Marcus B . Weaver-Hightower | Virginia Tech (original) (raw)
Books by Marcus B . Weaver-Hightower
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Qualitative research has exploded in popularity in nearly every discipline from the social scienc... more Qualitative research has exploded in popularity in nearly every discipline from the social sciences to health fields to business. While many qualitative textbooks explain how to conduct an interview or analyze fieldnotes, rarely do they give more than a few scant pages to the skill many find most difficult: writing.
That’s where How to Write Qualitative Research comes in. Using clear prose, helpful examples and lists, it breaks down and explains the most common writing tasks in qualitative research, and each chapter suggests step-by-step how-to approaches writers can use to tackle those tasks.
Topics include:
• writing about and with qualitative data
• composing findings
• organizing chapters and sections
• using grammar for powerful writing
• revising for clarity
• writing conclusions, methods sections, and theory
• creating and writing about visuals
• writing different types of qualitative research and different document types
Each chapter features real-world examples from both professionals and students, hands-on practice activities, and template sentences that show qualitative writers how to get started.
This text provides the perfect companion for writers of almost any skill level, from undergraduates to professionals. Whether you are writing a course paper, a dissertation, or your next book, How to Write Qualitative Research will help you write clearer, more effective qualitative research.
Gender studies are a key lens through which education has been examined in the past forty years, ... more Gender studies are a key lens through which education has been examined in the past forty years, having become an accepted and popular subfield in educational foundations studies. Moreover, scholars in gender and education have made tremendous contributions well beyond education, influencing humanities and social sciences scholars across the academy. Hearing the stories of these scholars—their development, education, important works, and thoughts on the future—offers unique insights into the genesis and growth of the field and gives new scholars an overview of advances made. Leaders in Gender and Education: Intellectual Self-Portrais does just that, showing the history of gender and education through the eyes of 16 of its leaders. By recounting their experiences and scholarly work, they trace the development of feminist and profeminist research on girls, on boys, and on the issues shaping both gender and education—issues like race, sexuality, neoliberalism, globalization, and more. Importantly, the volume has a global focus, including scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. This diversity gives readers a broad sense of the progress of gender scholarship in education around the world. Each essay provides students and researchers alike with not only background on the 16 scholars included, but also the lists of major works—chosen by contributors themselves—direct readers to some of the most important scholarship on gender and education. Taken together, further, the contributors’ thoughts on the future of the field provide glimpses of productive directions for studies of gender and education.
This edited collection looks at the politics of food in schools globally, with chapters that cove... more This edited collection looks at the politics of food in schools globally, with chapters that cover all of the six inhabited continents. Contributors use a policy ecology framework to guide explorations of school gardens, farm-to-school programs, school food reform organizations, teachers' work with hungry students, cooking programs, and more.
This book explores boy-focused education policy and how different educators struggle to implement... more This book explores boy-focused education policy and how different educators struggle to implement or resist it in their schools. Weaver-Hightower examines masculinity politics in Australia and the United States, mapping how these politics create panic over raising and educating boys the “Right” way. Contextualizing this policy with movements for boys’ education around the world, this book offers progressive strategies for resisting conservative, regressive, anti-feminist programs for boys.
This collection brings together the best researchers in boys' education from around the world and... more This collection brings together the best researchers in boys' education from around the world and from different disciplines to explore boys in their complexity and diversity.
Papers by Marcus B . Weaver-Hightower
Routledge eBooks, May 21, 2024
Children's Geographies, Nov 6, 2023
School mealtimes, for many schools, are characterized by behavioural difficulties, a problematic ... more School mealtimes, for many schools, are characterized by behavioural difficulties, a problematic time of day requiring much attention and resources. Yet for many school food reformers, those who want food environments to be educative and pleasant, strict behavioural interventions are often contrary to the ideals of social learning. This paper presents an ethnographic case study conducted in Peartree Academy, an all-through academy school in England, to explore how schools and their staffs use the dining hall simultaneously as a community space for socialization and as surveillance mechanism. We deliberate on causes and variations of how this manifests. A Foucauldian lens, particularly viewing dining space as 'heterotopia' and 'heterochronies' (Foucault 1986), highlights tensions that shape the everyday for both students and staff in the school. As counter-spaces used differently by administrators, pupils, and food reformers, we show how rules and regulations imposed by staff work against the original intensions to develop the school dining hall into a community forum in which children develop positive eating behaviours and good citizenship. The children became subjected to power relations through which bodies became docile or resistant, with less opportunity for social learning. True progressive food reform thus requires, ultimately, deeply understanding and negotiating the multiple, overlapping functions of dining spaces.
Gender and Education, Mar 1, 2011
Locke. This is a useful corrective to the belief that eighteenth-and nineteenth-century women fou... more Locke. This is a useful corrective to the belief that eighteenth-and nineteenth-century women found space to be creative only within the home-what Hilton dismisses as the novelists' vision. Her book deserves to be read by historians of gender as well as historians of childhood and education.
SensePublishers eBooks, 2013
Presents a conceptualization of policy ecology and its uses in policy analysis in education
Graduate students learning qualitative methods often receive much instruction in collecting and a... more Graduate students learning qualitative methods often receive much instruction in collecting and analyzing data. Yet they receive far less in how to write up their results—perhaps one class period, maybe two—so they often feel overwhelmed when committing their findings to articles and chapters. For many, they bog down, sometimes never finishing their dissertation even after collecting all the data. In this presentation, I explore some of the common reasons data collection and theoretical foundations of qualitative research take so much more coursework time than writing. These reasons include the large skillsets and time involved with data collection, the diversity of approaches available, the lack of confidence many instructors have in teaching writing, and the vastly fewer resources (like guidebooks and technology) available on qualitative writing. To end the paper, I explore the writing skills that graduate students often don’t enter a class with, but which need to be taught to ensure they can write scholarly projects, both for their academic programs and their careers. These include basic rhetorical(not academic) grammar, the ability to analyze organization and rhetoric in their discipline’s models, the common qualities of all qualitative writing, and some general revision skills
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Dec 26, 2011
In this autoethnographic essay, I consider the experience of my daughter Matilda’s stillbirth. I ... more In this autoethnographic essay, I consider the experience of my daughter Matilda’s stillbirth. I explore stillbirth, grief, tactile contact with death, and how all of these demonstrate the strictures and ruptures of masculinity in Western cultures. I counterpose these realities against the political, economic, and medical discourses of stillbirth as a means of exploring how social structures mediate and complicate parents’ experiences of their children’s deaths. Fathers’ experiences form the core of my analysis, for both the scientific literature and cultural texts about grief and perinatal death often discursively elide these experiences.
Journal of Mixed Methods Research, Jun 10, 2013
Fields from political science to critical education policy studies have long explored power relat... more Fields from political science to critical education policy studies have long explored power relations in policy processes, showing who influences policy agendas, policy creation, and policy implementation. Yet showing particular actors’ influence on specific points in a policy text remains a methodological challenge. This article presents a five-stage, embedded mixed methods design for establishing influence on educational policy moving from a policy text outward. I use an example analysis of Australia’s policy making on boys’ education—the report Boys: Getting it Right (2002)—to show how data transformation measures, both quantitizing and qualitizing, within a larger qualitative study helped identify influence. This mixed design, I argue, can be useful in other research contexts, with variations for data availability and researcher resources.
The Journal of Men's Studies, Apr 1, 2011
Driven largely by concerns over boys' education, countries worldwide have seen crisis discourses ... more Driven largely by concerns over boys' education, countries worldwide have seen crisis discourses over small numbers of male teachers, particularly those teaching young children. Despite public desires and policy movements to increase their numbers, important barriers and challenges remain for male teachers. Preservice teachers' experiences, especially, might illuminate challenges to the recruitment and retention of males. Using a (pro)feminist, social interactionist framework and qualitative discourse analysis methods, this study examines discouragements from peers, family, and teacher education as faced by three male student teachers. These included gendered teasing about the ease of and "cuteness" required in education coursework, gendered objections to "wasting" their ability, and gendered suspicions of sexual predation. The analysis focuses on strategic performances the men used to cope with discouragements and persist in teaching. I argue that foregrounding such performances can disrupt barriers for males and thus increase their numbers.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Qualitative research has exploded in popularity in nearly every discipline from the social scienc... more Qualitative research has exploded in popularity in nearly every discipline from the social sciences to health fields to business. While many qualitative textbooks explain how to conduct an interview or analyze fieldnotes, rarely do they give more than a few scant pages to the skill many find most difficult: writing.
That’s where How to Write Qualitative Research comes in. Using clear prose, helpful examples and lists, it breaks down and explains the most common writing tasks in qualitative research, and each chapter suggests step-by-step how-to approaches writers can use to tackle those tasks.
Topics include:
• writing about and with qualitative data
• composing findings
• organizing chapters and sections
• using grammar for powerful writing
• revising for clarity
• writing conclusions, methods sections, and theory
• creating and writing about visuals
• writing different types of qualitative research and different document types
Each chapter features real-world examples from both professionals and students, hands-on practice activities, and template sentences that show qualitative writers how to get started.
This text provides the perfect companion for writers of almost any skill level, from undergraduates to professionals. Whether you are writing a course paper, a dissertation, or your next book, How to Write Qualitative Research will help you write clearer, more effective qualitative research.
Gender studies are a key lens through which education has been examined in the past forty years, ... more Gender studies are a key lens through which education has been examined in the past forty years, having become an accepted and popular subfield in educational foundations studies. Moreover, scholars in gender and education have made tremendous contributions well beyond education, influencing humanities and social sciences scholars across the academy. Hearing the stories of these scholars—their development, education, important works, and thoughts on the future—offers unique insights into the genesis and growth of the field and gives new scholars an overview of advances made. Leaders in Gender and Education: Intellectual Self-Portrais does just that, showing the history of gender and education through the eyes of 16 of its leaders. By recounting their experiences and scholarly work, they trace the development of feminist and profeminist research on girls, on boys, and on the issues shaping both gender and education—issues like race, sexuality, neoliberalism, globalization, and more. Importantly, the volume has a global focus, including scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. This diversity gives readers a broad sense of the progress of gender scholarship in education around the world. Each essay provides students and researchers alike with not only background on the 16 scholars included, but also the lists of major works—chosen by contributors themselves—direct readers to some of the most important scholarship on gender and education. Taken together, further, the contributors’ thoughts on the future of the field provide glimpses of productive directions for studies of gender and education.
This edited collection looks at the politics of food in schools globally, with chapters that cove... more This edited collection looks at the politics of food in schools globally, with chapters that cover all of the six inhabited continents. Contributors use a policy ecology framework to guide explorations of school gardens, farm-to-school programs, school food reform organizations, teachers' work with hungry students, cooking programs, and more.
This book explores boy-focused education policy and how different educators struggle to implement... more This book explores boy-focused education policy and how different educators struggle to implement or resist it in their schools. Weaver-Hightower examines masculinity politics in Australia and the United States, mapping how these politics create panic over raising and educating boys the “Right” way. Contextualizing this policy with movements for boys’ education around the world, this book offers progressive strategies for resisting conservative, regressive, anti-feminist programs for boys.
This collection brings together the best researchers in boys' education from around the world and... more This collection brings together the best researchers in boys' education from around the world and from different disciplines to explore boys in their complexity and diversity.
Routledge eBooks, May 21, 2024
Children's Geographies, Nov 6, 2023
School mealtimes, for many schools, are characterized by behavioural difficulties, a problematic ... more School mealtimes, for many schools, are characterized by behavioural difficulties, a problematic time of day requiring much attention and resources. Yet for many school food reformers, those who want food environments to be educative and pleasant, strict behavioural interventions are often contrary to the ideals of social learning. This paper presents an ethnographic case study conducted in Peartree Academy, an all-through academy school in England, to explore how schools and their staffs use the dining hall simultaneously as a community space for socialization and as surveillance mechanism. We deliberate on causes and variations of how this manifests. A Foucauldian lens, particularly viewing dining space as 'heterotopia' and 'heterochronies' (Foucault 1986), highlights tensions that shape the everyday for both students and staff in the school. As counter-spaces used differently by administrators, pupils, and food reformers, we show how rules and regulations imposed by staff work against the original intensions to develop the school dining hall into a community forum in which children develop positive eating behaviours and good citizenship. The children became subjected to power relations through which bodies became docile or resistant, with less opportunity for social learning. True progressive food reform thus requires, ultimately, deeply understanding and negotiating the multiple, overlapping functions of dining spaces.
Gender and Education, Mar 1, 2011
Locke. This is a useful corrective to the belief that eighteenth-and nineteenth-century women fou... more Locke. This is a useful corrective to the belief that eighteenth-and nineteenth-century women found space to be creative only within the home-what Hilton dismisses as the novelists' vision. Her book deserves to be read by historians of gender as well as historians of childhood and education.
SensePublishers eBooks, 2013
Presents a conceptualization of policy ecology and its uses in policy analysis in education
Graduate students learning qualitative methods often receive much instruction in collecting and a... more Graduate students learning qualitative methods often receive much instruction in collecting and analyzing data. Yet they receive far less in how to write up their results—perhaps one class period, maybe two—so they often feel overwhelmed when committing their findings to articles and chapters. For many, they bog down, sometimes never finishing their dissertation even after collecting all the data. In this presentation, I explore some of the common reasons data collection and theoretical foundations of qualitative research take so much more coursework time than writing. These reasons include the large skillsets and time involved with data collection, the diversity of approaches available, the lack of confidence many instructors have in teaching writing, and the vastly fewer resources (like guidebooks and technology) available on qualitative writing. To end the paper, I explore the writing skills that graduate students often don’t enter a class with, but which need to be taught to ensure they can write scholarly projects, both for their academic programs and their careers. These include basic rhetorical(not academic) grammar, the ability to analyze organization and rhetoric in their discipline’s models, the common qualities of all qualitative writing, and some general revision skills
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Dec 26, 2011
In this autoethnographic essay, I consider the experience of my daughter Matilda’s stillbirth. I ... more In this autoethnographic essay, I consider the experience of my daughter Matilda’s stillbirth. I explore stillbirth, grief, tactile contact with death, and how all of these demonstrate the strictures and ruptures of masculinity in Western cultures. I counterpose these realities against the political, economic, and medical discourses of stillbirth as a means of exploring how social structures mediate and complicate parents’ experiences of their children’s deaths. Fathers’ experiences form the core of my analysis, for both the scientific literature and cultural texts about grief and perinatal death often discursively elide these experiences.
Journal of Mixed Methods Research, Jun 10, 2013
Fields from political science to critical education policy studies have long explored power relat... more Fields from political science to critical education policy studies have long explored power relations in policy processes, showing who influences policy agendas, policy creation, and policy implementation. Yet showing particular actors’ influence on specific points in a policy text remains a methodological challenge. This article presents a five-stage, embedded mixed methods design for establishing influence on educational policy moving from a policy text outward. I use an example analysis of Australia’s policy making on boys’ education—the report Boys: Getting it Right (2002)—to show how data transformation measures, both quantitizing and qualitizing, within a larger qualitative study helped identify influence. This mixed design, I argue, can be useful in other research contexts, with variations for data availability and researcher resources.
The Journal of Men's Studies, Apr 1, 2011
Driven largely by concerns over boys' education, countries worldwide have seen crisis discourses ... more Driven largely by concerns over boys' education, countries worldwide have seen crisis discourses over small numbers of male teachers, particularly those teaching young children. Despite public desires and policy movements to increase their numbers, important barriers and challenges remain for male teachers. Preservice teachers' experiences, especially, might illuminate challenges to the recruitment and retention of males. Using a (pro)feminist, social interactionist framework and qualitative discourse analysis methods, this study examines discouragements from peers, family, and teacher education as faced by three male student teachers. These included gendered teasing about the ease of and "cuteness" required in education coursework, gendered objections to "wasting" their ability, and gendered suspicions of sexual predation. The analysis focuses on strategic performances the men used to cope with discouragements and persist in teaching. I argue that foregrounding such performances can disrupt barriers for males and thus increase their numbers.
Review of Educational Research, Dec 1, 2003
Althouigh the majority of research in gender and education has rightly focused on girls, recent r... more Althouigh the majority of research in gender and education has rightly focused on girls, recent research in the United States and elsews^here hzasfocused mnuch more on the learninlg, social ouitcomes, and schooling experiences of boys. T77is "boy turn" has produced a large corpus of theoretically oriented and practice-orienzted researcht alongside popular and rhetorical wvorks anidfetninist and pro-femninist responses, each of which this article reviews. To answt er ws7h boys have beconme suich a concern at this time, this article explores the origins and mnotivations of the boy turn, examines major critiqules of the distress about boys, and suggests possible directions for-debates and research.
Gender and Education, Dec 1, 2003
... Columbine High School era of school shootings in the USA and moral panics over the safety of ... more ... Columbine High School era of school shootings in the USA and moral panics over the safety of children in schools ... detail some of the activities they used in English single-sex schools to explore sexism and the male role. ... Theory-and Practice-oriented Literature about Masculinity ...
The Journal of Medical Humanities, Oct 14, 2015
Losing Thomas & Ella" presents a research comic about one father's perinatal loss of twins. The c... more Losing Thomas & Ella" presents a research comic about one father's perinatal loss of twins. The comic recounts Paul's experience of the hospital and the babies' deaths, and it details the complex grieving process afterward, including themes of anger, distance, relationship stress, self-blame, religious challenges, and resignation. A methodological appendix explains the process of constructing the comic and provides a rationale for the use of comics-based research for illness, death, and grief among practitioners, policy makers, and the bereaved.
List of Figures and Tables. Preface. 1. Issues of Boys' Education in the United States: Diffu... more List of Figures and Tables. Preface. 1. Issues of Boys' Education in the United States: Diffuse Contexts and Futures. Marcus Weaver-Hightower. 2. Gender Policies in Australia and the UK: The Construction of New Boys and Girls. Martin Mills, Becky Francis, and Christine Skelton. 3. What Can We Expect of Boys? A Strategy to Help Schools Hoping for Justice. Michael C. Reichert, Peter Kuriloff and Brett Stoudt. 4. "Why Does She Need Me?": Young Men, Gender Politics and Personal Practice. Rebecca Priegert Coulter. 5. Masculinity, Racialization and Schooling: The Making of Marginalized Men. Carl E. James. 6. Troubles of Black Boys in Urban Schools in the United States: Black Feminist and Gay Men's Perspectives. Lance T. McCready. 7. The Beer and the Boyz: Masculine Transitions in a Post-Industrial Economy. Anoop Nayak. 8. Hostile High School Hallways. Michael Kimmel. 9. Boys, Friendships and Knowing "It Wouldn't Be Unreasonable to Assume I Am Gay". Michael Kehler. 10. Tomboys and 'Female Masculinity': (Dis)embodying Hegemonic Masculinity, Queering Gender Identities and Relations. Emma Renold. 11. What Can He Want? Male Teachers, Young Children, and Teaching Desire. James R. King. 12. Beyond Male Role Models: Interrogating the Role of Male Teachers in Boys' Education. Wayne Martino. Contributors. Notes. Index.
Children's Geographies, 2023
School mealtimes, for many schools, are characterized by behavioural difficulties, a problematic ... more School mealtimes, for many schools, are characterized by behavioural difficulties, a problematic time of day requiring much attention and resources. Yet for many school food reformers, those who want food environments to be educative and pleasant, strict behavioural interventions are often contrary to the ideals of social learning. This paper presents an ethnographic case study conducted in Peartree Academy, an all-through academy school in England, to explore how schools and their staffs use the dining hall simultaneously as a community space for socialization and as surveillance mechanism. We deliberate on causes and variations of how this manifests. A Foucauldian lens, particularly viewing dining space as 'heterotopia' and 'heterochronies' (Foucault 1986), highlights tensions that shape the everyday for both students and staff in the school. As counter-spaces used differently by administrators, pupils, and food reformers, we show how rules and regulations imposed by staff work against the original intensions to develop the school dining hall into a community forum in which children develop positive eating behaviours and good citizenship. The children became subjected to power relations through which bodies became docile or resistant, with less opportunity for social learning. True progressive food reform thus requires, ultimately, deeply understanding and negotiating the multiple, overlapping functions of dining spaces.
International Review of Qualitative Research, 2021
How can (post-)qualitative inquiry do justice in uncertain times? Post-qualitative inquiry, in it... more How can (post-)qualitative inquiry do justice in uncertain times? Post-qualitative inquiry, in its embrace of radical uncertainty, held promise for ethical and political responsibility in an entangled, hardly knowable world. Lately, we (authors) are doubtful of that promise. For over a year, through in-person and Zoom conversations, before and during the global pandemic, punctuated by weekly protests of a resurging Black Lives Matter movement, we reckoned with our hopes, doubts, dreams, and disappointments of justice in qualitative and post-qualitative inquiry. We reconstituted our dialogue in this paper around the topics most pressing to us: coming to justice, being wary of idols and ideology, and deciding what matters in post-qualitative inquiry. We came to the uneasy conclusion that, with no one to blame yet everyone responsible, the veneer of justice is peeling away from post-qualitative inquiry; that post-qualitative inquiry has, largely against its will, become a stable, divis...
How to Write Qualitative Research, 2018
How to Write Qualitative Research, 2018
To create a societal change towards a sustainable future, constructive relations between science ... more To create a societal change towards a sustainable future, constructive relations between science and policy are of major importance. Boundary organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have come to play an important role in establishing such constructive relations. This study contributes to the development of empirically informed knowledge on the challenge of balancing different expectations for how the science-policy relation is to be constructed to create trustworthy knowledge and policy decisions, i.e., when to be what and to whom. This study revisits Climategate and uses the public debate on the IPCC's credibility, legitimacy, and policy relevance that followed Climategate as an analytical window to explore how the IPCC balanced the science-policy relation in a trustworthy manner. The analysis is based on a document study. The study shows how different expectations on the science-policy relation coexist, and how these risks create a loss of trust, credibility, legitimacy, and policy relevance. Thus, for boundary organizations to have a chance to impact policy discussions, reflexivity about the present epistemic ideals and expectations on knowledge production is of major importance, and must be reflected in an organizational flexibility that is open to different strategies on how to connect science and policy in relation to different actors and phases of the knowledge production process.
How to Write Qualitative Research, 2018
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a major public health concern. Preadolescent onset depression ... more Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a major public health concern. Preadolescent onset depression can be severe and can lead to serious consequences. MDD often has onsetearly in life and frequently follows a recurrent course. MDD though not so common in children, its presentation may be atypical leading to underdiagnosis and undertreatment. The diagnosis and management of childhood-onset depression poses a lot of challenge due to different and atypical presentations in children. We report a case of an 8-year-old boy, with the diagnosis of MDD, recurrent episode, severe, full remission, with atypical features by using DSM-5 criteria after repeated mental state examinations, rating scale, exploring history from parents, family members and observation in the ward. There was a significant improvement in his illness following three weeks of treatment with fluoxetine, lithium and supportive psychotherapy.
How to Write Qualitative Research, 2018
How to Write Qualitative Research, 2018
How to Write Qualitative Research, 2018
How to Write Qualitative Research, 2018
How to Write Qualitative Research, 2018
How to Write Qualitative Research, 2018
How to Write Qualitative Research, 2018
How to Write Qualitative Research, 2018
How to Write Qualitative Research, 2018
How to Write Qualitative Research, 2018
How Qualitative Data Analysis Happens: Moving Beyond "Themes Emerged", 2019
Handbook of Arts-Based Research, Edited by Patricia Leavy, 2017
In this chapter, the authors offer a theoretical and practical guide for researchers interested i... more In this chapter, the authors offer a theoretical and practical guide for researchers interested in utilizing the comics medium to carry out and disseminate academic scholarship.
Graphic Novels, Comics, and Education, 2013