Bryk–Accelerating Improvement
Educational policy makers, philanthropic foundations, and school reformers have struggled for years with the difficulty of improving the quality of public education, especially among the most economically distressed districts. In this article, Anthony Bryk argues for a new approach to school reform in which Networked Improvement Communities carefully study education as it occurs in a diverse array of contexts. The hope is to gain insights into effective teaching and schooling that can be shared across districts.
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Duke & Beck–Dissertation Formats
This article offers a useful perspective on the historical roots of the dissertation and argues that it is a specific and, in many ways, a unique genre of writing. The authors offer several suggestions for alternatives to the traditional 5-chapter, scientific-like dissertation. It is particularly helpful to practitioner-focused doctoral programs that are looking for ways to make the dissertation process and its results more useful to practitioners. It can be helpful to both faculty and doctoral students are pondering what constitutes a legitimate form of practice-embedded inquiry.
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Connelly-Clandinin. Stories of Experience & Narrative Inquiry
Connelly and Clandinin were among the first educational researchers to advocate for the legitimacy of narrative inquiry. This article is still relevant for those who are just beginning to explore the possibility of engaging in a narrative inquiry. It offers an historical perspective against which newer references can be compared.
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Garman, Noreen B., The Closed and Open Contract: Two Irreconcilable Structures in the Curriculum
Noreen B. Garman wrote “The Closed and Open Contract: Two Irreconcilable Structures in the Curriculum,” for the 1989 Triennial Conference of the World Council for Curriculum and Instruction (WCCI). Since its publication in the WCCI Journal, this article has been helpful to many students who are struggling to understand curriculum experiences in which learning objectives are stated clearly and precisely. Often the initial response is to say “the curriculum in unstructured.” Garman wrote this piece to articulate an alternative structure by using a “contract” metaphor. She argues that the nature of the learning contract is fundamentally different in a closed and open curriculum structure. Recognizing this difference can help learners let go of taken-for-granted preconceptions of what a curriculum should be. Understanding the difference can help educators shape different forms of curricula in their own work.
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Dissertation Fable
A great deal of folklore circulates among doctoral students who are looking for information on how to successful negotiate the dissertation process. One bit of common wisdom focuses on the role of the advior. This fable captures a belief that it is the advisor's position of power within the academy that makes a difference. We think it is important to both acknowledge and challenge this bit of folk lore. The advisor should play a key role, but not as a power player, but as a wise guide who can challenge doctoral candidates to complete a meritorious study and support them through the learning that this entails.
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Grubs, Robin E. & Piantanida, M. Grounded Theory in Genetic Counseling Research: An Interpretive Perspective
Grounded theory was and continues to be a popular form of qualitative research. In part, the appeal of grounded theory is that it has fairly explicit and rigorous procedures for data analysis. One of the difficulties, however, is the movement from discrete bits of data to a coherent theory. A great deal of researcher judgment is involved in constructing the relationship among concepts that emerge from the data. For this reason, grounded theory can be seen as an interpretive mode of inquiry. This article lays out a rationale for this interpretivist perspective. Even though the context is genetic counseling the rationale can be adapted for grounded theory inquiries in other fields.
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Heshusius–Freeing Ourselves from Objectivity
When the word "research" is mentioned, the importance of objectivity often comes immediately to mind. In fact, for centuries "objectivity" has been assumed to be a hallmark of legitimate research and it was taken as a given that all legitimate research had to be scientific. In the 1980s, educators began to challenge this prevailing assumption and began to argue for the legitimacy of inquiries embedded in the knowledge traditions of the arts and humanities. Still the criteria of "objectivity" exerted a powerful influence in the thinking of many educational researchers, including doctoral students trying to conceptualize a dissertation study. This article offers a helpful rationale for undersatnding why a stance of objectivity is not tenable in practice-embedded inquiry.
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Oldfather, Penny & West, Jane Qualitative Research as Jazz
Practice embedded research most often takes the form of interpretive inquiry. It is not unusual for new comers to this paradigm to struggle with how it differs from traditional scientific research. This was particularly true when the idea of interpretive research was just entering the educational discourses. This article was among the early efforts to distinguish between two fundamentally different modes of inquiry. It is still helpful in providing a general sense of this difference.
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Smith, John K. & Heshusius, Lous. Closing Down the Conversation: The End of the Quantitative-Qualitative Debate among Educational Inquirers.
In spite of this article’s title, the conversation about the nature of educational inquiry continues. However, when educators first began to engage in qualitative research, there was a great deal of confusion about what constituted legitimate method. This article was among the first to make a distinction between a “how to do it” way of thinking about method, and a “logic-of-justification” way of thinking. The article remains a useful resource to those who are in the early stages of learning about different modes of inquiry.
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