In the research project which formed part of my PhD study, I dealt with the topic of inequity in education. My main interest was to find out how (formal) educational careers can be fostered even if the starting position within the system is one which makes a successful educational career very difficult. Despite the fact that in the Austrian…

This article reflects on the use of participative techniques with final-year secondary school students in one rural community in Western Kenya as an enabling tool for an outsider to both gain insider perspectives and develop a more insider role in that community by privileging and legitimating participant-driven data. Conclusions put forward the…

Too often, students don't feel engaged in their research projects. The problem begins as early as the topic-creation stage, when students may choose from a list of teacher-selected topics that don't interest them or struggle to select a single fruitful topic on their own. Nanci Werner-Burke describes how two students in an English…

It is crucial for social researchers to clarify their researchers' roles, especially for those utilizing qualitative methodology to make their research credible. The purpose of this paper is to examine the advantages and disadvantages of the researcher's insider role, an instructor, occupied within case study research on the integration of…

The special issue "Keeping Connected: Identity, Social Connection and Education for Young People" opens with a paper that discusses the research design and overview of a three-year project by a Melbourne (Australia)-based multi-disciplinary team. Over 2007-2009, the Keeping Connected team of 10 researchers investigated the lives of…

Research apprenticeships for secondary students provide authentic contexts for learning science in which students engage in scientific investigations with practicing scientists in working laboratory groups. Student experiences in these research apprenticeships vary depending on the individual nature of the laboratory in which students have been…

Agencies that fund scientific research have called increasingly in recent years for the projects they support to contribute to broader social and educational impacts. However, the means by which these projects might best utilize their own resources to support educational outcomes for young learners have received relatively little attention. This…

This highly readable text demystifies the qualitative research process--and helps readers conceptualize their own studies--by organizing the different research paradigms and traditions into coherent clusters. Real-world examples and firsthand perspectives illustrate the research process; instructive exercises and activities build on each other so…

Participatory exercises are standard practice in qualitative methods courses; less common are projects that engage students in the entire research process, from research design to write-up. Although the teaching literature provides several models of complete research projects, their feasibility, and appropriateness for large, compulsory,…

To complement traditional learning activities in a masters-level research methodology course, social work students worked on a formal research project which involved: designing the study, constructing measures, selecting a sampling strategy, collecting data, reducing and analyzing data, and finally interpreting and communicating the results. The…

The last decade has seen the emergence in the policy arena of a new form of qualitative research, one intended to strenghten its ability to generalize while preserving in-depth description. These multisite qualitative studies address the same research question using similar data collection and analysis procedures in a number of settings. To gain…

This study addressed research collaboration on a range of instructional and administrative issues concerning how best to serve the educational needs of students with disabilities or at risk in general education classrooms. A group of expert researchers (N=31), funded to conduct research on the General Education Initiative (GEI), was interviewed to…

As teacher-educators, we designed and implemented a small study that mapped teacher-education students' understandings of their own identities and how they made sense of ethnicity and class differences among their secondary students while on teaching rounds. While we didn't set out to "teach" our research participants, it was during the…