Decolonizing Educational Research (Series in Critical Narrative) by Leigh Patel

Author:Leigh Patel [Patel, Leigh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317331384
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-12-10T23:00:00+00:00

Design Constraints

Educational research has accepted design elements that render some studies more authoritative than others. There are two strong strains to this. First is the strain of objective, empirical research, with experimental, inferential quantitative designs prevailing. In many ways, the definitions of science that were solidified through this cultural space, those of reliability and validity, shaped qualitative research for many years. Qualitative research itself grew out of anthropology’s methods of ethnography, an inauspicious commencement whose very design hinged on axes of researcher and the other (Somerville, 2013). Ethnography, literally meaning to write the people, from its Greek root words of ethno and grapho, fundamentally is about the study of peoples and the way they are written about. Within that entanglement, then, is the fact that someone is doing that writing and another being written about. Qualitative research for many decades embraced its particular disciplinary space of studying specific cultures (and not others) while also attempting to answer to questions of reliability (are the findings reproducible in other contexts?) and validity (do the measures capture the desired phenomena?) that had been established through concepts of research driven by neutrality and objectivity.

These concepts, though, stand in direct contradiction to an Indigenous worldview that sees all living beings and the planet in constant flux. The concepts of objectivity and immutable, isolable factors also stand in contrast to physical realities in which the actions of all beings and entities impact each other. Perhaps at no other time has this fundamental truth been so readily comprehensible. In the current Anthropocene (Somerville, 2013) era, as it’s been termed, humans and their industrial technological developments have fundamentally and deleteriously impacted the planet’s well-being and balance. From this understanding of the momentum of damage done in the name of universality, then, the claim of replicability, of stand-alone actions that can be measured by themselves and unhinged from the measurer, the measurement, or the specifics of place seems naive. However, this genealogy of social science has created design constraints that invoke these ideas as standards, with aberrations requiring specific justifications, often through the language of the existing standards (Wilson, 2009). Critical qualitative and critical ethnographic studies (e.g., Daza, 2009) have thoroughly critiqued such attempts to filter qualitative research through objectivist-driven concepts, which has yielded more space for research designs to draw from and produce decidedly multi-perspectival stances. The growth of postmodern and poststructural studies has also influenced educational research, particularly in qualitative, decolonial, and critical research designs. The open access academic journal, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, for example, explicitly seeks, among other formats, empirical research from qualitative designs, delineating this preference out of a decolonial dismissal of imperial notions of objectivity and generalizability (http://decolonization.org/index.php/des). Design of research, though, is just one aperture into the particular cultural, sociopolitical, and material realities that have contributed to its sanctioned versions.

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