The article asks whether constructivist qualitative researchers have anything to offer policymakers who expect researchers to tell them what works. The first part of the article addresses philosophical objections to characterizing the social world in cause/effect terms. Specifically, it considers whether it is legitimate for qualitative…

This article argues that specific spatial imaginaries are embedded in current debates about school ethos and research methods. It takes the reader on a journey around an English multicultural primary school supported by the creative learning program Creative Partnerships, exploring how creative arts practices (re)configured sociospatial relations…

This article presents some results arising from the meta-analysis of the educational research that has been developed at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal). The intention was to understand the status of the educational research produced, the main thematic trends studied, affiliated scientific domains, conceptual frames mobilized, and…

Although educational researchers predominately study complex, multidimensional problems, research findings and proposed arguments can sometimes be characterized as definite, simplified, and prone to particular types of answers or expected outcomes. The authors seek to problematize these definite and simplified notions of answers by looking at some…

From the vantages of a teacher who has been researched and an educational researcher who has researched teachers, this inquiry constructs a knitted narrative from journals, letters, and stories written about my time teaching English studies in a remote First Nations' community and articles written about me when I was a research participant in a…

Indigenous scholars have debated the impact that researchers and the act of researching have on Native and Indigenous people and communities. Although literature on this subject has grown, little has been written explicitly laying out "the doing" of research with these communities. The authors seek to articulate their "doing"…

Paradigms serve as metaphysical frameworks that guide researchers in the identification and clarification of their beliefs with regard to ethics, reality, knowledge, and methodology. The transformative paradigm is explained and illustrated as a framework for researchers who place a priority on social justice and the furtherance of human rights.…

This article illustrates how an emerging graduate researcher's conceptions of postpositivist, feminist, and poststructural theories of educational research affected data gathering and initial analysis. These macro theories are exemplified as the voices of an educational researcher, a feminist researcher, and a poststructural researcher,…

This article seeks to demystify, through deconstruction, the concept of "interdisciplinarity" in the context of qualitative research to contribute to a new praxis of knowledge production through reflection on the possibilities and impossibilities of interdisciplinarity. A review and discussion of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity leads the…

The purpose of this article is to illuminate one researcher's experience in working with poetic representation while researching participants' perspectives of the transition from high school to college. Two integral points are discussed: (1) making the choice of using alternative representation--letting the data speak, and (2) the flow experience…

Through the work of Michelle Fine and others, researchers are encouraged to examine the processes of qualitative research in a manner that attends to the lived experiences of those who participate in a given research project. The authors explore identity relations in qualitative research, specifically asking how their research projects are…

This article narrates the author's experience of obtaining institutional review board (IRB) approval for her dissertation study. Although her research topic was particularly sensitive, this case is illustrative of the increasing level of difficulty qualitative researchers are facing in conducting not only risky research but also work that is not…

The authors examine the field of contemporary teacher knowledge research. Specifically, they examine the use of narrative representations by researchers in this field. They make a general argument for the development of distinct narrative genres in teacher knowledge research because considerations of distinct genre styles can help researchers…

Drawing from educational research conducted in Canada and Mexico, university researchers explore how culture complicates both the ethics review process and the translation of ethical research principles into practice. University researchers in Canadian contexts seek approval from university Research Ethics Boards to conduct research, following…