During a recent research project, it became apparent that the conventional taxonomic, textual and linguistic devices used to develop the narrative of a manuscript would not allow me to make sense, or tell the complex story, of my inquiry. I needed to employ multimodal approaches to grapple with the project related to artists who work in…

This paper offers an account of a reflexive "trip" undertaken by a professional doctoral student and her supervisor. It presents a series of vignettes which offer an account of unbecomings and becomings encountered by the student. Making use of a dialogic approach in which the supervisor responds to the student, we suggest this method of…

Narrative enquiry has become increasingly popular in recent decades. Although James Wertsch has developed a well-theorized model of narrative as a sociocultural tool, his work has not been as influential on this narrative enquiry as it might have been. This may be, in part, because Wertsch has mostly applied his model to the collective memory of…

Texts and articles that put epistemological theories and methodologies to work in the context of qualitative research can stimulate scholarship in various ways such as through methodological innovations, transferability of theories and methods, interdisciplinarity, and transformative reflections across traditions and frameworks. Such…

The aim of the article is to show how substantial qualitative material consisting of graphic cognitive maps can be analysed by using digital CmapTools, Excel and SPSS. Evidence is provided of how qualitative and quantitative methods can be combined in educational research by transforming qualitative data into quantitative data to facilitate…

International comparison is complicated by the use of different terms, classification methods, policy frameworks and system structures, not to mention different languages and terminology. Multi-case studies can assist in the understanding of the influence wielded by cultural, social, economic, historical and political forces upon educational…

This paper describes a study which uses quantitative and qualitative methods in determining the relationship between academic, institutional and psychological variables and degree performance for a sample of Jamaican undergraduate students. Quantitative methods, traditionally associated with the positivist paradigm, and involving the counting and…

Drawing on the experience of carrying out a literature review commissioned to support the Review of Teacher Education in Scotland, this paper discusses the role of literature reviews within the movement for "evidence-based policy" making. The first part of the paper discusses the purposes of such reviews and some of the misconceptions that may be…

In this article, the author argues that storytelling is centrally important to education research. The proliferation of narrative methodologies, albeit significant and innovative in the evolution of qualitative studies in education, has, nonetheless, not been accompanied by a theoretical body that has captured the complexities--ethical and…

The Children Crossing Borders (CCB) study is a polyvocal, multi-sited project on immigration and early childhood education and care in five countries: Italy, Germany, France, England and the USA. The complicated nature of the data pushed us as a group to expand our methodological resources to not only organize the data but also to make it…

Teachers' classroom-based action research is sometimes misunderstood by those who undertake it and support it, in three respects. First, it is wrongly assumed to fall into either positivist or interpretive paradigms (or perhaps a mixture of both) or to be critical. Second, there is little understanding as to why action research is necessarily…

Educational researchers are concerned about the ways in which researcher identity can influence practice and findings for better or worse effect. However, writings which offer narratives, intended to instruct others in the ways in which the positioning and reflexivity of the researcher operates for better or worse, often present a view of identity…

Data that have been collected for specific purposes may be exploited in the service of other interests (such as institutional research), though the exploitation may have to be accompanied by methodological compromises of various kinds. As a consequence, the findings might satisfy the criterion of being "good enough" for the purposes of practical…

This article presents accounts of four UK doctoral students' engagement in a Higher Education Academy project which used digital video (DV) to promote reflexivity on their doctoral journeys. Proceeding from participants' accounts of the production of their videonarratives, the article analyses the relations between doctoral research, reflexivity…

Qualitative research, especially visual ethnography, is an iterative not a linear process, replete with good intentions, false starts, mistaken assumptions, miscommunication and a continually revised statement of the problem. That the camera freezes everything and everyone in the frame only complicates ethical considerations. This work, jointly…