Critical frames in educational research: Feminist and post‐structural perspectives

Growing up female in rural South Dakota in the 1950s and 1960s, my sense of career "choice" included nursing and teaching. As I had no stomach for blood, teaching it was. An undergraduate degree in English education coupled with a graduate degree in an interdisciplinary program of American studies prepared me for 5 years of teaching high school in small-town Indiana. I would have stayed forever if I had found enabling conditions to foster good teaching. Instead, I found small reward for hard work and a bureaucracy seemingly intent on thwarting my every attempt to teach creatively. Deciding to pursue a doctorate in education so that I could help make schools places where people like me could have lifetime careers as teachers, I enrolled in a graduate program in curriculum studies. I knew I would have to do "research." I assumed this meant a process both alienating and necessary if one were to get the doctorate. I did not see myself in anything I had encountered in my limited knowledge of "research." Dependent and independent variables, control groups, hypothesis testing, statistical tests-all of this seemed so "other" to my own experiences that I approached my induction into the mysteries of scientific inquiry as a bitter pill I had to swallow. Two movements changed all this in ways I still cannot fully fathom. Because of the two movements of qualitative research in education

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