ABSTRACT
Writing in the Educational Researcher, American Educational Research Association President Marilyn Cochran-Smith (2005) noted that “Today, in part because of the federal government’s enlarged role in education as a whole and in education research in particular, the research community is
once again (or, more accurately-still) struggling with questions about the nature of educational scholarship: What kinds of research ‘count’? Do some ‘count’ more than others? Who gets to do the counting? For what purposes and what contexts? Should certain kinds of research be elevated (and funded) over others? As Ellen Condliffe Lagemann and others remind us, these are enduring questions in the century-long history of educational inquiry, involving debates about science and scientism, the development and institutionalization of fields of study, and the emergence of knowledge hierarchies that hardened (though, at certain times, they became more fluid and permeable) during the 20th century. These are the same enduring questions that are concurrent with the development of many fields of scholarship” (p. 20).
