This book with Denis Phillips is the first in a projected series that will appear with Rowman and Littlefield Publishers: “Philosophy, Theory, and Educational Research.” Contemporary educational research has been experiencing an explosion of new methodologies and approaches to inquiry. Many of these approaches have drawn from philosophical or theoretical positions that underlie their determinations of research methods, aims, and criteria of validity. Yet, the substance of these philosophical or theoretical assumptions is not always made clear to readers, and so it is difficult for them to judge those assumptions for themselves.
This series is designed to explore some of the dominant philosophical and theoretical positions influencing educational research today, in a manner that does justice to the substance of these views and shows their relevance for research aims and practices. Each volume will show how a particular set of philosophical and theoretical positions affects the methods and aims of educational research and will discuss specific examples of research that show these orientations at work. The emphasis is on lively, accessible, but theoretically sound explorations of the issues. These books are intended to be of interest not only to educational researchers, but to anyone in education wanting to understand what these various “isms” are about.
This series features a distinguished international group of scholars. It is important for the reader to know that the first author of each volume has had primary responsibility for conceptualizing and drafting the text. The Series Editor has played a very active role in selecting the topics and organization for each volume, has interacted regularly with the first author as the text has been drafted, and has had a relatively free hand in revising the text and adding or suggesting new material. This is more than the role that editors normally play, and so second authorship seemed the appropriate appellation. But the predominant voice and point of view for each volume in the series is the first author’s. It could not be otherwise, since no coauthor could advocate equally all the positions, many of them mutually inconsistent, argued for in these volumes.
Nicholas C. Burbules
Series Editor