What Counts As Research?

Erickson

- Juxtaposes a positivist, scientific perspective of educational research with a critical description, hermeneutical analysis. -Research should include the humanities. - Arts and humanities should receive the same funding benefits as the sciences -Focusing on the importance of taking on a critical perspective to qualitative research -talks mostly from a sociocultural/humanities perspective

- Critiquing the system from the “outside” in many respects (as a university-based researcher). -It seems as though Erickson is preaching to the choir in this article; it is arguable whether or not people who fundamentally believe scientific research to be purely positivist would be persuaded by this article.

- Are causal relationships ever able to be conclusively determined, then?

Lieberman

-School-university connection, and how to successfully connect scholarship and activity, research and practice, etc. -talks about the changing roles and relationships and how research is not cut and dry, never static -'Insider's perspective, and where new meaning of research is stemming from the conflicts of assumptions, power struggle relationships and agendas of the various participants

- Idealistic and pertinent, yet with little contribution to how this conversion might take place. -Discusses idea of “scholarly activity” as “an embrace of what appear to be two ideas that do not fit comfortably together” (p. 8); historically, scholarship was just that: scholarship (and not action). I wonder if we are moving slowly away from pure scholarship—or, will scholarly activity remain just a subsection of one field?

- Maybe the role of a “translator” is helpful and acceptable? -Is “what counts” necessarily going to be different for a university researcher and a k-12 teacher? Is a “translator” needed to help bridge the two?

Hammersley

-Scientific, evidence based' teacher research may be relied to heavily upon - Solutions to educational problems can be found through simpler, practical enquiries -Few practicing teachers utilize the research that is generated - Critiques Hargreaves, mainly in that scientific, “evidence based” research doesn’t impact schools where Action Research might. “Practical enquiries are no substitute for academic research; just as the latter is no substitute for them” (p. 179).