ABSTRACT
Our final substantive chapter engages with the epistemological and methodological issues that are involved in studying teachers and the work of teaching from a feminist perspective and/or for feminist purposes. In doing so, the chapter has a number of specific aims, which provide an organizational framework. First, we briefly describe the relationships between feminism and social research-paying particular attention to the feminist critiques of social research and to what feminist research might look like. Second, we provide an overview of research strategies available to the investigator for gathering and analysing data on teachers and their everyday realities. Where possible we accompany these sketches with apposite examples of the method in action, and accounts of its use by feminist scholars. Third, we examine the relationship between feminism, teaching and action research. Fourth, we pay some attention to contemporary debates and movements in social research, and how these may add to our understandings of teachers and their teaching. Finally we provide some pointers towards a research agenda for feminism and the teachers’ work.
