Intimate Accounts Of Education Policy Research

What do we actually do when we research education policy and governance? Why do we tame the messy hinterland of research into smooth accounts and what do we lose in the process? In this volume, distinguished scholars in education policy and governance research discuss how the practice of methods is messy, subjective, and provisional. They approach methodology as riddled with tensions, doubts, troubles, and mundane decisions. Scholarship in this book shifts from recording the methodological hinterland to putting it to productive use as resources for thinking about the researched world and about research itself. This methodological openness helps to examine how research reproduces scholars’ metaphysics, how research is a deeply embodied process encompassing all senses, how scholars’ concerns interfere in the worlds they study, but also how these equally interfere with researchers. By challenging smooth methodological accounts which conceal the complex and provisional nature of research, this book offers new approaches in education policy and governance research that are more generative, insightful, and sincere. Offering new ways of thinking about research methodologies, the book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students in the fields of education research and education theory, as well as social scientists interested in research methodologies more broadly.

What do we actually do when we research education policy and governance? Why do we tame the messy hinterland of research into smooth accounts and what do we lose in the process? In this volume, distinguished scholars in education policy and governance research discuss how the practice of methods is messy, subjective, and provisional. They approach methodology as riddled with tensions, doubts, troubles, and mundane decisions. Scholarship in this book shifts from recording the methodological hinterland to putting it to productive use as resources for thinking about the researched world and about research itself. This methodological openness helps to examine how research reproduces scholars’ metaphysics, how research is a deeply embodied process encompassing all senses, how scholars’ concerns interfere in the worlds they study, but also how these equally interfere with researchers. By challenging smooth methodological accounts which conceal the complex and provisional nature of research, this book offers new approaches in education policy and governance research that are more generative, insightful, and sincere. Offering new ways of thinking about research methodologies, the book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students in the fields of education research and education theory, as well as social scientists interested in research methodologies more broadly.

The field of education policy research is a dense, crowded space owing to its complicated relationship to different intellectual histories and the influence of various ontologies or ‘turns’. To aid comprehension and clarity, this book describes the history, contribution and application of over 90 keywords in the field of education policy research. It is designed as a reference, learning and teaching tool to assist students, educators and researchers with: • complex learning and teaching; • wider and background reading and knowledge building; • critical scholarship and research; • interdisciplinary thinking and writing; and • theory development and application.

Analysing Education Policy: Theory and Method provides a comprehensive overview of key approaches in critical education policy research. With chapters from internationally recognised and established scholars in the field, this book provides an authoritative account of how different questions may be approached and answered. Part 1 features chapters focused on text-based approaches to analysis, including critical discourse analysis, thinking with Foucault, Indigenist Policy Analysis, media analysis, the analysis of promotional texts in education, and the analysis of online networks. Part 2 features chapters focused on network ethnography, actor-network theory, materiality in policy, Institutional Ethnography, decolonising approaches to curriculum policy, working with children and young people, and working with education policy elites. These chapters are supported by an introduction to each section, as well as an overall introduction and conclusion chapter from the editors, drawing together key themes and ongoing considerations for the field. Critical education policy analysis takes many different forms, each of which works with distinctly different questions and fulfils different purposes. This book is the first to clearly map current common and influential approaches to answering these questions, providing important guidance for both new and established researchers.

Co-published by Routledge for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Educational policy continues to be of major concern. Policy debates about economic growth and national competitiveness, for example, commonly focus on the importance of human capital and a highly educated workforce. Defining the theoretical boundaries and methodological approaches of education policy research are the two primary themes of this comprehensive, AERA-sponsored Handbook. Organized into seven sections, the Handbook focuses on (1) disciplinary foundations of educational policy, (2) methodological perspectives, (3) the policy process, (4) resources, management, and organization, (5) teaching and learning policy, (6) actors and institutions, and (7) education access and differentiation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, the Handbook’s over one hundred authors address three central questions: What policy issues and questions have oriented current policy research? What research strategies and methods have proven most fruitful? And what issues, questions, and methods will drive future policy research? Topics such as early childhood education, school choice, access to higher education, teacher accountability, and testing and measurement cut across the 63 chapters in the volume. The politics surrounding these and other issues are objectively analyzed by authors and commentators. Each of the seven sections concludes with two commentaries by leading scholars in the field. The first considers the current state of policy design, and the second addresses the current state of policy research. This book is appropriate for scholars and graduate students working in the field of education policy and for the growing number of academic, government, and think-tank researchers engaged in policy research. For more information on the American Educational Research Association, please visit: http://www.aera.net/.

This book delves into the various methods of constructing postdigital research, with a particular focus on the postdigital dynamic of inclusion and exclusion, as well as the interplay between method and emancipation. By answering three fundamental questions - the relationship between postdigital theory and research practice, the relationship between method and emancipation, and how to construct emancipatory postdigital research - the book serves as a comprehensive resource for those interested in conducting postdigital research. Constructing Postdigital Research: Method and Emancipation is complemented by Postdigital Research: Genealogies, Challenges, and Future Perspectives, also edited by Petar Jandrić, Alison MacKenzie, and Jeremy Knox, which explores these questions in theory.

Measuring governance has become an increasingly important feature of modern societies, with organizations and institutions expected to prove their worth by quantifying their activities and results. This unique Handbook maps historical developments, theoretical conceptions and key approaches, and summarizes what is known about measuring governance from a variety of fields of practice.

This book combines assemblage theory and policy mobilities to inform the study of comparative and international education (CIE), focusing on education policy and how such policy moves are enacted. These approaches challenge taken-for granted and universalizing concepts in policy research and policy work in CIE – such as the nation-state, policy making/policy enactment, global/local, Global North/Global South – and highlight how policy is contingent on emerging through complex relations between people and places. Using illustrative cases drawn from research and practice in CIE and education development, the book demonstrates how these ideas can be used in the analysis of policy and the application of this approach in real life.