Joe and I were so informed by Claude's work, what a intellectual heritage he has left us.

On several occasions, I have been tempted to rush and respond to some of your posts. Each time, I sat in front of the computer screen poised to begin writing but decided against it because I would have been responding not because it was time to respond, but merely out of an obligation to do so. I looked beyond prompts from a dear friend who nudged me to respond but the time was not quite right so I waited. I felt like there needed to be more time for the questions you have posed to seep through my thoughts and those of other readers. After reading and re-reading your posts, and viewing the responses you have provided to each other, I am sure I made the right decision.

Research in education (see Clar Doyle’s blog and the wonderful responses to it on this site) is going through a fascinating and disturbing period in the contemporary era. As part of a larger effort to recover forms of dominant power, some researchers in education are attempting to “recover” more traditional ways of doing educational research. In this process tired and damaging epistemological and ontological assumptions are being re-inserted into the cauldron of knowledge production and self-appointed gatekeepers are attempting to marginalize critical research in general and attempts such as the bricolage to gain a more complex understanding of educational processes in particular. It is not a good time for researchers concerned with social justice, the machinations of power, and the efforts to construct new ways of seeing a world and an educational status quo in crisis.