ABSTRACT
Introduction to the Nature of Critical Research The way in which we seek to understand the crisis in teachers’ work in this book is through Lather’s (1986) notion of ‘dialectical theory building’, drawing on the approaches of critical ethnography that are given expression here in ‘critical storied accounts’ of teachers’ work. We believe that the idea of dialectical theory building can best be pursued through a stereoscopic view of the relationship between labour process theory and the ideas of critical ethnography. The analysis of teaching needs to start out with the question of how teachers are being controlled (technically, bureaucratically and ideologically), as alluded to in Chapter 2. To fully understand the nature of the educational practices arrived at in different educational sites, requires a research methodology capable of providing depth as well as solidity. The idea of pursuing how the work of teaching is being reshaped, in a context of acknowledging the importance of accessing wider sets of social and political forces, has a good deal of methodological appeal to us.
