Qualitative Methods in Research on Teaching

This chapter reviews basic issues of theory and method in approaches to research on teaching that are alternatively called ethnographic, qualitative, participant observational, case study, symbolic interactionist, phenomenological, constructivist, or interpretive. These approaches are all slightly different, but each bears strong family resemblance to the others. The set of related approaches is relatively new in the field of research on teaching. The approaches have emerged as significant in the decade of the 1960s in England and in the 1970s in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany. Because interest in these approaches is so recent, the previous editions of the Handbook of Research on Teaching do not contain a chapter devoted to participant observational research. Accordingly, this chapter attempts to describe r~s and their theoretical _nresup~s in considerable detail and does not attempt an exhaustive review of the rapidly growing literature in the field. Such a review will be appropriate for the next edition of this handbook. From this point on I will use the term interpretive to refer to the whole family of approaches to participant observational research. I adopt this term for three reasons: (a) It is more inclusive than many of the others (e.g., ethnography, case study); (b) W Blake