Qualitative Research as an Approach to Orders of Inequality

Insights into the Work of a Research Workshop

Abstract

In qualitative research, the proximity of researchers to their research fields is crucial for the investigation of social phenomena. For the examination of questions of difference and inequality in the context of university teacher education, this enables the potentials for a transformation of teaching and learning in qualitative research, which does not conceive of inequality as an external object, but declares its own involvement in powerful orders as the object and reference point of reflexive professionalism. By means of an insight into the work of a research workshop in a master’s program in teaching, it is shown how the researchers at first reproduce orders of inequality, but then succeed in revealing them and making them discussable using reflexive position-fixing. This article not only traces how such a change of perspective takes place, but also which challenges the university setting poses and how these can be met in order to address social power relations and to stimulate professionalization processes that are critical of inequality.