As educational research becomes privatized, commodified and commercialized, research relevance increasingly means being incorporated into neoliberal ideological and economic agendas. Within this social context, qualitative research in particular is often deemed less relevant (if not irrelevant) because it does not provide prescriptions for best…

The recent debates about what constitutes scientific research in Education, on the one hand, and the so-called "paradigm wars" that got played out in the final quarter of the 20th century, on the other, are more similar than different. At the center of both controversies was the relative worth of quantitative and qualitative research…

This proposal addresses the assumptions underlying the "Science Wars" about the purpose of educational research. The author proposes a more modest "Lake Woebegon" approach to school reform that supports long-term professional education, a shift away from "Best Practices" to "Pretty Good Practices," low…

In this introduction we reflect on two key questions that initiated this special issue on qualitative inquiry: What can qualitative researchers do to regain their post-paradigm-wars cache? How do we avoid distracting "science wars" in the future? We suggest that the strong tendency to narrow the research methods accepted as…

The short-term emphasis engendered by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has focused research predominantly on unraveling the complexities and uncertainties in assessing short-term results, rather than developing methods and assessing results over the longer term. In this paper we focus on estimating long-term gains and address questions important to…

In this article, we present a data set and case study exercise that can be used by educators to teach a range of statistical concepts including Simpson's paradox. The data set and case study are based on a real-life scenario where there was a claim of discrimination based on ethnicity. The exercise highlights the importance of performing…

This study aims to understand the perceived learning experiences and gains for Japanese government officials from US and Japanese graduate and professional schools, and how applicable their continuing professional education (CPE) is to professional performance. Interview participants were drawn from long-term overseas and domestic fellowship…

This study explores strategies students use to construct their academic engagement in the social environment of school. The study is based on group interview data collected from 161 sixth (78) and eighth (83) grade students. Students reflected both engaging and disengaging episodes. Data were content analysed. The results show that students…

In this article we present findings from the evaluation study of a nation-wide school renovation programme in Portugal. The aim is to analyse policy implementation, taking into account school community participation, discussing how the programme requirement to involve users in the renovation was met, examining perceptions of the programme's…

This study, based on the qualitatively rendered experiences and perceptions of educational leaders from historically underserved backgrounds in the US, argues that identity impacts leadership practice. To make this point, researchers build upon an emergent theoretical framework for applied critical leadership from the theories and traditions of…

This paper argues for the importance, benefits and wider impact of a donor-funded, locally supported postgraduate programme in security sector management (SSM) for government officials in Ethiopia. With the exception of specialised education and training programmes within the field of peace and conflict studies, the role of education in…

Deficit theorisations of Chinese Learners studying in western countries are criticised for dichotomising learning attributes into Surface- or Deep-learning approaches. Subsequent context-dependent, small culture studies of students transiting between cultures theorise learning as a dynamic journey of adapting to a range/continuum of learning…

This article describes a case study that is part of a broader research project in which schools set up processes of school improvement inspired by the proposals put forward by students. The project furthers the initiatives of the student voice movement and seeks to implement more participative pedagogical models. This as a whole represents a novel…

Restorative justice (RJ) is both a methodology for dealing with conflict and a process for modeling more positive human relations after social harm. As both method and process, the benefits of developing restorative practices on college campuses go well beyond just the many positive community-oriented outcomes of facilitated conflict resolution…

This article is based on an action-oriented study of 13 community-engaged courses at 11 institutions of higher education in Israel. These courses were not part of peace education programs but rather accredited academic courses in various disciplines, all of which included practice and theory. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how these…