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.

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

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.