Describing the Research Design and Methods and Introducing the School Sites and Principal Participants

In this chapter, we describe the research design and methods used in the Principal Leadership for Parent Engagement project. We initially set the scene for our research by providing contextual information about the state of Queensland in Australia where the project took place. This is followed by a brief history of the project, our design-based research approach, and research rationale—all of which contributed to our selection of the project’s four school sites. We subsequently introduce Schwab’s (1973) notion of commonplaces in the planning of curriculum as the basis for our analytic framework. Schwab’s commonplaces comprise four coordinated equally important spheres of influence (dimensions)—students, teachers, curriculum, and milieus—where milieus consist of schools, classrooms, parents, and communities. In the Principal Leadership for Parent Engagement project, we added digital technologies as a further milieu. The chapter describes data collection, analysis methods, and the research questions before briefly introducing each of the four schools and their principals in a section called, School and Principal Snapshots. The chapter concludes by discussing how the different dimensions of Schwab’s notion of commonplaces which we used were grouped under broad headings and the perceived advantage of these groupings for improving communication of our research findings in subsequent chapters. Our preliminary analysis of data in the snapshot section lends more weight to our argument about the potential value and utility of agency as achievement (Biesta & Tedder, 2007) as a conceptual tool in principal leadership for parent engagement research.