Educational Researcher, Vol. 47 No. 1, pp. 53–61 DOI: 10.3102/0013189X17737284 © 2017 AERA. http://edr.aera.net JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 53 M any policy and research problems in education are inherently issues of space, place, and geography. Questions of how school services are arranged, how resources and demographics are distributed across a city, and where students go to school are essentially questions of location, distance, and proximity. Such factors are evident in many educa- tion policy issues, such as desegregation, teacher labor markets, property tax distribution, and resource allocation. While many policymakers and scholars continue to address these problems without attention to the geographical context in which they emerge and persist, in the past decade, geospatial approaches, especially Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approaches, to education research have gained recognition as an effective meth- odology. Indeed, a growing number of education policy scholars have recognized the efficacy of GIS and used it to study educa- tion policy outcomes and inform future policy directions (Butler, Hamnett, Ramsden, & Webber, 2007; Cobb, 2003; Gulosino & Lubienski, 2011; Lubienski, 2005; Lubienski, Lee, & Gordon, 2013; Richards, 2014; Taylor, 2002, 2009; Zhang & Cowen, 2009). Yet, current applications of GIS in education research have been limited to quantifiable social and racial demograph- ics—relying mostly on census-based data—in depicting student mobility and school choice outcomes. Often, explanations for the spatialized patterns of education outcomes and conditions have been left underexplored or to researchers’ conjecture. As a case in point, the relatively new issue of school choice high- lights an education policy question with geographic dimensions, such as concerns about catchment areas, routes to school options, and availability of services. All of these are paramount in under- standing the potential of this reform movement. Yet research on this issue has tended to be either quantitative, with a focus on distance, catchment boundaries, and/or student demographic characteristics (Butler et al., 2007; Lubienski et al., 2013; Taylor, 2002), or qualita- tive, with a focus on experiences or perceptions (Gabay-Egozi, 2016; Reay, 2007; Yoon, 2015). Thus, we see two distinct con- versations—one taking a bird’s-eye view, the other an on-the- ground perspective—with little attention to communicating across this divide or capitalizing on the opportunity to integrate the two conversations to enhance our overall understanding of patterns and make more effective policy recommendations. In this article, we use school choice as a reference point to demonstrate the need for an integrated, mixed-methods approach to policy issues with geo- graphic characteristics and suggest some ways this may be done. 737284EDR XX X 10.3102/0013189X17737284Educational ResearcherEducational Researcher research-article 2017 1 University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada 2 Indiana University, Bloomington, IN Thinking Critically in Space: Toward a Mixed-Methods Geospatial Approach to Education Policy Analysis Ee-Seul Yoon 1 and Christopher Lubienski 2 This paper suggests that synergies can be produced by using geospatial analyses as a bridge between traditional qualitative- quantitative distinctions in education research. While mapping tools have been effective for informing education policy studies, especially in terms of educational access and choice, they have also been underutilized and underdeveloped. This paper focuses on the potential benefits of expanding geospatial analysis, which has traditionally been heavily quantitative in its orientation, by incorporating qualitative research, including the accounts of lived experiences and perceptions that guide and shape institutional and individual behaviors and decisions. To that end, the paper proposes an agenda for mixed-methods research by drawing on new advances in the fields of human and critical geography. Keywords: critical theory; education policy; equity; geographic information systems; interdisciplinary teaching and research; mixed-methods; school choice REVIEWS/ESSAYS