Qualitative Research as a Means of Justice

• In Event: Curriculum, Curriculum Theory, and Cultural Issues in Education

Abstract

In this theoretical paper, I question the ways researchers have used quantitative, positivist "scientific" paradigms to create, support, and disseminate research that reifies dangerously false beliefs about race and racial differences. Reflecting on my use of synectics as a research method, I theorize that creative, qualitative research approaches reliant on Eisner's qualities of connoisseurship invite a sufficient degree of care to inhibit bias in ways that supposedly objective positivist research approaches do not.

Author

• Crystal Howell, Randolph College