Practice Methodologies in Education Research

Practice Methodologies in Education Research offers a fresh approach to researching practice in education. Addressing a major gap in research methodology scholarship, it highlights how integral practice theory is to the transformational agendas of education research, introducing a theory of activist practice methodologies informed by expansive theories of practice. With contributions from leading education researchers drawn from across the world, the book confronts onto-epistemological dilemmas for doing research that arise from taking practice theory seriously, including the theories of Bourdieu, de Certeau, Deleuze, Haraway, Latour, Taylor, and Vygotsky. A defining feature of the chapters is their activist axiologies and their experimental approach to researching practice in education, in fields as diverse as educational leadership, schooling, higher education, adult and workplace education and training, professional practice, and informal learning. Practice Methodologies in Education is essential reading for education academics and postgraduates engaged in critical research using practice theory.

Table of Contents:
1. An outline of a theory of practice methodologies: education research as an expansive-activist endeavour 2. Corporatised fabrications: the methodological challenges of professional biographies at a time of neoliberalisation 3. Researching teacher practice: social justice dispositions revealed in activity 4. Digital research methods and sensor technologies: rethinking the temporality of digital life 5. Practices within positions: a methodology for analysing intra-group differences in educational fields 6. Principles, procedures and applications of dialectical methodologies for the study of human practice 7. The challenge of Bourdieu’s relational ontology for international comparative research in academic governance practice 8. Social imaginaries in education research 9. Morphologies of knowing: fractal methods for re-thinking classroom technology practices 10. Unpacking practice: the challenges and possibilities afforded by sociomaterial ethnography 11. What is an inaugural professorial lecture? Exploring academic practices through diffractive listing 12. Tactics of resilience: playing with ethnographic data on classroom practice

About the Author :
Julianne Lynch is an Associate Professor in Curriculum and Pedagogy at Deakin University, Australia. Julie Rowlands is an Associate Professor in Education Leadership at Deakin University, Australia. Trevor Gale is Professor of Education Policy and Social Justice at The University of Glasgow, UK. Stephen Parker is a Research Fellow in Education Policy and Social Justice at the University of Glasgow, UK.

Review :
Practice Methodologies in Education brilliantly conveys the diverse and challenging field of activist practice methods. We are presented with beau-tifully crafted accounts of the challenges and contradictions provoked by a range of different theoretical traditions, but also the transformative poten-tial of activist agendas of education research. This compelling and author-itative collection, tackles key methodological and epistemological issues in a nuanced and innovative manner, whilst recognising the many contradic-tions in educational research. The originality of the work shines through in descriptions of experimental styles of research writing, new approaches to data, and novel arrangements of theory. In doing so it reveals a sociological imagination missing in much of the research methods literature. —Professor Diane Reay, University of Cambridge, UK An invaluable collection that challenges our conventional, taken-for-grant assumptions about theory, method and representation in education re-search, and that provokes us to think anew about the critical endeavour and responsibilities of the activist agendas of education research. —Professor Christine Halse, Education University of Hong Kong, China In a highly original turn towards the risk, uncertainty and contradictions that pattern education research, this book offers a scholarly set of ques-tions and real challenges. Educational research that takes seriously the im-peratives in this book requires us to engage in a permanent questioning of aims, processes and outcomes in the face of complex and interwoven sets of contradictions as well as the realisation that sometimes there are no easy resolutions to policy problems. —Professor Meg Maguire, King’s College London, UK This is a remarkable and incisive book—a riveting collection that captures the contemporary moment eloquently. I have no doubt that the collection will make a decisive contribution to practice-theory in education, and in ways that are simultaneously foundational and innovative while remaining highly accessible and coherent. —Associate Professor Taylor Webb, The University of British Columbia, Canada Practice Methodologies in Education Research is a companion to a very suc-cessful earlier work titled Practice Theory and Education. It truly is a land-mark text that provides a comprehensive survey and analysis of a diversity of approaches to practice and as such is likely to become a class text in meth-odology courses. A must-read for those students and academic researchers engaged with the theory and methodology of practice. —Professor Michael A. Peters, Beijing Normal University, China PR