In order to study education and development, researchers can choose among a plethora of methods. The Merriam-Webster dictionary tells us that “method” means: a procedure or process for attaining an object …such as …a systematic procedure, technique, or mode of inquiry employed by or proper to a particular discipline or art “ or “a way, technique, or process of or for doing something”, or “a body of skills or techniques”. Methods proper to the scientific study of education and development cover a very broad range of procedures, ranging from how to formulate and ask questions, how to design studies for answering such questions, how to perform such studies in real-world contexts, how to extract data and how to process them, how to relate processed data to answers on questions, how to communicate such questions and answers, and how to apply them to real world activities aimed at promoting education and development. This body of methods is customarily termed “methodology”, which is a concept that includes the methods themselves but also our understanding of their relationships and their rational and scientific justification. Let us call this body of methods and the justifications “Integrative methodology”. Researchers often tend to see this integrative methodology as a more or less autonomous set of good practice prescriptions. This view is consistent with practices of academic training in which methodology courses are offered separate from courses on disciplinarian contents, e.g. courses on development or educational science. As a consequence of this autonomy oriented view of methodology, scientific questions regarding development and education tend to be framed in terms of the available or habitual methods. For instance, we readily transform or translate concrete questions about the influence of some particular educational intervention in terms of a statistically significant difference between 2 representative samples that systematically differ in only one variable or feature of interest, which, in this case, is the intervention. Almost every word in this translation carries the heavy burden of methodological principles, concepts and presuppositions: “statistically”, “significant”, “difference”, “representative”, “sample”, “systematically”, “variable”, and “intervention”. And all these principles, concepts and presuppositions are taken from this autonomous body of integrative methodology, which forms our indisputable cookbook of good practices, outside of which no good — scientific — practices exist. The answers to questions that are shaped by this independent body of methodology will then contribute to existing theories of development and education. In this sense, it is the (allegedly) independent methodology that informs theory.In this chapter, we will move against this current practice and make the — apparently deeply obvious — claim that it must be theory that informs the questions and the way we shall answer these questions. That is, it must be theory – that is, your body of justified knowledge about a particular phenomenon – that informs, influences and determines methodology, that is, the whole of methods, procedures and instruments that you use to study that phenomenon. . The sort of theory that should inform integrative methodology must be an integrative theory, that is to say a theory consisting of a consistent set of general principles and concepts shaping the domains of inquiry, which in this particular case are the related domains of development and education
Methodological challenges are rarely discussed in depth among outdoor adventure tourism scholars. Despite the prevailing qualitative approaches in this field, and the recognition that the fleetingness of the human experience and the non-linearity and unpredictability of the more-than-human world have the power to influence the research process, the messy, negotiated and often contested researcher’s role has been less considered. In addressing this, the aim here is to critically discuss the methodological approach to explorations of the outdoor experiences through deconstructing the researcher’s role. Through renderings of the existentialist propositions of being in the world and a poststructuralist philosophy of fluidity and flux, the attention is granted to embodied experiences as a way of generating knowledges. Being situated in the research setting, space is created for interrogation of the processual dimensions of commodified outdoor journeys from an emic, researcher-as-tourist perspective. Research in the outdoor scenaria is by no means a linear process but rather a messy, complex and often ruptured journey, further complicated by the ethical concerns, struggles and idiosyncrasies of the researcher. I thus discuss the nuances and complexities of doing the embodied research and the haphazard ways of data collection. In shifting attention to more existential aspects of being in the outdoors through the process of post-experiential reflections, discomfort emerged as a critical quality of the outdoor experience. I thus illuminate the significance of embodied research and epiphenomenal discoveries in the production of new knowledges, to which greater attention, both in theoretical and methodological conversations, should be paid in the future.
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To reach for abstraction is a major but challenging goal in mathematics education: teachers struggle with finding ways how to foster abstraction in their classes. To shed light on this issue for the case of geometry education, we align theoretical perspectives on embodied learning and abstraction with practical perspectives from in-service teachers. We focus on the teaching and learning of realistic geometry, not only because this domain is apt for sensori-motor action investigations, but also because abstraction in realistic geometry is under-researched in relation to other domains of mathematics, and teachers’ knowledge of geometry and confidence in teaching it lag behind. The following research question will be addressed: how can a theoretical embodied perspective on abstraction in geometry education in the higher grades of primary school inform current teacher practices? To answer this question, we carried out a literature study and an interview study with in-service teachers (n = 6). As a result of the literature study, we consider embodied abstraction in geometry as a process of reflecting on, describing, explaining, and structuring of sensory-motor actions in the experienced world through developing and using mathematical artifacts. The results from the interview study show that teachers are potentially prepared for using aspects of embodied learning (e.g., manipulatives), but are not aware of the different aspects of enactment that may invite students’ abstraction. We conclude that theories on embodiment and abstraction do not suffice to foster students’ abstraction process in geometry. Instead, teachers’ knowledge of embodied abstraction in geometry and how to foster this grows with experience in enactment, and with the discovery that cognition emerges to serve action.
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