Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to interrogate practice of research and discursively problematise the role of the researcher in relation to the ways in which knowledge is constructed and represented in and as a centre/periphery relation. It considers the ways in which research practices can refocus attention on claims made about knowing and…

Interactional data is often central to research in plurilingual learning environments. However, getting a grip on the processes of collecting, organizing, transcribing, analyzing and presenting audio and/or visual data is possibly the most exciting, but also one of the most challenging things about learning to do qualitative research. Although the…

This paper has two aims: to introduce readers to Bernstein's concept of languages of description, interpreted through the lens of ethnography; and to demonstrate the value of this approach to theory-making by showing how a qualitative study conducted on these principles led to new explanations for gender differences in literacy attainment that can…

This paper introduces the Mathematics Dialogic Gatherings (MDG) as a successful way to encourage adults' learning of mathematics. We report on a group of adults who attended a MDG in an adult school placed in Barcelona. Participants in this group do not have an academic trajectory. They attend once a week a session in the adult school, where they…

This article traces the evolution of the French policy PISA debate from 2001 to 2014 by analysing the results of two original qualitative researches. Theoretically, this debate is the outcome of specific policy configurations, which predetermine its scope, content and effectiveness. These configurations are themselves described through their…

In this article we provide a discussion of present-day Khoisan activism in Cape Town, South Africa. The main actors in this movement are people whose heritage is complex: their history can be traced back to the early days of the colonial settlement, reflecting the interactions and cohabitation of the indigenous Khoisan, slaves and the European…

Although researchers conducting qualitative descriptive studies, ethnographies, phenomenologies, grounded theory, and narrative inquiries commonly use computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) to manage their projects and analyses, investigators conducting discursive methodologies such as discourse or conversation analysis seem…

Narratives have become increasingly important in the field of applied linguistics, as recent publications have illustrated, yet narrative analysis could still be considered undertheorized. This article outlines a specific, dialogical approach to the narrative analysis of data in qualitative research. Building on Bakhtin's notion of dialogue,…

In this article, we outline a course wherein the instructors teach students how to conduct rigorous qualitative research. We discuss the four major distinct, but overlapping, phases of the course: conceptual/theoretical, technical, applied, and emergent scholar. Students write several qualitative reports, called qualitative notebooks, which…

Immigrant youth who are designated as English language learners in American schools--whom we refer to as "emergent bilinguals"--are increasingly framed by numerical calculations. Utilizing the notion of assemblage from actor-network theory (ANT), we trace how emergent bilinguals are discursively constructed by officials, administrators,…

Although educational researchers predominately study complex, multidimensional problems, research findings and proposed arguments can sometimes be characterized as definite, simplified, and prone to particular types of answers or expected outcomes. The authors seek to problematize these definite and simplified notions of answers by looking at some…

Jean Anyon's (1981) "Social Class and School Knowledge" was a landmark work in North American educational research. It provided a richly detailed qualitative description of differential, social class-based constructions of knowledge and epistemological stance. This essay situates Anyon's work in two parallel traditions of critical educational…

This article is a focused response to the call for a "conscious use of crystallization," in qualitative research. To this end, the author brings into play a full-bodied textual metaphor, the "palimpsest," to stimulate the expansion of an integrated crystallization typology--comprised of woven and patched approaches.…

This paper reports the results of a qualitative study that examined the experiences of six preservice English language teachers in Hong Kong as they prepared for, engaged in, and reflected upon a compulsory research project during the final year of their Bachelor of Education degree program. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and using methods of…

Access to information (ATI) and freedom of information (FOI) mechanisms are now relevant features of governments in many liberal democracies today. Citizens, organizations, and permanent residents in several countries across the globe can request unpublished information from federal, provincial, state, county, and municipal government agencies.…