Doing educational research

Kenneth Tobin & Joe Kincheloe (Eds.) (2006). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

Qualitative Research in Classrooms (Tobin, pp.15-58)
Criteria for judging quality of ethnography include whether the research involving human subjects benefit the subjects and the researchers ensure that the subjects know that the benefits will be realized only in the future and improved once the research is enacted (p.25). In interpretive research, it is important to ask two main questions, what's going on and why is it happening, as soon as returning from the field. While formulating answers, the methodology takes researchers to search for patterns of coherence and contradictions as a whole--because culture consists of thin coherence dialectically interconnected contradictions (cited on p. 30; Sewell, 1999). Those initial findings are described in vignettes, little stories, then accumulate multiple data sources, beyond interviews, to support the patterns and contradictions. (He recorded video, audio, and photographs.) According to Tobin, intellectual efforts lie in connecting the theoretical framework that underpins a study to the empirical and theoretical works undertaken in the study (p.54). To produce a high quality research, in the planning stage, set a boundary and reexamine what has been done has all relevant meanings to the research once the study is unfolded.

Preparing to do Educational Research (Joyce & Tutela, pp. 59-83)
Each author is introduced within the context of their family and educational background. Being women who tend to be more attentive to what others say (cited on p.64; Gilligan, 1994), they choose a dialogue to uncover their voice in educational research. Dialogues are also a vehicle for understanding the world from their own experience and reality while staying conscious of the world (cited on p 65; Freire 1990). [The beginning part of this article is rather provocative in that the authors, the researchers, read themselves as the researched. In other words, they situate themselves in a research context and lead to the dialogue, which constitutes the main content of this article. Clever!] In the dialogue, Joyce's graduate study is mainly traced. She brought in journals that she kept while working in a high school for five years, which led her to study minority underachievement. While taking courses, she grounded up theoretical approaches and kept annotation in various ways, such as indexing, sticky notes, questioning texts and so forth. The rest of the questions include general study strategies and dissertation theories and methodologies she took.

Critical Cultural Studies Research (Steinberg, pp.117-137)
For critical cultural studies through reading popular media, Steinberg introduces various disciplines she employs for bricolage research. Levi-Strauss (1966) defines it as a form of taking research strategies from various disciplines and traditions to unfold research in context (p.119): Critical ethnography, based on the poststructualism, proposes dialogues between researcher and researched with the intention of breaking the hierarchial relation embedded in traditional ethnography between them (Atkinson & Hammersley, 94; cited on p. 121); Poststructuralist feminism challenges tradional patriarchal exclusions and connects class problems with female oppression; Critical poststructuralist theory emphasizes applying a theory to a local phenomenon to "guarantee individuals and community the capacity to make meaning and act independently."; Critical hermeneutics is concerned about the interrelations between identity/subjectivity/consciousness construction and cultural production.
hermeneutics is back to original difficulty and “an appreciation of the complexity and ambiguity of human life” (p.129)


Philosophical and Historical Research (Thayer-Bacon & Moyer, pp.139-156)
Library of Congress American Memory Collection (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem)
Harvard University's OASIS (Online Archival Search Information System)
ArchivesUSA
US National Archives (http://www.archives.gov/)
Archives Canada (http://www.archivescanada.ca/)

Participatory Activist Research/Action Research (Martin & McLaren, pp.157-190)
Action Research for social change and social justice develops Freire's notion of praxis--dialogic relationship between practice and theory--and is based on shared participation for problem solving process and awareness of power structure within the context. Unlike traditional research about education, which intends to conform individuals to the existing social structure and values--in Foucault's term, domiciled body through institutional disciplinary practices--critical traditions emphasize the relationship between power and knowledge. According to McLaren, the production and transmission of knowledge is a mechanism of marginalizing the knowledge of the Other (cited on p.177). The authors note that the characteristics of this research are that it is participatory and collaborative, focusing on change, based on self-critical communities, embodying praxis, aiming group theorizing, and exlicitly political, which is distinctive from all research (p.179). Still limitation exists as the authors phrase 'blind or manipulative power dressed up as emancipation or empowerment.' Issues and problems are frames by researchers initially and research moves along with the priviledged position of the researcher.

Historical Research in Education (Villaverde, Kincheloe, Helyar, p.311-345)
Historiography is by definition the study of history, historical methods and its writing and employs a meta-analysis of the writing of the past by using various methods such as deconstruction, discourse analysis, textual analysis, hermeneutics, semiotics and ideological contextualization) for interpretation (p.346). Villaverde writes that while philosophy guides to how to frame a problem and theorize the solutions, methodology leads researcher to actions in the study, and asserts critical interpretation, meta-analysis and asking unique questions as the integral methodologies in historiography. Kincheloe emphasizes critical theory in historiography as an aparatus of gaining new lenses for new interpretation of educational phenomena. Thus, groudning in social theory, he says critical historians should ask questions about power relations: who are advantaged and disadvantaged by particular educational plans? By addressing constructivism of historiography, he contends, "understanding the ways that the construction of a historical narrative is in part a ctrative act, a feat of the imagination does not take away from the usefulness of historical scholarshop. Indeed, it provides us with a more accurate picture of the historiographical process and how history may be either distorted or used in a socially beneficent manner"(p. 322). I also note his further insight into the intensified power of 'capital-driven global colonialism': this global structures 'co-opt' education insiduously to maintain its regulation on people around the world and research should explore this phenomenon in particular locales within the context of such intrusion and resistance. Finally he stresses a postformalistic notion of simultaneous multiperspectivism, where multiple perspectives, even contradictorily, are presented simultaneously. According to him, such efforts constitute a form of historiographical cubism and widen a horizen of research.