EPS 508 • Fall 2016

Uses and Abuses of Educational Research

W 4-6:50 • 389 Education

Professor Chris Higgins (crh4@illinois.edu)

All graduate students in education (if not all citizens) need to be able to engage intelligently with the full spectrum of educational research and with the policies said to be backed by research. This course aims at comprehensive and critical research literacy through discussion of the philosophy of inquiry, the sociology of knowledge, the history of educational research, and the politics of data. It seeks to correct the mystification that there is a recipe for research (question + lit review + method + limitations + theoretical framework + data = new knowledge), reopening some of the thorny questions around writing and interpretation, history and language, power and politics, knowledge and ignorance. It features a comparative case study of public education as refracted by four approaches: historical, philosophical, quantitative, and qualitative.