Teaching qualitative research online to leadership students: Between firm structure and free flow

Abstract

The US National Science Foundation (2013, 2015) surveys of earned doctorates in education show that between 2003 and 2014, over 20,000 degrees were granted in a field broadly defined as Educational Administration. It is then important to discuss the pedagogies of teaching not only the content area courses for educational leaders, but research as well. We highlight the intertwined tensions between different discourses: the ways of thinking about research that our students bring to the online classrooms, the course goals that we aspire to achieve, and the ways we teach qualitative research online. In doing so, we see our classes as spaces of the (not always sm oth) interplay between the firm structure of expected goals and free-flowing nature of qualitative research.