Noreen, and the author share a commitment to substantive qualitative educational research, particularly as this research is conducted using the arts, autoethnography, and other emerging arts-based methodologies. They have all worked closely together at the American Educational Research Association in the creation and expansion of the Arts-Based Educational Research Special Interest Group. They also were instrumental in the development of a new conference for arts-based research, initially in Albuquerque in February 2000, then in Austin in October 2000, and Victoria, Canada, in 2001.

Book Review: Being, Seeking, Telling: Expressive Approaches to Qualitative Adult Education Research, edited by Peter Willis, Robert Smith, and Emily Collins. Flaxton, Australia: Post Pressed, 2000. 433 pp., AU$55 (paper).

Book Review: Being, Seeking, Telling: Expressive Approaches to Qualitative Adult Education Research, edited by Peter Willis, Robert Smith, and Emily Collins. Flaxton, Australia: Post Pressed, 2000. 433 pp., AU$55 (paper).

Reflective critique and collaborative practice in evaluation: promoting change in medical education

The School of Medicine at the University of Tasmania has recently begun to implement a process of curriculum evaluation,which aims to reflect contemporary best practice in evaluation in tertiary pedagogy and medical education. Best practice must accommodate a broadening interest in cooperative and collaborative evaluation strategies among stakeholders, advances in applied qualitative educational research and recognition that critical reflection on practice is the cornerstone of professional education. This paper reports a recent evaluation strategy in a specific year-long unit in the second year of a six-year undergraduate medical degree.The paper begins by presenting the context; it then discusses and rationalises the evaluation strategy and presents findings. The paper concludes by arguing that curriculum evaluation as best practice must be reflective, informed by the scholarship of medical education, and internalized as a dynamic process that can promote sustainable change and improvement in medical curricula. Such an approach will contribute to an undergraduate medical curriculum that prepares students for the demands and complexities of medical practice.

''Winks upon winks'': Multiple lenses on settings in qualitative educational research

Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives and research, this paper focuses on the significance of settings in qualitative research as well as on associated problems with representations of settings in traditional analyses and reports. The central premise developed is that a deeper analysis of settings requires an unraveling of relations among settings in which individuals or groups participate. In this discussion, setting is defined as a fluid and mutable but bounded environment in which particular situations, interactions, and behaviors accrue to it as normal by virtue of history, cultural values, and beliefs. To represent the complexity of identity and power relations in educational research, author suggests six lenses that offer a multilayered picture of participants' lived experiences across multiple settings. These lenses have the potential to broaden researchers' representations of participants beyond what is often available in traditional analyses and reports of qualitative educational research. These six lenses on settings are not meant to be inclusive but to suggest that finer grained examinations of the social and cultural symbols that permeate settings may yield fresh perspectives on lived experience.

Epistemological and methodological considerations of doing cross cultural research in adult education

While doing cross cultural research is not new, the growing acknowledgment of the perils of crossing cultures unconsciously is calling for change. This paper examines some methodological and epistemological considerations of doing cross cultural qualitative research in adult education. Reliance on partial knowledge and middle-class cultural and political bias point to the need within the field for critical reflection on how and why empirical realities are studied in the ways that they are and at the same time require rethinking and revision of traditional research methods while designing new methods of inquiry.

What’s Race Got to Do With It? Critical Race Theory’s Conflicts With and Connections to Qualitative Research Methodology and Epistemology

This article will provide the theoretical and conceptual grounding for forthcoming discussions regarding how critical race theory (CRT), as a discourse of liberation, can be used as a methodological and epistemological tool to expose the ways race and racism affect the education and lives of racial minorities in the United States. To that extent, the goal is threefold. First, the authors seek to adequately define CRT by situating it within a specific socio-historical context. Second, they seek to present an argument for why there is a need for CRT in educational and qualitative research. In doing so, they discuss the ways concerns regarding race and racism have or have not been addressed previously in educational research. Finally, they speculate about what lies ahead. In doing so, they fully assess the possible points of agreement and conflicts between CRT and qualitative research in education.

The leeway of qualitative educational research: A case study

This article presents a case study into the question of how research-internal and research-external factors influence the leeway of qualitative research, and ultimately determine which questions can and cannot be addressed in research. First an overview is presented of the position of qualiative research in the field of education in The Netherlands. This position is then analysed by situating educational research in the particular research political context. In the second part of the article the authors focus on effective schools research, one of the strongest research programmes in Dutch educational studies, in order to show the consequences of the lack of a qualitative tradition.

The Stories We Choose to Tell: Fulfilling the Promise of Qualitative Research for Special Education

In recent years qualitative research has earned an increasingly legitimate place as a form of systematic inquiry in educational scholarship. Special education researchers who draw on qualitative methods have responded by using this research paradigm chiefly to document stories of individuals with disabilities. However, rarely have these studies been extended to consider the broader sociocultural contexts within which disability exists. A case is made in this article for broadening the view of qualitative research that governs its practice within special education in an effort to challenge both the nature of the stories we choose to tell about disability as well as the frameworks by which these stories are disciplined.

Voices from the Language Classroom: Qualitative Research in Second Language Education

Part I. Teaching as Doing, Thinking and Interpreting: 1. The best laid plans: teacher's in-class decisions to depart from their lesson plans 2. Hidden voices: insiders' perspectives on classroom interaction 3. Teaching style: a way to understand instruction in language classrooms Part II. Classroom Dynamics and Interaction: 4. In or out of the action zone: location as a feature of interaction in large ESL classes in Pakistan 5. Reticence and anxiety in second language learning 6. A window on the classroom: classroom events viewed from different angles Part III. The Classroom and Beyond: 7. Socializing with the teachers and prior language learning experience: a diary study 8. Sardo revisited: voice, faith, and multiple repeaters 9. Language learning diaries as mirrors of students' cultural sensitivity 10. I Want to Talk With Them, But I Don't Want Them to Hear Part IV. Curricular Issues: 11. Curriculum renewal: an investigation into changes in learner and teacher behaviors in classrooms in the sultanate of Oman 12. U.S. language minority students: voices from the junior high classroom 13. Voices for improved learning: the ethnographer as co-agent of pedagogic change 14. Registration and placement: learner response Part V. Sociopolitical Perspectives: 15. Conflicting voices: language, classrooms, and bilingual education in Puno 16. The functions of code-switching amongst high school teachers and students in KwaZulu and implications for teacher education 17. Different languages, different practices: socialization of discourse competence in dual-language school classrooms in Hungary Part VI. Implications for Teachers and Researchers: 18. Redefining the relationship between research and what teachers know 19. The tapestry of diversity in our classrooms.

Qualitative research in education

Qualitative research in education

Qualitative Research in Special Education: Notes toward an Open Inquiry Instead of a New Orthodoxy?

Qualitative Research in Special Education: Notes toward an Open Inquiry Instead of a New Orthodoxy?

Book Reviews: Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Post-Modern Perspectives, Understanding Quantitative and Qualitative Research in Early Childhood Education, Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education

Book Reviews: Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Post-Modern Perspectives, Understanding Quantitative and Qualitative Research in Early Childhood Education, Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education

The twilight years? Educational ethnography and the five moments model

The growth and variety of qualitative research in education is used as a test case to challenge the narrative of ethnography proposed by Denzin and Lincoln. Their characterization of qualitative methods in terms of five (subsequently six) ''moments'' is not reflected in research on education. Ironically, their model is shown to be a modernist narrative that does not do justice do the diversity of qualitative research in the past. It is suggested that qualitative research has always been marked by greater diversity than is captured in unilinear developmental histories.

The Challenges of Conducting an Ethnographic Case Study of a United Kingdom Teacher Education Institution

Qualitative researchers engaging in systematic fieldwork encounter dilemmas that may illuminate cultural assumptions and enhance understanding of the contexts of studies. This article is based on a study of the extent to which the concept of competence in the everyday life of a teacher education institution in the United Kingdom (UK) showed sensitivity to the need to prepare future teachers as critical, autonomous professionals. I conducted ethnographic research in this institution and wrote a case study about the experience. The study was particularly imbued with a transformative approach to competence, the need to prepare teachers as agents of change of educational inequality in which certain groups whose cultural patterns differ from those in the school systems are systematically kept off the main tracks of the educational system. Transformative educational practices in teacher education involve teaching technical skills and competencies and encourage future teachers to reflect critically on the impact of their actions and perceptions on the achievement of pupils from different cultural backgrounds. I (Canen, 1984) undertook a similar study in Brazil in which I pinpointed practices contradictory to transformative approaches in teacher education in two teacher education institutions I used as case studies. The multicultural nature of the UK and Brazil (Canen, 1995) was a framework for reflection on preparing teachers to deal with cultural diversity. In this article, I focus on the ethical dilemma I encountered during an ethnographic study in the UK. I first deal with issues related to ethnographic studies and then describe the negotiations in the fieldwork and the constraints imposed on it. The relevance of these matters in qualitative research in teacher education is twofold: They show the contradictions and difficulties qualitative researchers likely encounter conducting research in a teacher education institution. In this study, they illustrate cultural assumptions informing the concept of competence itself, which might be detrimental to the enhancement of critical thought in a teacher education institution. Ethnographic Case Studies: Some Considerations in the Literature Denzin and Lincoln (1994) define case study as the study of things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them (p. 2). ... coupled with the presence of a gendered, multiculturally situated researcher (p. 11) throughout the process of research, from adoption of the theoretical framework and formulation of questions to the strategies of inquiry and interpretation of data. Fieldwork procedures and theoretical ideas are two sides of the same coin (Wolcott, 1992, p. 6). Fieldwork procedures are paradigms of interpretation [put] into motion (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p. 14). Case study is a choice of object to be studied (Stake, 1994, pp. 236-237). Ludke and Andre (1986) point out that a case is a unity inside a wider system, an instance such as an event, a person, a group, a school, an institution, or a program to be intensely and systematically studied. Case researchers seek out both what is common and what is particular about the case, the end results being generally something unique (Stake, 1994, p. 238). An ethnographic case study uses techniques such as observation, interviews, analysis of documents, and others to discover the cultural knowledge that people hold in their minds, how it is employed in social interaction and the consequences of its employment (Spindler & Spindler, 1992, p. 70). Even though some scholars recommend the description of conflicts of values and ethical challenges in ethnographic studies, others point out its low frequency. Punch (1994) notes that it would be inappropriate for the `scientist' to abandon objectivity and detachment in recounting descriptions of personal involvement and political battles in the field setting (p. …

The Origins of a Theory of Career Decision‐making: a case study of hermeneutical research

AbstractThis article analyses a recently completed research project, to answer the question, on what were the findings based? It draws on the hermeneutics of Gadamer to explore the relationship between researcher and research subject in qualitative educational research. It argues that all qualitative research findings are simultaneously subjective and objective, being essentially constructed interpretations of data which are partly, but only partly, external to the researcher. Yet many contemporary educational researchers tend to focus almost exclusively on either the subject matter under investigation or upon the standpoint of the researcher him/herself. A simultaneous combination of both is necessary to understand the nature of research findings.

An Alternative Framework for Chemical Bonding

Recent, qualitative research in science education has uncovered many naive or incorrect ideas about aspects of science commonly held by students and others at all levels. This article discusses how misconceptions can cluster and compound.

Book Review: Beyond High School: Transition from School to Work, Qualitative Research in Education: An Introduction to Theory and Methods

Book Review: Beyond High School: Transition from School to Work, Qualitative Research in Education: An Introduction to Theory and Methods