J. Amos Hatch

A step-by-step guide to qualitative research in the field of education.

Doing Qualitative Research in Education Settings

Reclaiming the Teaching Profession gives educators (especially teachers and future teachers) and their allies a clear overview of the massive effort to dismantle public education in the United States, which includes a direct attack on teachers. The book details, and provides a systematic critique of, the shaky assumptions at the foundation of the market-based reform initiatives that dominate the contemporary education scene. It names and exposes the motives and methods of the powerful philanthropists, politicians, business moguls, and education entrepreneurs who are behind the reform movement. It provides counter narratives that public school advocates can use to talk back to those who would destroy the teaching profession and public education. It includes examples of successful acts of resistance and identifies resources for challenging reformers’ taken for granted primacy in the education debate. It concludes with strategies educators can use to “speak truth to power,” reclaim their professional status, and reshape the education landscape in ways that serve all of America’s children and preserve our democracy.

Transforming the Dialogue on Public Education

Reclaiming the Teaching Profession

Susan L. Groenke

Susan L. Groenke and J. Amos Hatch It does not feel safe to be critical in university-based teacher education programs right now, especially if you are junior faculty. In the neoliberal era, critical teacher education research gets less and less funding, and professors can be denied tenure or lose their jobs for speaking out against the status quo. Also, we know that the pedagogies critical teacher educators espouse can get beginning K–12 teachers fired or shuffled around, especially if their students’ test scores are low. This, paired with the resistance many of the future teachers who come through our programs—predominantly White, middle-class, and happy with the current state of affairs—show toward critical pedagogy, makes it seem a whole lot easier, less risky, even smart not to “do” critical pedagogy at all. Why bother? We believe this book shows we have lots of reasons to “bother” with critical pe- gogy in teacher education, as current educational policies and the neoliberal discourses that vie for the identities of our own local contexts increasingly do not have education for the public good in mind. This book shows teacher educators taking risks, seeking out what political theorist James Scott has called the “small openings” for resistance in the contexts that mark teacher education in the early twenty-first century.

Small Openings

Critical Pedagogy and Teacher Education in the Neoliberal Era

Richard Wisniewski

Narrative inquiry refers to a subset of qualitative research design in which stories are used to describe human action. This book contains current ideas in this emerging field of research. Chapters include a qualitative analysis of narrative data; criteria for evaluating narrative inquiry, linking emotion and reason through narrative voice, audience and the politics of narrative; trust in educational storytelling; narrative strategies for case reports; life history narratives and women's gender identity; and issues in life history and narrative inquiry. This text is intended to be of interest to all qualitative researchers and education researchers studying forms of narrative.

J. Amos Hatch

Books

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