Programme 328, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot & Sociology (16-5-18)

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney

On this week's programme I bring you my interview with Professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot has written 10 books, including The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture and The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other. In the course of our interview, we discussed the following matters:

• Diversity and tokenism
• Why education research needs to move away from a pathological approach
• An alternative approach to conducting educational research
• Visibility of children in classrooms
• When global atrocities make the news, how can they be handled in classrooms?
• What looking at education through a sociological lens can make visible
• The importance of context in social science research
• Portraiture as a form of research
• Her book Exit: The Endings that Set Us Free
• Why truth matters more than facts