PRODUCTS

An Introduction to Critical Autoethnography and Education: The Vulnerable Researcher examines the practice of critical autoethnography, which combines critical pedagogy, autoethnography, and often, critical ethnography, as a research methodology for conducting research in vulnerable communities without establishing hierarchical systems. Researchers who work collaboratively with participants in these communities can provide a means for often-unheard voices to reach wider audiences.

Researchers function as collaborators/participants in the research, asking themselves the same questions they ask the other participants in the research. This methodology requires reflection and introspection, as researchers examine the Self and the complexities of their cultural perspectives, whether visible or invisible, hidden beneath layers of socially constructed beliefs and behaviors. This interrogation and problematization of words and actions surpasses chronological and supposedly objective recounting of autobiography, leading to a deep understanding of the sociocultural, socioeconomic, political, and historical beliefs that created their ways of understanding and navigating the world. Traditional research situates researchers as experts. Pushing against existing norms, critical autoethnography negates hierarchical thinking, believing all collaborators co-construct equally valuable knowledge and meaning.

Accessible to diverse audiences, this book would be appropriate in graduate qualitative methods or foundations courses, at introductory or advanced levels. It would also be a good addition to any undergraduate courses preparing students to conduct research in vulnerable communities.

Perfect for courses such as: Qualitative Research Methods I | Qualitative Research Methods II | Advanced Qualitative Research Methods | Social Justice in Education Research | Case Study | Ethnographic Research in Education | Anthropology in Education | Critical Qualitative Inquiry | Multicultural Research Methods

Written by scholars from three generations of qualitative methodologists, Qualitative Research Design and Methods: An Introduction situates qualitative research within the history of the field and integrates this history within discussions of specific research designs. This novel approach allows readers to come to know the genealogy of the field and how previous generations of scholars have informed what we know today as qualitative research. The text reflects these more traditional as well as emerging qualitative research approaches, providing a theoretically grounded approach to designing and implementing qualitative research studies. While some introductory research texts focus on the specific methods of qualitative research with little attention to the role of theory, this book forefronts theory in qualitative research. The authors speak to students new to qualitative research with clear discussions of theory and theoretical concepts and how those notions must be considered throughout all aspects of research design, implementation, and representation of findings. Each chapter integrates discussion of theory. In addition, the book highlights the role of ethics in the same way with a chapter at the beginning as well as discussions of ethics threaded throughout each of the design chapters.

Qualitative Research Design and Methods is THE introductory textbook for students taking introductory masters and doctoral courses in qualitative research. Instructors in those classes will appreciate the straightforward language and concepts provided by the authors.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Qualitative Research and Qualitative Research Design

This volume brings together work developing storytelling and narrative as an educational methodological framework. Chapters foreground scholarship that helps promote creating change, both educational and societal, through the use of critical storytelling regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ). These include both narratives of challenges and possibilities that educators sometimes encounter in research spaces when intentionally centering DEIJ in their educational practice. Chapters also pay close attention to research ethics and explore epistemological alternatives and attempt to find ways toward generative dialogue regarding the reception and implementation of culturally-relevant pedagogy. This collection offers much sustained reflection on shared and sharable ways of knowing that interrogate the very philosophical foundations of education, pointing us to ever-more equitable futures.

A key distinction between an education doctorate, or Ed.D., and other doctorates in the field of education is the development of scholar practitioners armed with knowledge and skills to successfully lead change in their profession. Critical inquiry is one such skill, increasingly taught in many Ed.D. programs in some form of applied research methodology. Teaching Critical Inquiry and Applied Research: Moving Beyond Traditional Methods gathers insights from Ed.D. faculty regarding how the teaching of applied research occurs to develop scholar practitioners prepared to bring change to their respective professional fields. The 13 chapters provide a broad coverage of related topics, which includes advocacy and leadership through research, innovative features of methods courses, and methodology-focused program redesign. Each chapter includes strategies and recommendations for others interested in implementing something similar in their courses and programs. This book also captures student voices, in the form of vignettes written by students within each chapter, to illustrate the powerful impact of learning related to critical inquiry and applied research. Teaching Critical Inquiry and Applied Research is an excellent text for classrooms devoted to critical research, critical pedagogy, and other courses.

The idea of the doctorate is undergoing a transformation as experts explore the nature of “doctorateness” and its relevance for current organizational and societal challenges. The professional practice doctorate has emerged as a highly useful framework to address these challenges and it necessarily requires a distinctive approach to the doctoral dissertation.

The Action Research Dissertation: Learning from Leading Change shares a framework for the action research dissertation, outlining the specific ways in which action research fosters the development of scholar-leaders. It offers both doctoral students who are practitioners in applied fields, and the faculty who guide them in their doctoral research, a comprehensive and applied approach to action research that focuses on facilitating and leading change in organizations, as well as ways to address how to translate the findings of this work into a rigorous, dissertation research study.

Throughout the book, the authors explicitly address the connection between the parallel and mutually-reinforcing processes of taking action and conducting research, offering rich insights, tools, and case examples that outline specifically how to use action research to both guide a change effort and generate useful insights to contribute to theory-building.

This is an essential book for a variety of readers, including professional practice doctoral students, faculty directing the studies of those students, program administrators, professional development coordinators, and many others.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Action Research, Action Research, Applied Research, Qualitative Research, Mixed Methods Research, and Case Study Research

Qualitative Research in the Time of COVID: Lessons Learned and Opportunities Presented During a Pandemic focuses broadly upon educational issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapters make note of how contextual understandings are important for the future of researchers, especially when those contexts involve inequality made more acute since the pandemic. The chapters illustrate the importance of creating a climate of care based upon the principles of care ethics, and also examine projects that could be taken in the context of necessary self-care during challenging times. Chapters address the climate of caring in both in-person and online educational spaces and what it means to support students in an expanded conception of classroom space. In discussions ranging from exemplars of arts-based, personal narrative to completing a dissertation during a pandemic, chapters share both the immensity of the challenges and the rewards of productive and meaningful work both domestically and internationally. In the context of the living taking place after the pandemic’s coming into being as an event, this volume humbly offers writings as documents of remembrance of our historical present, offering with the hope that the historical may continue to move forward with an ethics of care ever in the foreground.

Qualitative Research in the Time of COVID is perfect for such courses as Qualitative Research, Qualitative Inquiry, Ethnography, Teacher Education, Action Research, and Educational Research.

This edited book presents a range of quests for those who want to learn from others through asking questions in research interviews and conversations and attending to the more-than-human aspects of the world. Authors in this book explore how to talk to people in ways that are responsive to cultural contexts and the challenges faced by people in everyday life, how to think with concepts drawn from an array of theories, including Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-action,” Rosi Braidotti’s work on “cartographies,” and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of the “fold” and “assemblage.” Authors discuss a rich array of interview practices used by contemporary scholars—including, how to

a. elicit verbal accounts from participants in culturally responsive ways;

b. think with theory in relation to the use of interview methods; and

c. integrate object, graphic, and photo elicitation methods and mobile and walking methods in research.

The book is designed to provoke and inspire readers’ creativity to take risks and integrate different approaches to doing interviews in their research—in other words, to undertake methodological quests to experiment with the art of asking questions. Understanding the breadth of practices entailed in qualitative interview research can invigorate any researcher’s practice. This volume seeks to encourage researchers to design studies that account for how they interact with others in culturally responsive ways; to consider how they can draw on theoretical concepts to re-think, re-theorize, and question conventional interview practices; and to re-imagine the generation of interview accounts using other ways of knowing, including visual, sensory, and mobile methods.

Perfect for courses such as: Introductory Research Methods │Introductory Qualitative Methods │Qualitative Research Design │Interview Research │Qualitative Data Collection

Our Bodies Tell the Story: Using Feminist Research and Friendship to Reimagine Education and Our Lives asks (and answers) a number of critical questions that are key to improving our educational system. How can we use our embodied stories to navigate and disrupt how schools and society reproduce the patriarchy and heteronormativity within our institutions of learning? How do we transgress oppressive boundaries (boundaries cultivated by the patriarchy that have been perpetuated at home, within school, outside of school, in university settings, and in communities) that permit our dehumanization and exclusion? As teachers, professors, and teacher educators, how do we navigate our students’ trauma when we are navigating the re-ignition of our own?

This book sets out to tell the story of how the authors have tried to answer these questions in their lives and work. It is the story of a friendship, a partnership, a narrative retelling of their “becoming” as girls, teenagers, women, teachers, wives, daughters, scholars, and mothers. From the earliest memories of their gendered and sexualized childhoods to the present navigation of sexism, heteronormativity, and trauma in the context of teaching and schools, these stories reside in their bodies. They recall, construct, and reexamine, emerging from their dialogues—from talking face-to-face, to email, to FB messenger, poetry, and text. Our Bodies Tell the Story centers around the co/autoethnography of personal narratives, stories, and a kind of survival testimonies, the ways in which the authors bore witness to each other’s lives.

The book extensively uses co/autoethnography as a self-study feminist research methodology that takes autoethnography, “a form of self-representation that complicates cultural norms by seeing autobiography as implicated in larger cultural processes” (Taylor & Coia, 2006, p. 278) and moves it beyond the singular to the plural. Using this methodology enables the authors to interweave their stories through dialogue, so that validity, insight, and analysis all emerge in the text. The book investigates the self within the social context of personal relationships, as well as the larger society. Creating a co/autoethnography is a rich, multi-layered endeavor because it is not conducted in a vacuum. As such, it is an important book for faculty and researchers involved in a number of disciplines, including auto/ethnographic research, gender studies, women’s studies, feminist studies, qualitative research and many other areas of study.

Perfect for courses such as: Gender and Education │ Public Purposes of Schooling │ Introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies │ Critical Feminisms in Teacher Education │ Gender Issues in Teacher Education

A 2023 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner

Can transformation be the primary goal of autoethnographic research? In this book, the authors present a compelling case that this is indeed possible. Since autoethnography first appeared as a nascent approach to social inquiry, much has been written about it as a useful addition to the field of qualitative research methods. Over the years, its usage has been extended across various disciplines including the humanities, human services, social sciences, leadership studies, engineering, education, counseling, and even medical education. Notably, the primary function of autoethnography to advance our understanding around sociocultural phenomena has been increasingly paired with a parallel function of the many ways in which this research method can also contribute to practice. However, though its contribution to scholarship is well documented, less has been written about its practical usage as the focal point of inquiry. Yet there is growing evidence that one of the emerging strengths of autoethnography is its transformative capabilities. In Transformative Autoethnography for Practitioners, Hernandez, Chang and Bilgen turn the spotlight on autoethnography as a tool for practitioners where the primary goal is to solve real world problems by facilitating transformational change at the individual, group and/or organizational levels. They draw on existing scholarship as well as their collective work and expertise to provide a Transformative Autoethnographic Model (TAM) for use by practitioners who are intent on effecting such changes in their respective contexts.

The book contains seven chapters. Chapters One through Three provide the theoretical grounding for a transformative autoethnography model. Chapter One begins with a broad overview of autoethnographic research and the unique characteristics of this method that makes it especially suited for effecting transformational learning. In chapters Two and Three, the authors provide a quick review of the literature relevant to individual autoethnography and collaborative autoethnography respectively. Each chapter discussion is centered around explicating the transformative elements of the method as well as how it is able to effect change at the individual, group, and organizational level. Chapters Four through Six focus on the praxis of transformative autoethnography. In Chapter Four, the transformative autoethnography model (TAM) is presented in detail and templates are provided for its application. Chapters Five and Six show the application of the TAM in a variety of settings. The book ends with a final chapter discussion on the continuing evolution of autoethnographic explorations, as well as future applications for the TAM model in a fast changing digital landscape.

Perfect for courses such as: Research Methods in the Social Sciences | Qualitative Research Methods | Narrative Research | Advanced Qualitative Research Methods | Coaching and Consulting | Leading Change

A 2023 SPE Outstanding Book Honorable Mention

Improvement Science as a Tool for School Enhancement: Solutions for Better Educational Outcomes is a collection of equity-focused improvement science-in-action, school-based case studies led by practitioners. Chapter authors tell us how and why improvement science principles make system-wide improvements in classroom practice, how they learned from the problems encountered and, further, how they were then able to make changes within a school or district. A core principle of improvement science is variability in context (what works for whom and under what conditions)--a critical concept for improvement in each of the case studies. Each team analyzed their problem of practice from the perspective of the unique conditions in their context, considering what might work, and what might not work, and when the changes could be expanded for implementation school- or district-wide.

Early chapters describe the actions of school personnel to embed social and emotional learning as well as how to serve historically underserved students during disasters. Trauma-informed and restorative practices embraced by all staff enhanced student outcomes and reduced educational disparities in classrooms and throughout the school. The content then explores how improvement science change processes improve chronic absenteeism and discipline issues through whole-school practices related to school climate. Centering student and family perception, developing representative systems, and facilitating collaborative improvement projects were found to measurably improve the experience of students, increase equity, reinforce democratic principles, and empower school stakeholders, especially those whose voices have historically been ignored, to create meaningful system-wide school improvement. Finally, the material in the book provides concrete examples of improvement science as it applies in real-setting to address high school advisories, graduation rates, services for multi-lingual learners, students with disabilities, and reading clubs. Each chapter has an equity focus.

The editors and contributors provide examples of how to use the processes and tools of improvement science to increase equity system-wide. How to use improvement science to address educational disparities system-wide with urgency, commitment, and a belief in the success of every child, of every race, every ethnicity, gender, ability, and cultural identity, is the essence of this book.

Perfect for courses such as: Educating For Equity And Social Justice │ Cultivating Culturally Responsive Classrooms │ Integrating Methods And Curriculum Design │ Inquiry, Assessment, And Instructional Design │ Foundations Of Culturally And Linguistically Responsive Practice │ Math Literacy │ Physical Education │ Professional Collaboration In Education │ Language And Literacy Development Of Diverse Learners │ Equal Opportunity: Racism; Diversity And Equity In Schools │ Cultural Proficiency In Schools │ Language And Power In Education │ Teaching For Equity In Literacy │ Supportive Classroom Communities │ Cultural Diversity In Literature │ Engaging Students In Writing │ Introduction To School Leadership │ Introduction To School Improvement │ Teacher Leadership And School Improvement

To learn more about Improvement Science and see our full list of books in this area, please click through to the Myers Education Press Improvement Science website.