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In this chapter, we explore the use of participatory and community-based research (CBR) strategies within institutional ethnography. Reflecting on our current, past, and future projects, we discuss the utility of community-based and participatory methods for grounding one’s research in the actualities of participants’ lives. At the same time, we note ontological and practical differences between most community-based participatory action research (PAR) methodologies and institutional ethnography. While participants’ lives and experiences ground both approaches, people’s perspectives are not considered as research findings for institutional ethnographers. In an institutional ethnography, the objects of analysis are the institutional relations, which background and give shape to people’s actualities. The idea is to discover something through the research process that is useful to participants. As such, the use of community-based and participatory methods during analysis suggests the greatest utility of this sociological approach for people.

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a sociology that focuses on the everyday world as problematic. As a theory/method of discovery, it focuses on how the work people do is organized and coordinated by text-mediated and text-regulated social organization. Actor-network Theory (ANT) is a theory/method that is concerned with how realities get enacted. ANT focuses on a multiplicity of human and nonhuman actors (e.g., computers, documents, and laboratory equipment) and how the relations between them are constituted and how they are made to hang together to create certain realities. In this chapter, we discuss some of the similarities and differences between IE and ANT. We begin with an overview of IE and ANT and focus on their ontological and epistemological “shifts.” We then discuss some of the similarities and differences between IE and ANT, particularly from an IE stance. In doing so, we put these approaches into dialog and allude to some of the potential benefits and pitfalls of combining these approaches.

For over a decade, the early grade reading assessment (EGRA) has been used to measure and report on students’ acquisition of five reading skills. Education development initiatives funded by the US Agency for International Development, the World Bank, Department for International Development (DFID), and other agencies have facilitated the use and adaptation of the EGRA into over 100 languages in more than 65 countries (Dubeck & Gove, 2015, p. 315). Guidelines for the proper use and the limitations of the EGRA have been circulated widely. An international evidence base that challenges the theoretical underpinnings and the expanded use of the EGRA is also growing (Bartlett, Dowd, & Jonason, 2015). Not yet explored to date, however, is the use of the EGRA as a measure to determine Payment by Results (PbR) in a donor agency initiative. This chapter examines the use of the EGRA oral reading fluency (ORF) subtest as a PbR learning outcomes measure in DFID’s Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) projects, and it concludes that the way in which the EGRA ORF was used for PbR was a misuse of the EGRA, and ultimately it did not serve well the PbR project beneficiaries, the marginalized girls.

This chapter identifies that distributed leadership is about sharing power for political pluralism. Distributed leadership has a comprehensive commitment to bringing different groups with different interests, different languages and dialects, different knowledge bases, different metaphysical knowledge and different religions, or no religion, together through provisional agreement on key principals of political pluralism. Marginalised groups may not feel like they belong and may be vulnerable to ideologies that give them a sense of being disconnected from community. Such a position stands as a barrier to political pluralism and shared world views. The situation might be ignored in schools because developing political liberalism through participatory, evidence-informed leadership that is logical, moral and ethical requires time, and agents need to be prepared for such identity work. However, the problem cannot be ignored if community members seek to belong with risky gangs, and are vulnerable to radicalisation, which is very dangerous for them and for their communities. Empowering others may be achieved by developing their capability to ask good questions, and apply collaborative critical thinking for solving social and personal problems. Such empowerment requires shifts from hierarchical teaching of standardised knowledge that is right or wrong to doing the right thing as mature citizens in becoming. The chapter also identifies that it cannot be assumed that leaders are willing or able to distribute leadership, or that doing so would be a panacea for navigating the turbulence faced by their schools to empower societal innovators for equity and renewal. Rather, we concur with Leithwood et al. (2008) who advocate for a thoughtful and purposeful approach to developing leadership for school improvement.