In the past decade or so, there has been an increasing interest in employing a combination of archival and life history methods to understand the complexities of schooling. This book explores the history of the Beal Technical School in order to discuss the methods and problems involved in researching the story of an institution. It offers the…

This paper suggests a new way of working with and analysing school photographs in history of education research, especially photographs of school classrooms. It advances a new methodological approach for inquiring into the spatiality and materiality of schooling. This approach is located in the practice of installation art and draws from the…

Discusses the extraordinary changes in pedagogy and scholarly procedure that have characterized the English profession in the past two decades. Observes that scholars let superficial differences blind them to significant connections between past and present, and too often look for disjunctions between current schools of research or approaches to…

This book explains the debates that bedevil education research--for example that it is low quality, or not scientific enough, or not useful enough--and shows how research in education must meet different demands in different places, times and conditions. A major part of the book provides detailed analyses and guidance to different areas in which…

Surveys 32 officials of federal agencies and educational researchers to express historically grounded judgments on issues in educational research, including the poor reputation of the field. Criticisms that recur are that it does not pay off, that the community is in disarray, and that the field is politicized. (SLD)

Dialog between the authors addresses multiculturalism from a critical perspective and reminds educational researchers that research is always about political representation. It is argued that researchers may have inadvertently created the populations they study because of the controlling cultural mode of their own research. (SLD)

Action research, a term first used in the 1940's by Kurt Lewin, implies the application of tools and methods of social science to immediate, practical problems, with the goals of contributing to theory and knowledge in the field of education and improving practice in the schools. Collaborative action research suggests that each group represented…

Few dissertations on vocational educational history are being written by graduate students. Reasons for this paucity of research include: (1) few opportunities exist for employment in the foundations of education field; and (2) few mentorships are availabile for those with training in both historical methods and vocational education fields. The…

Provides a concise overview of the role of the federal government in educational statistics and research. Although the scale and methodologies of these projects have increased in size and complexity, federal educational statistical research has never become a significant force in educational reform. (MJP)

This paper discusses the misuse of historical data in attacks on educational revisionism and describes the contributions made by revisionists. Maintaining that the works of historical revisionists must be critically analyzed and their inadequacies recognized if they are to have lasting value, the author presents a textual criticism of a recent…

This bulletin is the second of a cooperative series sponsored by the National Committee on Research in Secondary Education. With the profession of education demanding research as a basis for adaptation of school procedures, research is being undertaken by an increasing number of agencies and is rapidly involving school principals and classroom…

Racial and cultural diversity issues have been a source of some interest amongst outdoor and environmental educators. Early research was framed in terms of the "under-participation" of people of colour, which led to the development of ethnocentric and methodologically problematical "marginality" and "ethnicity"…