Past and Present: Advocating for Rural Education

In my ongoing SSHRCC project regarding the history of parental advocacy for children’s schooling in rural parts of BC, issues of methods and methodologies have become paramount. In the project, we are comparing two data sets: one historical and one contemporary. My research assistants, both PhD students in EDST, are asking key questions about the difficulties in bringing these sources into conversation with each other. What are the methodological challenges in doing so? What needs to be taken into consideration, from an analytical point of view, when one is working with sets of data that speak to similar issues and yet are decades apart? Stay tuned for some ongoing posts about this tricky issue.