Can Critical Education Research Be “Quantitative”?

Those who align themselves with the critical education tradition form a complex and often contradictory grouping of research interests and political commitments. Despite the heterogeneity, though, there is a source of cohesion that binds the tradition together: rather than thinking of education as an isolated activity, critically oriented researchers attempt to understand processes in education in relation to their cultural, economic, and political contexts. By definition, then, the critical analyst’s gaze is theoretically oriented towards these complex sets of relationships (Carspecken & Apple, 1992, p. 47).¹ Using this orientation as a point of departure, critical education research is most often associated with two very broad forms of inquiry: On the one hand, there is an interest in uncovering the ways in which differential forms of power work in and through structures and agents in educational settings; on the other hand, there is a motivation to understand how alternative pedagogic and curricular arrangements can yield more egalitarian relations and processes in education and society writ large.