Educative Research, Voice, and School Change

Abstract

In this article Andrew David Gitlin argues that the politics of research is not adequately addressed in current educational research. This, he says, is because methodological discourse often focuses on traditional definitions of reliability, validity, and compatibility, which ignore how method structures a particular type of relationship between the researcher and those studied. Most traditional methods, Gitlin writes, establish an alienating relationship which silences those studied, disregards their personal knowledge, and strengthens the assumption that researchers are the producers of knowledge.

To alter this relationship, Gitlin proposes the use of "educative research," a dialogical approach that attempts to develop voice as a form of political protest. He then outlines the theoretical assumptions of educative research, and describes his experience using this method with twenty public school teachers. Drawing on the teachers' writings in his research, Gitlin describes how the use of personal and school histories, along with a peer evaluation model,can facilitate a question-posing process that can lead to the development of teachers' voices. Gitlin also includes his own account of what he learned as he participated in this educative research project.