Search results for: Qualitative research

Calls for the renewal of teacher preparation through clinical practice have left many novice teacher educators to learn on the job. This article reports on the research of two such novices, studying their own practice. Addressing the need to better understand the approaches teacher educators take to clinically grounding their work, the authors used a hermeneutic approach to naturalistic inquiry to study their use of an inquiry community framework in a teacher preparation clinical setting. The authors found that within an arc of practitioner inquiry, explicitly teaching guided reflection and professional dialoguing skills within an inquiry community were key teacher educator practices. They found that an inquiry community approach holds promise as a structure and space for teacher educators to advance teacher preparation toward clinical practice.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of policy-oriented teacher inquiry that is collaborative, theoretically driven, and methodologically well-grounded. The author proposes a methodological framework for policy-oriented teacher inquiry that highlights multilayered research approaches and collaborative inquiry. She situates her arguments and the proposed framework in the context of qualitative research and Marx’s dialectic method. The author introduces four study phases that can enable deeper and more detailed understandings of relations between individual experiences, political structures, and material environments.

This article describes the research method of visual juxtaposition. It explains that visual juxtaposition is inquiry through contrast, facilitated by side-by-side positioning of two images, or images and text. When combined with a theoretical foundation that explores interactions between the material and discursive elements of visual data, juxtaposition creates opportunities for qualitative analysis that are not as readily apparent when individual images are considered.

The authors examine educational policy by focusing on the ways in which actors “play” or selectively follow, negotiate, and appropriate cultural instructions and rules. The authors outline a framework that situates assemblage, a notion utilized in actor-network theory, within the critical cultural study of policy. The authors pay particular attention to what happens when disparate actors join together to perform policy-directed tasks.