Contexts Are a Matter of Concern: Problematizing Context in Education Research

• In Event: Curriculum Studies and Historicizing the Present: The Political and the Impracticality of Practical Knowledge

Abstract

I argue that education researchers should play more attention to how they conceptualize the context(s) of schools and education systems. The construction of the research context is caught up in a mobilization of norms, power relations, regulative practices, technologies and strategies. Ascriptions of Context can operate as externally imposed categories that enclose, disable, and deny access to resources, opportunities, agency, and subject positions. In like measure, inscriptions of Context can sometimes enable, increase access and generally privilege particular cultural groups or particular social settings. This paper considers methodological strategies for analytically approaching the problem of Context in educational research. I propose that researchers recognize how context(s) are part of an interweaving process with an object (or objects) within an ever-changing assemblage. The “entangled analysis” approach (Sobe, 2013) advanced here accounts for the constructed and constructing quality of context(s), and further brings the researcher into the problematic as she too is continually within the power/knowledge relations that make context(s) meaningful and consequential. I argue that ‘contextualizing’ a study should not be merely a preparatory activity but should carry across the entirety of the research project. Rather than beginning with standardized Contextual categories, researchers should seek to understand the confluence of practices and objects that are coming together, or interweaving, as well as constantly flowing and changing.

Author

• Jamie Ann Kowalczyk, Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas