Leadership and a Critical Spirit of Resistance

Abstract

The field of educational research is replete with celebrated methodologies, procedures, and, in fact, a hegemony that prescribes what is considered to be genuine and valuable research. Scholars have engaged in numerous philosophical and ontological debates focusing on the efficacy of quantitative and qualitative research. In recent times, a discourse has emerged in research that salutes the poly-voiced character of researchers and the researched, celebrates culturally sensitive and relevant research, andendorses transformative and emancipatory research (see Mertens, 2005; Patton, 2002; Tillman, 2002). But all of these ways of positioning scholarship, it seems, are grounded in some sedimented notions of what “legitimate” research actually is. Within these prescriptions for scholarship is the idea that the purpose of research is to disclose some truth or truths and that these discovered truths are only legitimate if they have been unearthed through traditional or “accepted” forms of research methodology. Some positivist scholars argue that there exists what is called a grand narrative or some celebrated truth that purportedly essentializes the human condition—that research, it is argued, always either leads to or confirms its existence. The grand narrative is “a script that specifies and controls how social processes are carried out” (Stanley, 2007, p. 14). The grand narrative in education has been established through years of substantiating research.