Ways of Working in the Interpretive Tradition

The kinds of specialised questions that tend to be generated in educational contexts are intimately connected to professional practices, with the aim of understanding the complexities of social, discursive and textual practices within those contexts. This chapter presents an analysis of a range of difficult-to-categorise qualitative work that spans grounded theory, through post-structural analysis to structural linguistics, and which the authors in this section have used to address such complex and contextualised questions. What draws the work together is the notion of interpretation. The social, linguistic and psychological phenomena which form the heart of these questions raises challenges for researchers as they develop interpretive analyses that honours agency, multiplicity and difference. This chapter showcases and analyses the approaches of nine researchers as they undertake this kind of interpretive work. In the process, it also highlights the evolution of research methods, as new ‘emerging’ and continuously expanding forms of educational research driven by an ever-increasing range of educational problems, contexts, and interpretive tools to understand them.