Scale in education research: towards a multi-scale methodology

Abstract

This article explores some theoretical and methodological problems concerned with scale in education research through a critique of a recent mixed-method project. The project was framed by scale metaphors drawn from the physical and earth sciences and I consider how recent thinking around scale, for example, in ecosystems and human geography might offer helpful points and angles of view on the challenges of thinking spatially in education research. Working between the spatial metaphors of ecology scholars and the critiques of the human geographers, for example, the hypercomplex social space in Lefebvre's political-economic thinking and the fluid, simultaneous, multiple spatialities of Massey's post-structuralism, I problematize space and scale in education research. Interweaving these geographical ideas with Giddens’ structuration and Bourdieu's theory of practice, both of which employed what might be termed scale-bridging to challenge social science's entrenched paradigms, leads me to reconsider what is possible and desirable in the study of education systems. Following the spatial turn in the social sciences generally, there is an outstanding need to theorize multi-scale methodology for education research.

Keywords:

• scale
• space
• human geography
• methodology

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-061–25–0035). I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and conference participants who commented on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey.

Actually, this disposition towards a geographical spatializing of the world is rooted in my own habitus inherited from geographers and so is in a sense probably deeper than I can properly comprehend.

The Economic and Social Research Council recently scrapped its small grants scheme and increased the upper limit for the main grants with the intention of production larger studies with greater social impact.