What Counts in Discourse and Policy? Mapping Ways of Knowing Across Qualitative Discursive Studies of Educational Policy

• In Event: 70.066 - Roundtable Session 28
  In Roundtable Session: 70.066-10 - Interrogating Distinctions Between and Misconceptions of Qualitative Methods

Abstract

In this proposal we analyze a set of 18 peer-reviewed studies that take a discursive approach to educational policy in order to begin mapping the epistemological terrain of how discourse and policy are brought to bear on one another in qualitative research. Our examination of this corpus, which is a subset from a larger study-in-progress, considers definitions of key concepts and implications for study design on what can be known of policy through discourse. Explicating “what counts” among studies of discourse and policy bolsters a methodological argument that qualitative analysis of education policy provides needed, complementary forms of knowing alongside more common forms of quantitative educational policy research, which we argue has important implications for social justice and equity.

Authors

• Kate T. Anderson, Arizona State University

• Jessica Holloway, Kansas State University

• Stuart Rice, Arizona State University - Tempe