Evaluating Value(s): Issues in and Implications of Educational Research Significance and Researcher Identity
Special Issue of International Journal of Pedagogies & Learning
Volume 4 Issue 1 January 2008
93 pages ISBN
ISSN: 1833-4105
Editors:
Linda De George-Walker
Faculty of Education, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
Patrick Alan Danaher
Faculty of Education, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
Increasing attention is being paid to the identities and subjectivities of educational researchers. Rather than being neutral ciphers and/or objective and disinterested observers, researchers are understood as vital participants in the research enterprise and as having highly developed interests in the enactment and outcomes of research projects.
A crucial corollary of this understanding is the proposition that researchers must be reflective and reflexive about their roles and responsibilities, and open and transparent about their interests and motivations, in such projects. Effective and powerful research often entails researchers learning as much about themselves - their own ethics and politics, values and worldviews - as about the other research participants. At the same time, research that is exclusively or primarily about the researcher might not necessarily be either effective or powerful.
It is therefore vital that educational researchers evaluate values - their own as well as those of other participants - in order to maximise the intended and actual value of a research project. This complex and contentious interplay between research significance and researcher identity is the focus of this special theme issue of theInternational Journal of Pedagogies and Learning, entitled 'Evaluating Value(s): Issues in and Implications of Educational Research Significance and Researcher Identity'.
The result is a diverse range of engagements with a key issue in any study: the researcher's place in ensuring the study's authenticity and relevance in relation to both the researcher and the other participants. Readers are likely to take from this one an equivalent diversity of ideas and insights for their own work as educational researchers.
International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning encapsulates and synthesises such a rich diversity of strategies, issues, concepts and arguments about educational philosophy, policy and practice that range broadly across contexts, countries and sectors.
eContent Home
