The Science of Context:
Modes of Response for Ethnographers & Qualitative Researchers in Education
Peter Demerath, Ed.D.
The Ohio State University
How might ethnographers and qualitative researchers meaningfully operate in a contemporary research climate that holds to such limited conceptions of what constitutes "scientific" research in education? This address will review criteria for "scientifically-based research" as expressed in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the Education Sciences Act of 2002, and the new Institute for Education Sciences, and identify several pathways along which researchers may productively work in such a context.
These include: 1) Critical inquiry into the socio-intellectual frameworks and institutional networks driving such policy development; 2) Instruction and dissemination of little-understood facets of cultural practice or oft-misunderstood precepts of ethnography and qualitative research; 3) Achievement of greater transparency in research designs and processes of inference and theory building; 4) Mixed-methods research and the "pragmatic" turn; and 5) Public, or public-interest education research.
Central aims are to discuss dilemmas that must be confronted within each of these areas, and to orient ethnographers and qualitative researchers toward those modes of scholarship that can most powerfully impact the knowledge projects, practices, or causes to which they are committed.
About the key note speaker:
Peter Demerath is Associate Professor of Social & Cultural Foundations at The Ohio State University. His research interests have included: comparative study of student class cultures, sociocultural study of education policy, urban education, and school-university partnerships. Peter received his B.A. in political science from Haverford College, M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Ed.D. in Educational Policy, Research, and Administration from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
For Dr. Demerath's home page and CV, visit http://www.coe.ohio-state.edu/pdemerath.