Terri S. Wilson

Autonomy operates as a key term in debates about the rights of families to choose distinct approaches to education. Yet, what autonomy means is often complicated by the actual circumstances and contexts of schools, families, and children. In this essay, Terri S. Wilson and Matthew A. Ryg focus on the challenges involved in translating an ideal of educational autonomy into the “nonideal” contexts and circumstances that surround families' choices. Drawing on the methodological insights of Elizabeth Anderson and John Dewey, they sketch out a nonideal approach for exploring autonomy. Wilson and Ryg particularly focus on Dewey's notion of an ideal, his treatment of autonomy as a concept, and his view of the self. Such a nonideal approach draws attention toward the specific circumstances, habits, and environments that make autonomy possible. Wilson and Ryg illustrate the salience of this nonideal approach by exploring one example of an empirically engaged study of autonomy

School choice positions parents as consumers who select schools that maximize their preferences. This account has been shaped by rational choice theory. In this essay, Terri Wilson contrasts a rational choice framework of preferences with John Dewey's understanding of interest. To illustrate this contrast, she draws on an example of one parent's school decision-making process. Dewey's concept of interest offers an alternative conceptual vocabulary attentive to the complex, value-laden, and evolving process of choosing a school. Her analysis considers how schools might not just appeal to the preexisting preferences of families, but might instead actively shape those interests to democratic ends.

In this essay, I describe some of the methodological dimensions of my ongoing research into how parents choose schools. I particularly focus on how philosophical frameworks and analytical strategies have shaped the empirical portion of my research. My goal, in this essay, is to trace and explore the ways in which philosophy of education—as a methodological orientation—may enable researchers to be attentive to the normative dimensions of human experience. In addition, I will argue that philosophically informed empirical research offers new possibilities for making normative arguments that are closely connected to the non-ideal, complex ground of actual experience

Many scholars have pursued philosophical inquiry through empirical research. These empirical projects have been shaped—to varying degrees and in different ways—by philosophical questions, traditions, frameworks and analytic approaches. This issue explores the methodological challenges and opportunities involved in these kinds of projects. In this essay, we briefly introduce the nine projects featured in this issue and then address two key questions: First, how do these diverse contributors understand their empirical research as a mode of philosophical inquiry? And, second, what is the value in engaging in empirical research oneself, as opposed to drawing on the empirical work of others? As the essays in this issue demonstrate, there is no single answer to these questions. Our hope is that these guiding questions—and the diverse and divergent answers offered within this special issue—might demonstrate the live and pressing methodological questions involved in integrating empirical research and philosophical inquiry