Understanding Education Research

This module will provide participants with an introduction to a range of research approaches and methods.  They will also be able to engage in specialist issues and look in detail at sourcing, generating and analysing specific kinds of extant and new research content.  These will include autobiographies, biographies, documents, interviews, life histories, media and multi-media texts, narratives, observations, oral histories, philosophical arguments, statistics and conceptual analysis, photographs and other visual representations, statistics and numeric data.

Reading of original source texts of key studies will provide participants with the opportunity to interrogate the changing and contested nature of education research.

The module is designed to be both multi- and inter- disciplinary, exposing all students to approaches to research from across the foundation disciplines of history, philosophy and sociology.

Participants will be invited to explore the sorts of questions that might be asked, and answered, by education research.  Moving on, we will think about the implications of these questions for designing research as well as engaging, or even influencing education policy and practice.

The role of the researcher, her/his relationship with the researched, and the ethical dimensions of this will be key considerations.