Section archive - Research Methods

This article explores the use of active imagination and dialogics as constructs that can be applied reflexively to health care education. Drawing on student data, it discusses some of the primary elements of these ideas, and how they may inform reflection, human inquiry, and pedagogical approaches to personal and professional growth and development.

This article draws upon the work of two researchers who facilitated practitioner research with school professionals in Liverpool. The researchers themselves had not been involved in practitioner research before. In this account, the researchers reflect critically upon their own experience. The discussion presents the learning curve that the researchers underwent as well as what they discovered about the relationship between practitioners and researchers when engaged in school-based research.

Strengths and weaknesses of different research approaches are discussed, and it is proposed that the dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative approaches should be replaced with distinctions between low- and high-level inference approaches with respect to data, generalization and explanation. It is concluded that while the international studies easily invite misuse and misinterpretation, they also offer possibilities for improving the quality of educational research, because the high-quality data generated by these studies can be taken advantage of in research on causal effects of factors in and out of educational systems.

The article describes two practices that are signature pedagogies of doctoral education: one in neuroscience (the journal club) and one in English studies (the list). The two practices, in addition to teaching students disciplinary norms and identities, serve as windows to their cultures and home disciplines. The author recommends educational doctoral programs consider the values of the two practices.