Kathleen deMarrais

Standards of Evidence in Qualitative Research: An Incitement to Discourse

In a climate of increased accountability, standardization, federal control, and politicization of education research and scholarship, this article briefly reviews various positions outlined by qualitative researchers about quality in qualitative inquiry, showing how these are implicated in the acquisition, conceptualization, and use of qualitative evidence. It concludes by identifying issues in and challenges to setting standards of evidence for qualitative researchers in education.

Evaluating Executive Leadership Programs: A Theory of Change Approach

As executive leadership development programs become more informal and experiential, traditional evaluation models of learning transfer based on fixed objectives do not capture emerging program outcomes. What is needed is a more robust approach for increasingly complex environments that looks at open objectives and changes that have occurred that affect both the individual and the organization. This article presents an evaluation model based on a Theory of Change approach that identifies critical incidents of new behavior and explores changes at individual and organizational levels. This evaluation model relies on repositioning management learning in leadership development programs and incorporates theories of action, workplace, and organizational learning. Two case studies of executive leadership development in the United States and Europe demonstrate the model’s usefulness. Both studies explore emerging program outcomes using in-depth interviews with participants in the leadership programs. Key stakeholders include individuals who design and deliver leadership development programs as well as the leaders who must make difficult decision regarding where to invest limited development dollars. In addition, evaluators of those programs as well as scholars of both evaluation and of leadership development will find this approach of interest. The approach is useful both for guiding practice and for developing knowledge about what types of learning occur in these programs and what persists.

Elegant Communications: Sharing Qualitative Research with Communities, Colleagues, and Critics

This article examines possibilities for qualitative evaluations within the federal government’s narrow context of research as articulated in the No Child Left Behind Act and the National Research Council’s Report on Scientific Principles for Education Research. Through vignettes from qualitative evaluation studies, the following questions are addressed: (a) What is quality in qualitative evaluation? (b) How do we communicate with multiple audiences in ways that are engaging and convincing? (c) What role do emotions play in the work of qualitative evaluation? Despite calls for “scientific objectivity,” emotions are at the core of quality educational research. Emotions as responses to power and status dynamics within social relations puts emotions work at the center of evaluation research in schools. Qualitative researchers are challenged to broaden narrow views of educational research through continuing to demonstrate how well, through attention to emotions and through elegant explanations, qualitative methodologies respond to the complexities of school life.

Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies Third Edition, 2012, Draft Presented to the Educational Community by the American Educational Studies Association's Committee on Academic Standards and Accreditation.

This Third Edition of the Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies is presented to the educational community by the American Educational Studies Association’s (AESA) Committee on Academic Standards and Accreditation (CASA). The Standards were first developed and published in 1977-1978 by the American Educational Studies Association, and the Council of Learned Societies in Education (CLSE) assumed proprietorship and responsibility for dissemination and advocacy of the Standards following adoption of the document by each of its member societies in the early 1980s. In 1986, the original Standards were republished with a new introduction by CLSE and was widely circulated at colleges of education, state departments of education, and national accreditation agencies. In response to development in the field of teacher preparation, licensure, and assessment, the standards were revised, resulting in the publication of the Second Edition of the Standards published in 1996 by CLSE.

Critical, Interpretive, and Normative Perspectives of Educational Foundations: Contributions for the 21st Century

In 2011, the American Educational Studies Associations (AESA) Committee on Academic Standards and Accreditation (CASA) revised the Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundation...

Remembering Social Foundations of Education: Autobiographical Wanderings.

For this collection of articles celebrating the 50th anniversary of the American Educational Studies Association, I was invited to contribute a narrative detailing my history and relationship to the field, influences to my development as a scholar, the state of the field during my presidency, and any advice or guidance I might share with current scholars and graduate students of Social Foundations of Education. As with any story, my perspectives are partial, based on my memories of events and experiences, and may or may not be consistent with the views and memories of others.

Students’ perceptions of learning about qualitative inquiry in online contexts

ABSTRACT This paper reports findings from a 2-year study of online coursework in a graduate certificate program in qualitative research methods in the USA. Thirty-four interviews with students enrolled in coursework offered over a 2-year period were analyzed to explore their perceptions of engagement with the course content and one another. Findings are related to student perceptions of their learning to (1) value the course design and structure, (2) make authentic connections in the absence of physical proximity, and (3) appreciate feedback from others. These themes are considered in light of principles of qualitative pedagogy outlined by scholars of qualitative methods, and the community of inquiry (CoI) model, in which social, cognitive, and teacher presence support student learning. Findings provide insight into the processes by which students’ engagement with course content and interactions with instructor and peers contribute to the development of a CoI involving cognitive, social, and teacher presence. Although the learning context described in this study pertains to teaching graduate-level qualitative research methods, findings are relevant to teachers of other subject areas.

An intimate ethnography: A review of ‘My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century’

Alisse Waterston’s My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century is a beautifully written story of one man and his family within the context of twentieth-century social history. Waterston, a cultural anthropologist, describes her work as an intimate ethnography, a crafted interweaving of her father’s journeys through war, exile and immigration within the larger history of conflict, violence, and oppression. She describes the work as:

“I Prefer Face-to-Face”: Comedic Moments in Teaching On-line

This script presents comedic moments experienced by professors teaching online. We examine instructor experiences of the “wheel of death,” the “hermeneutic circle of support,” the phenomenon of students taking coursework for purposes of convenience, instructors’ felt needs to always be at others’ service 24/7, and how instructors respond to students’ self-evident questions. In this short scene about learning to teach online, all characters appearing are fictitious. We share this with others because we argue that comedy is an effective way to respond to some of the challenges we have faced in learning to teach online.