Like chalk boards and cheese? Close-reading and educational research

Content, Conversation, Discourse, Multimodal, Narrative, Rhetorical, Stylistic, Thematic…Analysis. You might have encountered a few of these approaches to qualitative data in educational research already, perhaps also in studying English language, literature or linguistics. They imbue activities such as reading (and re-reading) a policy document or interview transcript with an appealing air of empiricism, even positivism. They can seem like a lifesaver if you’re working in an environment that favours such epistemologies. But how far can you get in the social sciences, particularly educational research, with close reading? … that ill-defined activity at the core of English studies. I will answer this drawing on my educational research that pairs close-reading with other methods, such as survey, or combines close-reading literary and non-literary texts. These include picturebooks, television, theatre reviews, websites, YA literature and YouKu videos. I will offer tips for explaining what you’re doing and how, when you put close-reading at the heart of your project. Difficulty with articulating this, rather than doing the close-reading, is arguably what makes undertaking close-reading as an educational research method most perilous.

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