This paper asks if powerful educational knowledge is possible, by examining the character and constitution of educational knowledge and its means of acquiring 'power'. In disciplines or fields that might be termed 'applied' or 'professionally orientated' the characteristics of powerful knowledge are constituted in ways that often differ from purer…

To make historical consciousness beneficial for history education research we need to disentangle its multidisciplinary backgrounds so that contradictory approaches and outcomes can be avoided. The aim of this article therefore is to clarify the enigma of its different paradigms. We will discuss two interrelated paradigms: one interpreting…

In recent decades, philosophy has been identified as a general approach to enhance the maturity of higher education as a field of study by enriching theory and method. In this article, I offer a new set of philosophical recommendations to spur the disciplinary development of higher education, departing from previous work in several meaningful…

In this chapter I address what I see as the cornerstone for advancing our understanding of how results from empirical research into L2 interactional development can usefully be brought to bear on L2 education--be it curriculum design, teaching or testing--, namely an epistemologically coherent understanding of interactional competence and its…

In this commentary, various expert authors offer their ideas on indigenous research in the philosophy of education and PESA's role from an indigenous perspective. Georgiana Stewart is the first author to step forward and explain that education is based on knowledge, and so education is centrally concerned with literacy and identity. Stewart goes…

In this article we set out to broaden the scope of comparative education in relation to change. Following what various scholars have already shown, we argue that the world we are exploring is contingent, as too is comparative research, reflecting particular epistemological perspectives. We use this dual focus on contingency and analyze the…

Operating across the 'marshy epistemological divide' created between schooling and academia, the role of pre-service teacher researchers presents a unique set of challenges and responsibilities. This paper reports on a follow-up study exploring the attitudes of a multi-disciplinary cohort of graduand teachers towards the use and conduct of…

This paper reports on a study of what interdisciplinarians do. Data was gathered by conducting semi-structured interviews with self-identified interdisciplinarians. Several themes emerged from this project. First, the principal approach to research by interdisciplinarians was broadly exploratory and messy contrary to the linear step-by-step…

Although action research has been widely recognized as an appropriate methodology for promoting the democratization of knowledge, it is not always conducted from an emancipatory and transformative paradigm. Using AR in a technical way, renders it no more than a researcher-driven, problem-solving heuristic that perpetuates the intellectual…

High Leverage Practices (HLPs), as a core set of teaching practices, represent important instructional priorities and provide instructional guidance for students' engagement in practice-based instruction. The goals of this research were to: (1) understand how an epistemic community (the people designing and leading courses and programs) viewed the…

The last few decades abound in studies concerned with what teachers, students, parents, and other participants in the educational process believe about a wide variety of issues. Most of these studies follow methodological procedures based on reports that people make about their own beliefs. We argue that this strategy is seriously flawed under…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to interrogate practice of research and discursively problematise the role of the researcher in relation to the ways in which knowledge is constructed and represented in and as a centre/periphery relation. It considers the ways in which research practices can refocus attention on claims made about knowing and…

This important volume brings together key writings from one of the most influential education scholars of our time. In this collection of her seminal essays on critical race theory (CRT), Gloria Ladson-Billings seeks to clear up some of the confusion and misconceptions that education researchers have around race and inequality. Beginning with her…

This article examines underdetermination as a key theoretical assumption in an emerging body of educational research. Underdetermination is described as a broad philosophical position that assumes that social, scientific and technological phenomena cannot be reduced to linear relationships between antecedents and consequences, for instance through…

The article draws attention to the forgotten ancestry of the "four steps of comparison" model (description--interpretation--juxtaposition--comparison). Comparativists largely attribute this to George Z. F. Bereday [1964. "Comparative Method in Education." New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston], but among German scholars, it is…