Decolonizing Research Methods

Dear Colleagues, we six authors have come together to share our reflections on research methods. Our composite and cut-up accounts (Bogotch, 2023; Burroughs, 1959; Skerl, 1985) are deliberately meant to challenge current educational research writing and the publishing enterprise which we depict as a set of established, prescriptive, and formulaic rules repeated throughout one’s academic careers. However, in a recent discussion about post-qualitative methodologies, Tesar (2021) argued that we should be slow to reject or set ourselves against certain methodologies in favor of new ones. He notes that we are all caught up in these plenary ways of thinking and being even as we question “[t]he millions of marvelous, wonderful, and very ‘useful’ achievements of our scholarly practice” (p. 4). Advocating plurality, instead, Tesar (2021) encourages us to engage the “ideas lying dormant in the deepest roots of our scholarly work” (pp. 3–4). Furthermore, Stephen Ball (2017) noted the ascendancy of neoliberalism and the effects of neoliberal ideologies on the production of educational research in the academy.