The underlying paradigms that influence research on quality have remained alarmingly under-researched; this article analyses the constraints that a technical-rational approach for the study of quality in higher education imposes. Technical rationality has been the dominant paradigm that shapes research on quality in higher education.…

Over the past forty years, Howard Barrows' contributions to PBL research have influenced and guided educational research and practice in a diversity of domains. It is necessary to make visible to all PBL scholars what has been accomplished, what is perceived as significant, and what is the scope of applicability for Barrows' groundbreaking…

Several notions have been proposed to understand the specificity of schooling and its persistence across time and space, despite several attempts to reform it. In this article, the author analyses more closely the notions of the "grammar of schooling", "forme scolaire", and "school organisational culture". These…

This article consists of five sections. First, it briefly describes the results of the authors' previous studies on the history of colonial education in view of the problem introduced by the special issue of which this article is a part. Second, it links these results to such central concepts as the so-called grammars of schooling and…

This study explores higher education research in Asia. Drawing on scientometrics, the mapping of science and social network analysis, this paper examines the publications of 38 specialised journals on higher education over the past three decades. The findings indicate a growing number of higher education research publications but the proportion of…

The feminist post-structuralist emphasis on social location has yielded crucial insights within debates about power and reflexivity in educational research; however, spatial location is also at play in the formation of educational ethnographies. Reflecting upon various aspects of a research project with rural students in Ontario, Canada, this…

This article explores some theoretical and methodological problems concerned with scale in education research through a critique of a recent mixed-method project. The project was framed by scale metaphors drawn from the physical and earth sciences and I consider how recent thinking around scale, for example, in ecosystems and human geography might…

In their essay, Patricia O'Connell Killen and Eugene Gallagher focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning in theology and religion, which, they say, is "identifiable" though "varied," and "exhibits standards of excellence recognizable in other forms of scholarship." Their purpose is descriptive, in large part, to share what they have…

This paper challenges the approach that we traditionally take to research (in the realm of Early Childhood) within our colleges and universities. It asks why we have obediently adopted an outmoded and entirely inappropriate approach to research which disempowers and alienates the practitioners that we are working with. This paper calls for Early…

In the field of higher education there are few places reserved for philosophical exploration, and this, this author argues, can limit and distort the cartography. Higher education research tends to be framed as the empirical process of collecting and analysing qualitative or quantitative data. But this conception of research leaves little space…

The paper makes a number of arguments about the research interview and maintains that, despite the near ubiquity of the method in higher education research, the interview remains under-theorised and mis-described. We argue that by virtue of being "insider", higher education research involves a form of tacit ethnography where multiple…

In this paper, we draw on pro-feminist, anti-essentialist espistemological and theoretical frameworks, in conjunction with adopting autoethnographic narratives, both to provide critical insight into and contextualize the particular testimony and witnessing of our own personal involvement in the gendering of a government-commissioned research…

At a conference, a secondary school teacher was very surprised when she heard about the idea of talent development in preschool education. "What does it mean?" she asked. In this paper we answer the above question with a model created by joint research. We describe our method of developing gifted children with the involvement of…

In a 2009 American Educational Research Association session on the topic of public pedagogy, Bill Ayers, serving as the session's discussant, posed the problem of public pedagogy being so broadly conceptualized in the literature base that it might actually become meaningless. Ayers's concern centered on the slippery, ever-proliferating meanings of…

Longitudinal data analysis in education is the study growth over time. A longitudinal study is one in which repeated observations of the same variables are recorded for the same individuals over a period of time. This type of research is known by many names (e.g., time series analysis or repeated measures design), each of which can imply subtle…