Introduction: Performing shared responsibilities: Inclusive methodologies for educational inquiry

Abstract

Let me say from the outset that the following articles really need no introduction, and that their authors certainly do not need my patronage (or anyone else's) to legitimate their work. Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed the presentation of four of these articles in their earlier versions (at the Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education held in Fremantle in December 2001) and the authors have persuaded me that introducing their articles and making some connections between them might serve some useful purpose. I admit that much of my enthusiasm for these articles is unabashedly self-interested. Four of them those by Jan Edwards, Valerie Harwood, Margaret Kumar and Mary Lou Rasmussen were invaluable in helping me to understand and address a pressing practical problem in 2001, as I will explain in more detail below. I read the fifth article by Anna Hickey-Moody only a few weeks before writing this introduction, but it has proved to be no less useful in informing the same practical problem, as well as a more recent research interest. Each of these articles responds critically and creatively to the challenges of performing and representing inclusive methodologies in educational research. For much of my career as an educational researcher and teacher of research methodology studies, I thought I 'knew* how difficult these challenges were. Like many of my colleagues, I have struggled with the ontological, epistemological, methodological and axiological complexities of reading, representing and narrating difference without fearing or fetishising it, and of performing modes of inquiry that respond constructively to the effects of difFerence in mediating educational change. But I have become more aware of the limits of my understandings in recent years, especially since 1998 when I began to participate in a number of research and teaching activities in southern Africa. These literal (if occasional) shifts in location have helped to shape my enthusiasm for the articles in this issue.