Search

Responding to the challenge for qualitative researchers to claim a central place in conversations about big data, analytics, datafication, data mining and the role of algorithms, this article describes a mixed-method research partnership focused on algorithmic ethnography. In the debates about the opacity of online algorithms, qualitative researchers typically advocate for access to code. This standard discourse centralises the technical aspects of big data and networked ethnographies. Instead, this article outlines a research methodology that analyses algorithmic discourses by working alongside the technical expertise of data scientists and utilizes the affordability of big data methods to do qualitative work. The potential for qualitative research skills to investigate the underlying technical processes that frame online social interactions is proposed as a way to place how people understand the world at the centre of big data research.

This article examines the accounts of actions undertaken by Early Career Teachers (ECTs) recently graduated from a social justice-oriented Initial Teacher Education (ITE) program and employed in complex school settings with high levels of student diversity, disadvantage, and poverty. The study drew on theories of teacher agency and agency more broadly to examine the workshadowing observations of the teachers’ practice in classrooms augmented by their reflective accounts in interviews. The study found that the ECTs’ agency, or contextualised social action, can be conceptualised as temporally embedded social engagement directed at addressing their students’ cultural, social and academic needs. The teachers drew on past learnings from their ITE program, committed to future-oriented innovations in teaching, and made in-the-present decisions about actions to resolve emergent contingencies such as resource shortages. We argue that these understandings are usefully enhanced by recognising contingency, consciousness, criticality and creativity as additional features of the teachers’ deliberative programs of action Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper provides an overview of the Reading Wars as a site of discursive struggle. Using a digital sociological account of online events associated with the 2018 Phonics Debate hosted by the Australian Centre for Educational Research and the think tank the Centre for Independent Studies, this paper works to illuminate and challenge contemporary understanding of the politics of literacy teaching. If educational researchers are to clarify the relationship between politics and literacy in the twenty-first century we must understand how boundaries are negotiated using digital tools and how the literacy professional community is imagined. Using a Bourdieu-facilitated digital sociology, this paper will present a case study of the 2018 Phonics Debate to illustrate how literacy researchers and cognitive scientists have used social media as a space to navigate, negotiate and reimagine the contours of the field of literacy itself.

Based on literacy policy educational reform in Australia, this article explores the role of new media, policy labor and what small data analysis can reveal about parents and carers as networked policy actors. Using qualitative critical network (QCN) analysis, legacy and social media data, this article provides a snapshot of how policy actors interact online to labor for education reform. This article shows that parent and carer advocacy is central to the success of the universal synthetic phonics (USP) social media campaign in Australia. It also shows that analysis of the new media networks that connect policy actors should be a core part of understanding policy dynamics in the 21st century.

The relationship between the daily practice of personal politics and digitally networked publics amplify a familiar shaping and reshaping of the social. This article expands on nascent critiques of nodocentrism as a contemporary representation of the social in new media research to begin to advance a digital methods multidisciplinary project. Trace publics as a qualitative critical network (QCN) approach considers how representations developed by big social data analysis are shaped by everyday practices. Using the #MeToo phenomenon as an analogous frame, I show how trace publics can be used as a theoretical and methodological device for deconstructing, co-constructing, and reconstructing representations in social media research. The goal of such a proposal is to encourage future critical network and data research to consider the ethical ramifications of nodocentric representations of the social and the methodological possibilities of trace publics.

This experimental article provides an immanent alternative to the neo-positivist outcomes-driven turn currently cannibalising the Academy. It offers a stitched together, multiphrenic creature, formed in darkness, gore and toil; a co-generative performance embodying coming-to-know as a process of creative co-inquiry. It writes into existence an ungainly and seductive creature who is the speciation of a curious collective who met regularly to explore new and experimental ways of performing educational research. Our creature is a response to post-qualitative challenges for invention and re-invention. So we invent! And you, dear reader, are invited to participate in our grizzly performance. The following ethnodrama lays bare our skin in a gothic theatre where the individuated self is dismembered and restitched in order that coming-to-know might be understood as a collective and ongoing performance.

As social media platforms become increasingly entangled in how academia gets performed, there is growing pressure on individuals to cultivate a digital presence or risk becoming invisible. While some adopt new and emerging online communicative tools with gusto and elan, there are others who resent and resist their creeping territorialisation of workspaces. This paper uses a feminist New Materialist onto-epistemology to offer an alternative understanding of the material, discursive, and affective forces that enfold to nurture and/or neuter the uptake of scholarly blogging practices in academia. Unlike conventional humanist ontologies, a New Materialist approach views agency as distributed across all matter – not just the human form. This approach allows for the social, historical, affective, technological, and spatial forces, fluxes, and flows shaping and reshaping diverging scholarly blogging practices and performances to be plumbed. The insights generated have implications for how academic developers might encourage the uptake of scholarly blogging within and across their institutions.

This paper provides an overview of the Reading Wars as a site of discursive struggle. Using a Bourdieu (1993) facilitated digital sociology, this paper will present a case study of the 2018 hashtag #PhonicsDebate to illustrate how literacy researchers and cognitive scientists used social media as a space to navigate, negotiate and reimagine the contours of the field of literacy. Using a digital sociological account of online events associated with the 2018 Phonics Debate hosted by the Australian Centre for Educational Research and the think tank the Centre for Independent Studies, this paper works to illuminate and challenge contemporary understanding of the politics online. If policy researchers are to clarify the relationship between politics and their field in the 21st century we must understand how boundaries are negotiated using digital tools and how fields are imagined.

Drawing on the notion of cutting together-apart introduced by Karen Barad and combining it with Lefebvre’s notion of a flaneur (f. flâneuse) who moves between temporal, spatial and political relationships, this article performs a collaboration mediated by social media, namely blogging and tweeting. It draws on the notion of history, space, and social relationships to describe how two women met online. This collaboration as inquiry is about working together despite our differences – finding places to meet rather than diverge, and to dialogue rather than debate. Through a duo-ethnography of how this relationship worked and did not work, notions about how the digital world can act as a mediator for academic work are explored.

This is a book about reading, and how writers think about decoding, comprehending, and interpreting difficult texts. The role of the last chapter of a book is usually to conclude and draw some comparisons between the chapters—to make a sort of grand statement that ties the book together. Our overarching observations from the book have been drawn from our role as editors, or readers, administrators, and critics of writers who read. We have both enjoyed this process very much. But, you see, both of us are first-time editors, and despite the tremendous guidance and support of Professor Shirley Steinberg, this book has been a difficult process. What we dreamt for the book is not what it became. That does not mean we are any less proud of it or the authors who stuck with the project over many years. In fact, it took on a new life as we reflexively worked through the issues that emerged as the project evolved. Consequently, we thought it would be more fitting to couch our observations in the narrative of our coming of age as editors.

Who is your greatest influence? Take a moment to think about it. When we have asked this question in class we inevitably get answers like “my parents” or “Jesus” or “James Charles” (look on YouTube—there’s no shame in it; why carry a tiny super computer in your pocket if not to find out these things?). Which fictional character speaks to you? Is it Hermione or Luke Skywalker? Maybe it’s Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony Mark 4 or Buffy. Maybe you internally shouted “finally!” when you could replace the decades of teachers moralizing about Atticus Finch with Starr Carter or Jasper Jones. The collective heteronormative sigh of relief was palpable when Bandit Heeler showed families that not all dads were like, or had to be like, Homer Simpson.

This chapter uses the BBC cyber series Years and Years to illustrate social thinking around the most contemporary turn in modernist thinking about society. Explaining the social condition of humanity has been the focus of sociologists since the field’s inception. The basic point of sociology is to gather enough evidence to theorise why collectivised humans do what they do. Unfortunately, humans are fickle beings and unable to act as predictably as sociologists would like. So social theory is built by using the best available evidence. Descriptions are formed and predictions are made. As new evidence comes to light, new theories are drawn in an iterative and dynamic field. In this chapter, I describe the theory of Ulrich Beck who challenges the thinking of sociologists who have developed their theories of society in a world dominated by the effects of the Industrial Revolution. He argues that society has moved to a “risk society” that looks to mitigate the risks of industrial society. Loved and hated by sociologists, Beck outlines a theory for the modern world affected by climate change, pandemics and economic disaster.

Qualitative education research is an inherently complex landscape, presenting the qualitative researcher with constant ethical and reasoned decision-making. Presented as a narrative dialogic, this paper traces and juxtaposes the method stories of two qualitative researchers who focused their work around education phenomena, but in different contexts and in different ways. One researcher’s narrative study of phenomena via interviews is juxtaposed with the other’s phenomenographical investigation utilizing Facebook status updates. Seeing researcher thinking side-by-side provides a comparison that teases out the ways in which researchers might consciously grapple with thinking around method. These twin method stories offer ways for other qualitative researchers to think about their own decision-making as they address the challenges of balancing subjectivity and rigour, authenticity of reported data, and protection of participants. This dialogic partnership points to the malleability of method. It also encourages further exploration of the complexities of qualitative education research in which the researcher is often insider–outsider or outsider–insider.

The new mediascape is one of polarising narratives, fast education news, constant education crises, and a relentless cacophonic stream of voices and information. This chapter presents a theoretical and duoethnographic exploration of the productiveness and possibilities of new media, exploring how we create and make sense of knowledge in this changed and changing mediascape. Records of our own digital experiences provide insights into what new media offers the education scholar, such as empowerment, collaboration, and increased productivity, as well as drawing attention to the mess of educators’ being and becoming, and the sometimes-dark underbelly of the new media world. We argue that cyborg scholarship, in which researchers operate as merged human-technology amalgams, allows education scholars to at once resist, embrace, and influence the system by making transparent the work of being and becoming an educator-scholar. We argue that digital media offers the cyborg scholar a collaborative platform, identity testbed, and productive sphere. As cyborg scholars digitally connected to our scholarship and to one another, we offer a first-hand perspective of new media as an important facilitator of a culture of online practices that empower teachers and scholars to be public agents in education narratives.

There is broad agreement among scholars that quality teaching is one critical factor in student learning. We argue in this chapter however, that discussions around quality teachers and quality teaching have become so politicised that the mere mention of quality (when connected to various aspects of teaching) fuels immediate debate about definitions (what constitutes quality) and measurement (how quality can be gauged). The lack of precision about the use of the keyword quality causes confusion and it is often linked to measurable outcomes across a range of basis skills...

This chapter explains how methodological adaptions developed during a research project that used Facebook status updates as data. The research approach was phenomenography and the phenomenon studied was the first year experience at university.

Playfulness as an orientation to research can provide a way to re-see the world and spark imagination (Watson, 2015). Playfulness is also an irony (Haraway, 2000), where we hold together things which might be contradictory – like a vampire slayer, a curious girl, and a monster – and see where they meet. Playfulness is a “rhetorical strategy and a political method, one [we] would like to see more honoured in feminism” (Haraway, 2000, p. 291). In this chapter, metaphor is a part of our playfulness, as is our Baradian method of re-turning. Metaphor is a powerful vehicle for defining reality, structuring experience, and understanding intangibles like feelings, experiences, and beliefs; it is a coherent frame for imaginative rationality (Martinez, Sauleda & Huber, 2001). Thought processes and conceptual systems are defined and structured through metaphor (Lakoff & Johnsen, 2003). Metaphor is particularly useful as an analytical tool in the exploration of complex, abstract, or emotionally challenging human experiences (Billot & King, 2015). We three authors – Amanda, Deborah, and Naomi – in this chapter offer up to the reader our own metaphors of woman-self-in-academe (the academe referring to the intellectual community of academia). We are represented here by the three characters of vampire slayer Buffy, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and Victor Frankenstein’s creature. The choice to use well-known pop-cultural and literary characters as metaphors for lived experiences of women in the academe taps into readers’ experiences of known cultural models (Mus, 2014), thereby offering layers of relatability and meaning, and offering potential ways for women to do academia differently.

This chapter is a minor literature in that it performs the language of a minority in a major language. In other words, it is feminine, monstrous, as it is of the body and rarely a part of headstrong, masculine academic writing. It feels. This chapter avoids essentialising head or body, one over the other, asserting that both are needed in academic writing. A partnership. A co-mingling. This chapter performs the re-territorialisation of feminine texts within academic writing by relegating the masculine explanations for what is written to the cliff/footnotes. It embraces blogging as a form of mass [academic] culture that breaks down the walls of high [academic] culture by asking the audience to become an active, rather than passive, consumer of academic texts. This chapter writes in a way which provokes emotions (I know, I’ve tested it) as active engagement with text, but also continues Cixous’s agenda of advocating for a place for feminine literature within cultural studies. There are multiple ways into this text. Breaks in the flow, sections which stand alone, depth and shallowness. Dip in and out where you will, take what you need, and leave what you don’t. All I ask is that you feel.

Facebook status updates provided the data for a study about the transition learning experiences of 1st-year university students. Strict ethical guidelines were proposed by the PhD researcher from the outset of the study. Anonymity was considered important for the approved ethical clearance for both the university and the participants. Phenomenography was adopted and adapted for the study because it both conceptually and methodologically managed anonymity as well as questions of authenticity. An ethical dilemma arose during the research because the archival parameters were expanded by the researcher to allow the collection of data from the participants’ network. Questions of consent in an online space and how to report findings, which included data from people unaware of their involvement in the research, needed to be considered.

This article explores how early-career teachers working in high-poverty schools in Australia account for their decision-making during critical classroom incidents. Classroom management solutions are problematized by investigating how two teachers take up particular positions, make decisions, and enact what they believe to be ‘quality teaching’ in context. Through a combination of interviews and observations of teachers ‘in situ’, we examine what these teachers do, why they do it, what informs their decisions, and how they reflect on their actions. The complexity of teachers’ work in schools located in high-poverty areas is highlighted. We argue that both early-career teachers prefer to position themselves within ‘pastoral’, in contrast to ‘disciplinarian’, discourses, as part of constituting the school as a site of possibility and teachers who advocate for youth growing up in poverty. Refereed/Peer-reviewed