Opening Third Spaces for Research in Education: Challenging the Limits of Technocratic Methods

Description: A 2022 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner

Opening Third Spaces for Research in Education challenges dominant educational research methods. It rejects the reductive binaries normalized in social science research--theory/practice, objective/subjective, quantitative/qualitative. Drawing from multiple fields and eras, the book opens third spaces between these artificial poles to help researchers expand interpretations and possibilities for research. Critiquing the current focus on the measurement of "student learning outcomes" and high-stakes assessment, the book offers conceptual tools and case examples to support educators in reconceptualizing research. The book critiques the modernist notion that learning is an individual mental process of acquiring knowledge or skills. It argues instead that learning is inextricably entangled with social relations and cannot be isolated or controlled no matter how scientifically rigorous researchers try to be in their study designs. This challenges the current goal of educational research instruction to design "valid and reliable" studies that provide evidence for "best practices," and reimagines it as opening third spaces to expand opportunities and approaches for inquiry.

Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Social and Cultural Analysis of Education Agency, Resistance, and Identity in Education Critical and Postmodern Pedagogies Culture, Cognition, and Power Issues in Education Modernity and Postmodernity in Social Thought and Education Integrating Research and Practice in Social Justice Education Cultural Studies in Education Science, Technology, and Social Research after Eurocentrism Critical Pedagogy Language, Performance, and Power Sociology of Education Ideology, Racial Politics, and Public Policy: Sociology of Knowledge Seminar in Cross National Studies of Educational Problems Participatory Action Research and Programming

Brief description: Erin Blakely graduated with a B.A. from the University of Michigan, before moving to New York and working at an independent school for elementary and middle school students with learning differences. She earned her master's degree in education at San Francisco State University, where she later taught research methodologies in the Graduate College of Education. For her thesis, she conducted an ethnography on the normalization of narrative form in a diasporic community in Northern California. She spent the next decade coordinating action research projects, designing family leadership and English Language Learning programs for PreK-8 public schools, and facilitating county-wide equity initiatives. She subsequently did postgraduate work in Denmark. Her research interests include critical theory, cultural studies, pragmatism, social practice theory, history of the family, language socialization, narrative, and research design. She now lives in southern California, working in higher education, writing, and making mixed media collages.

Review Quotes: "The brilliance of Opening Third Spaces for Research in Education: Challenging the Limits of Technocratic Methods lies in its being situated in colonial historicity that privileged Western psychological research models which have, by and large, colonized educational research under the pretext of protecting objectivity. By succinctly unveiling the falsehood upon which the foundational pillars that support the false binarism inherent in the derivative educational research models, Erin Blakely and David Hemphill, painstakingly demonstrate how the disarticulation between the interpretative discourse and the interests of the interpreter often denies the dialectical relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. That is, the blind embrace of objectivity found in most educational research, denies the subjectivity that determines why a particular area is considered worthy of research in the first place, and how certain knowledges are subordinated to the imperatives of number crunching which, by design, erases the human face always present in all research endeavors.

What the authors of Opening Third Spaces for Research in Education: Challenging the Limits of Technocratic Methods make abundantly clear is the high societal costs exacted through the Godfication of scientism, not science, and the blind celebration of methodological elegance. Given the unacceptable high rate of educational failure, particularly in urban areas populated mostly by non-white students, readers of this important book will understand that the predominance of the technocratic paradigm in educational research is an ideological trap that sacrifices human factors along the lines of gender, ethnicity, class, and culture at the altar of research objectivity. This insightful book must be read by all educators who consider themselves agents of change in the struggle to promote a less dystopian and more humane world."--Donaldo Macedo, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts, University of Massachusetts Boston