Lived Experience and Educational Research Methodology

Reflections on the PhD Journey

Edited by:
Michael Corbett, Acadia University

In Press 2025

Most education and social science research methodology texts offer detailed and often prescriptive advice to higher degree students generally following established paradigmatic frameworks for qualitative and/or qualitative research. Lived Experience and Educational Research Methodology: Reflections on the PhD Journey offers instead a set of retrospective narrative accounts of the complex lived process of developing a thesis project in the field of education. Challenging myths, stereotypes and related linear research imaginaries, the focus of this book is both the particular, messy, located research problems that tend to drive education research as well as how differently positioned recent graduates situated their academic writing in relation to their diverse ethical and personal commitments, theoretical and political passions, methodological choices and community membership.

Each chapter in this book is a narrative account of the how-did rather than the how-to of qualitative social science dissertation writing in the field of education. Lived Experience and Educational Research Methodology: Reflections on the PhD Journey also demonstrates how doctoral writing reflects both experiential politics, but also geographic location. The authors in this collection are graduates of a small, technologically hybrid, rural-regional doctoral program which is both unique to its place, but also representative of a growing number of non-metropolitan higher degree programs explicitly designed to provide broad access to populations that are geographically and otherwise marginalized from/in established metropolitan institutions.

ENDORSEMENTS:
"In a sea of 'how-to' manuals for doctoral researchers, 'Lived Experience and Educational Research Methodology' emerges as a beacon of authenticity and depth. Departing from conventional wisdom, this book orients to the lived experience of doctoral candidates and their textual reflections on the messy, complex reality of doctoral research. The book offers invaluable and practical insights that underscore the importance of reflexivity and ethical engagement in scholarly inquiry. A must-read for aspiring researchers and seasoned academics alike." — Patrick Howard, Cape Breton University

"In my own doctoral journey, I remember feeling slighted the first time someone referred to my work in rural education as mesearch. The illusion of objectivity in the pursuit of a doctorate has long dominated the field’s understanding of the dissertation. As education and social science scholars we rarely get to exist separate or at arms-length from our research. There is a tension in the process of becoming a scholar and as Cynthia Bruce shares in her chapter those tensions can be as “life-shattering as they are affirming, as silencing as they are amplifying, as disempowering as they are agentive.” This new book gives us space (perhaps even permission) to unlearn and humanize the process by centering narrative and lived experiences as integral and necessary." — Amy Price Azano, Virginia Tech.

CONTENTS
Understanding Diverse PhD Journeys, Michael Corbett. Leaving Normal, Cynthia Bruce. Value Proposition, Gregory Hadley. Positively Not a Positivist, Colin King. Spirited Research, Késa Munroe-Anderson. Commitment to Community, a Passion for Teaching, Imposter Syndrome, and the Prospects of a Permanent Job, Mary Sweatman. Attending to Trickster, Keith Williams. Afterword, Ann Vibert. About the Editor. About the Contributors.