The Uses of Qualitative Research: Powerful Methods to Inform Practice in Education

• In Event: 16.043 - Applying Cultural Historical Activity Theory to Resolve Long-Standing Inequities at the Intersections of Dis/ability, Race, and Language in Education

Abstract

The Institute of Education Sciences’ (IES) role is to provide scientific evidence that undergirds the nation’s education policy and practice as well as its mission to share knowledge ...” The Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 reaffirmed the government’s commitment to scientific research as the standard from which educational practice and policy should emerge. Since then, educational research has been dramatically reshaped and distorted. I advance two major arguments. The first is to establish the utility of qualitative methodologies for shaping and advancing important questions of educational practice and policy. The second is to advance a set of guides for assessing the contributions of qualitative studies to expanding how we understand and use qualitative research as part of the landscape of scientific thought and practice.

Cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) resonates with the original notion of evidence-based practice (EBP), a term that has been used across disciplines to describe decision-making based on the current evidence available (Sackett et al, 2000). The notion is that the available research, clinical expertise, and person-centered values converge to create evidence-based practice (Sackett et al, 2000). Used in this way, EBP can empower practitioners and families to draw on research that offers insight into the specific issue being addressed, connect it to craft knowledge built over time through experience, and address family beliefs and expectations to make the best possible decisions given the context and what is known (Buysse et al, 2012). Education has troublingly narrowed the notion of EBP so that it is both an intervention practice and a method for the selection of scientifically based interventions.

Critical ethnographic methods require evidence, working hypotheses about what is happening, followed more focused evidence collection to help make meaning and re-focus effort (Holstein & Gubrium, 2008). Researchers and practitioners can use this approach to document how schools construct, manage, and sustain or resist social realities. This approach is important since educational researchers exist within a topography of conflicting approaches to knowing. We use this approach to demonstrate how mapping technologies help practitioners, researchers, and community members build hypotheses and action steps as a way of co-constructing EBPs.

Mapping allows participants to explore a problem in novel ways and re-mediates their roles and participation in constructing cases, vignettes, and other forms of intermediary analysis. The CHAT framework helps to make transparent the change in practice and guides participants towards a shared object for transformational change. The result is the construction of an EBP.

This worked example engages participants’ everyday practices as a way to re-mediate their views and actions (Kozleski, Gibson, & Hynds, 2012). We co-construct social spaces with practitioners to focus attention on the racialization of disability. New ways of understanding the problem and designing alternative educational futures for marginalized learners offer an important contribution to providing evidence for practice.

Author

• Elizabeth B. Kozleski, The University of Kansas