Collaborative Cross-Cultural Research Methodologies in Early Care and Education Contexts

Samara Madrid Akpovo, Mary Jane Moran, Robyn Brookshire, Samara Madrid Akpovo, Mary Jane Moran, Robyn Brookshire

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315460758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing from an array of international scholars' practical experiences, Collaborative Cross-Cultural Research Methodologies in Early Care and Education Contexts demonstrates how to conduct collaborative cross-cultural research and investigates the field's nuances and dilemmas. The book focuses on rich, real-life attempts to negotiate and develop culturally sensitive theoretical and conceptual frameworks, equivalent studies, and systems of relationships across distances, languages, ethics, and practices. The models presented consider the possible political and moral implications for all participants in cross-cultural research endeavors, including issues of race, colonization, immigration, indigenous populations, and more.

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INTRODUCTION

Rethinking Cross-Cultural Research Methodology through a Collaborative Lens

Samara Madrid Akpovo, Mary Jane Moran, and Robyn Brookshire

Over the past two decades, commensurate with an increase in globalization, a growing interest in conducting qualitative cross-cultural studies in early care and education settings has taken place. Nevertheless, the number of collaborative cross-cultural studies remains low, and far fewer of these studies actually illustrate methodological details and challenges faced by early childhood researchers. The purpose of this edited volume is aimed squarely at drawing from a wide array of international scholars’ practical experiences to demonstrate how to conduct qualitative collaborative cross-cultural research. How does one develop collaborative partnerships? How does collaboration inform the research designs and methods? How does one navigate cultural differences with research partners and participants? How does one move past collaboration in data collection to collaboration in qualitative data analysis and writing? These are just a few questions among the multiple questions and dilemmas that we address in this book along with many more of the everyday and local nuances that arise in the cross-cultural landscape. In particular, foci include rich and real-life examples that reveal attempts to negotiate, navigate, and develop culturally sensitive theoretical and conceptual frameworks, equivalent studies, and systems of relationships across distances, languages, ideologies, ethics, and practices.

There are few sources available to emerging and established scholars on how to conduct qualitative collaborative cross-cultural research in early care and education contexts. In fact, the impetus of this volume came from the co-editors discussing the lack of resources about the practicalities of early childhood cross-cultural research. For most of us in this field, we have “learned by doing” rather than by having a book to guide us through the steps of the research process.

There are few volumes that one can read and discuss with others on how to approach, anticipate, and move through the formulation of a research design and implementation of a study in two or more cultural contexts that focus on young children in formal (e.g., classrooms) and informal contexts (e.g., homes and communities). Rather, we find ourselves revisiting the seminal works of anthro pologists Bea and John Whiting (1963), Robert Levine (1980), David Lancy (1996, 2008), psychologists Barbara Rogoff (2003), Patricia Greenfield (1994), Charles Super and Sarah Harkness (1986), and Carolyn Edwards (1993), with access to far fewer contemporary “educational anthropologists and early childhood education specialists” such as Joseph Tobin and colleagues (1989, 2009), Amita Gupta (2014), and Rebecca New (1993; 2010), among others. Thus, we bring together the experiences of contemporary scholars whose work has crossed the disciplines of education, psychology, family studies, and anthropology, and the boundaries of diverse early care and education contexts. Specifically, our emphasis is on qualitative study design and methodology that is relevant to research in the twenty-first century as our cross-cultural encounters become more frequent and our lives more mobile through technology and globalization. Our goal is to provide examples of long-term research projects that are not based on deficient models. Rather, our examples are grounded in equivalency models of research that include multi-modal and multi-vocal approaches that consider and represent issues of race, colonization, immigration, or indigenous populations, and challenge the hegemony of child development in traditional Euro-Western cross-cultural research. Our thesis is to present research models, from the various chapter authors, that position all research as a relational, political, and ethical act. In these studies, “Methodologies form fluid and becoming structures that extend processes of knowing and being, thus shaping experiences, senses, and affect” (Koro-Ljungberg & Clark, 2016, p. 2). Therefore, culturally responsive research tools, that utilize ways of knowing and being in cultural context, are woven into the theoretical frameworks and research designs and methods. We seek to replace normative models of cross-cultural research with models built upon authentic, responsible, and equitable collaborative relationships; this is research that can transform and challenge both the participants and the researchers.

The researchers in this edited volume seek to understand not only how to conduct collaborative cross-cultural research but also ask whom is the research for, whom does it serve, whom does it benefit, and whose voice must be included in the research to make it trustworthy, relevant, and ethical? Collaborative and relational research designs do not imply that accountability of the data set and interpretations are compromised or diluted. Collaboration is more complex than simply triangulating data with member checks or recruiting cultural informants. Rather, the chapters in this volume make visible how culturally relevant, nonnormative, and fluid cross-cultural research findings, in addition to rigorous methodology, also require rigorous emotional and intellectual commitments from the research teams and participants. Relationships and research method development is a parallel process because collaboration exists at all stages, from the initial formulation of research questions, through data collection and analysis, and to the final publication, dissemination, and outcomes of the work.

If you are reading this book, you most likely have already taken the perspective that cross-cultural research and postpositivist qualitative methodologies are complex, messy, situated, relational, emergent, and socially constructed. In this volume we do not argue why this type of research should be conducted but rather reframe the conversation from a theoretical discussion of methodologies to the sharing of lived experience when enacting these processes of knowing and being in cultural context. We open a space for a new conversation that considers how the lived experience of collaboration adds legitimacy, depth, fluidity, meaning, and rigor to the research designs, methods, and findings of these cross-cultural projects. While we use the phrase cross-cultural, there is a blurring of the lines between cross-cultural and intercultural relationships. When conducting collaborative cross-cultural research, one inherently constructs intercultural relationships (Liamputtong, 2010). Given this, many of the chapters also describe the negotiation of intercultural communication and the development of intercultural knowledge and skills.

Overview of the Book

The chapters in this edited volume illuminate not only the theories and epistemology of qualitative cross-cultural research but also the “on the ground” daily practices needed to conduct ethical and responsible educational research in an era of rapid globalization and internationalization. Historical overviews of cross-cultural research in early care and educational contexts are provided along with a current focus on how cross-cultural research has transformed with the advancement of young children’s education, globalization of childhood, a growing interest in indigenous and decolonizing research methodologies (Denzin & Lincoln, 2008; Liamputtong, 2010), and the ability to collaborate through the use of technology and researcher mobility.

The following 11 chapters are organized into three parts: 1) Collaborative Cross-Cultural Research as a Situated Activity, 2) Reflections on Positionality, Ethics, and Power, and 3) Multi-Modal and Multi-Vocal Illuminations of Lived Experience. Each chapter presents reflective experiences from early childhood researchers and/or empirical data from well-informed and in-depth programs of cross-cultural research. Authors invited to contribute are from various disciplines and cultural settings whose research projects are not merely replicated in another culture but are co-created with cross-cultural partners’ intent on generating rich data through multiple modes of inquiry and representation (e.g., video, audio, photographs, dialogue, artifacts). The unifying theme is the stories of the research collaborations and the lessons learned from seasoned cross-cultural scholars about building and sustaining reciprocal relationships. We asked the scholars to be willing to share the messy aspects of the research process rather than the sanitized version often reported in research articles. The chapter authors speak of the emergent and discomforting encounters inherent within the daily life of qualitative research, especially those that come from continually forming and reforming partnerships and constructing shared meanings about the research process over time and across multiple contexts. Our hope is that these stories offer an emotional, relational, and embodied point of reference for your own cross-cultural endeavors.

Part I: Collaborative Cross-Cultural Research as a Situated Activity

The chapters in Part I have overarching commonalities that center on the following themes: 1) initiation and ownership of research, 2) local knowledge guiding actions, and 3) problematizing the conception of the Other. In all chapters, the research collaborations were not planned but rather were “fortuitous” invitations or meetings that organically occurred and developed. While each author has a unique story about the formulation of the collaboration, each chapter details the relationships developed from a chance encounter, an unanticipated phone call, the meeting of a doctoral student, or simply finding people with similar research interests. The outcome was research projects that were collaboratively owned, conceived, and nurtured not by one individual, but by communities, partners, and teams. The second thematic focus is allowing local knowledge to guide research activities and decision making. Research, regardless of how collaborative one tries to make it, is still grounded in the goals of the researcher. The authors uncover how engaged and committed inquiry, along with deep listening, can shift the foci and directions during the research process. Drawing on local knowledge means the researchers must be open, flexible, and observant of intercultural dynamics. The last topic focuses on the construction of the Other. The authors provide lived examples to help the reader understand what it feels like to be Othered, how Others have been historically positioned in research, and the process of discovering the Other within ourselves.

In the opening chapter of Part I, Fortuitous Invitations, and Possible Ways Forward: Early Childhood Education, Care, and Development in the Majority World, Alan Pence reflects on 25 years of experience focused on collaborative multi-faceted research with indigenous communities in North Central Canada and countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Pence attributes the success of these long-term collaborative partnerships to the initiation of research. It was an unexpected invitation from the Executive Director of the Meadow Lake Tribal Council, and not his agenda, that laid the foundational direction of the research collaboration. The project was initiated by the goals and desires of the council, which led to outcomes that supported and fostered positive experiences for the community. Pence carefully outlines the principles of developing collaborative partnerships in the Majority World as the field of early childhood becomes increasingly internationalized and infused with global initiatives. Embedded in his chapter is an underlying tone that supports the Other, which he defines as the missing voice in early childhood cross-cultural research. He argues that ownership is the key sustainer of initiatives. Ownership is often undermined when research ideas and actions come from outside the community. Another guiding principle is the importance of local knowledge. Local knowledge is essential for developing multiply informed and culturally sensitive research programs. More importantly, Pence warns that it is “we,” the professionals, who have historically been “the problem” and asks researchers to reconsider definitions about what constitutes scientific research. The chapter concludes with the reminder that collaborative cross-cultural research opens up a space for people to “learn from one another, to understand the importance of context, and to appreciate that through the ‘stranger’ we can not only better understand the world, but the blinders we wear that have hid it from us” (p. 28).

Chapter 3, Two Decades of Collaboration: Decolonizing Cross-Cultural Research, is also based on a long-term collaboration on the African continent between Beth Blue Swadener and Kagendo Mutua. The authors retrace paths taken and reflect upon lessons learned from their North-South collaboration. The metaphor of the taproot is used to describe the collaboration, which provides an image of the many fibrous roots that diverge and reconnect around the core of their relationship. A discussion of race, privilege, and Otherness is used to make available a counter narrative to Western research models. Mutua beautifully, and carefully, details the authoring of her identities as an African scholar in the United States. By naming and claiming herself as being both a researcher of the field and also from the field, she reveals the struggles of defining herself in an academic community that is largely driven by a dominant, White-male culture.

The dominant culture often positions participants as objects of study rather than partners and people with real lives and real problems. Authentic discussions about decolonizing research cannot happen without acknowledging the uncomfortable entanglements that exist between the production of research and the consumption of knowledge that research generates. Whose knowledge is being supported? What knowledge is being created? What knowledge is left unexplored or exploited? Swadener and Mutua raise critical questions about decolonization as a methodology for educational research and the notion that research can be truly decolonizing while living in a society grounded in Western privilege and capitalism. They warn against romanticizing this type of work, pointing to the daily reality of people who still live a colonized life under material conditions that do not respect the humanness of all people. The authors’ heartfelt narrative and reflections remind us of the deep commitment, humility, humor, and courage it takes to develop and sustain two decades of research.

In Chapter 4, Narrative Methodologies: Challenging and Elevating Cross-Cultural Complexities, Sonja Arndt and Marek Tesar continue with themes of initiation/ ownership, local knowledge, and conception of the Other as they challenge hegemonies in research conducted at early childhood centers in New Zealand. The chapter highlights the complexity of cross-cultural narrative research and asks the reader to reflect on unknown, evolving, and invisible aspects of the researchers and participants. A braided river is used, metaphorically, to illustrate how research methodologies, when grounded in local and indigenous knowledge, diverge and come together. This image represents the potential fluid, ever changing, and intertwining aspects of a project. Such projects have multiple moving paths that frequently and rapidly shift to create new unexpected formations and/or to erode old formations. They also explore the Aboriginal Australian approach to storying (i.e., yarning) as a means to disrupt the Western way of conducting research. Yarning, within narrative methodologies, is a relaxed and informal way of sharing ideas. Arndt and Tesar push the boundaries of established, more structured data collection techniques and offer yarning as a collaborative relational procedure to gather in-depth cultural realities using indigenous tools for meaning making and knowledge sharing. The authors further draw upon Kristevea’s philosophical conceptions of Otherness and the foreigner-within noting that it is only when the foreigner-within is reflexively examined that the Other becomes less threatening. Researchers are asked to reflect on the difficulties that arise when they have predetermined, static, or fixed ideas and subjectivities in a context that ebbs and flows with multi-cultural realities, epistemologies, and ontologies. Arndt and Tesar advise researchers to embrace an intellectual space of non-knowing and lean into the uncertainty, which is both productive and important when bringing together indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives. This reconceptual ization of narrative methodologies as fluid, relational, and unknowable, blurs, disrupts, and troubles the “subject in process” and “foreignness” of the self and others invested in research processes.

Chapter 5, Collaboration as a Healing and Decolonizing Research Tool: The Narratives of Three Early Childhood Researchers, focuses solely on the experience of the three collaborators and development of the research team. While Chapters 1 and 2 looked back over decades of collaboration, this chapter reflects on newly established relationships. Successes and failures, as novice cross-cultural researchers, lay the foundation for the chapter. Sapna Thapa, Samara Madrid Akpovo, and Deborah Young embarked on a three-year collaborative research project that examined pre-service teachers’ notions of the child in cultural context. Video data were recorded from three communities to illustrate common routines of the child in the US, Nepal, and Nicaragua. Using video data as a provocation, preservice teachers in the three countries were shown the video footage and asked to discuss, with their peers, what they demonstrated about the child in cultural context. Each researcher also spent an in-depth period of time within the countries to ensure video data were grounded in the local knowledge of the community. The authors share how plans for data collection were interrupted and reconsidered based on unanticipated occurrences. The research collaboration afforded a space where they could explore emotional reactions such as love, fear, frustration, and compassion when faced with ethical dilemmas as researchers in vulnerable Majority World contexts. Thapa, Madrid Akpovo, and Young describe how they developed a framework aimed at decolonizing the ethnocentric views of each researcher and illustrate the daily workings of a research team when using a healing methodology. The authors recount how the research collaboration was initiated, the struggles of gathering the data during a natural disaster (e.g., Nepal Earth quake), how they created a “fluid” online document to build a collaborative research agenda, and how they carefully combined, based in their individual histories, a collaborative framework.

Part II: Reflections on Positionality, Ethics, and Power

Part II shares the voices of researchers who seek to enact new, shifting, and provisional methodologies built on ethics and values for authentic collaboration, shared power, reciprocity, and multi-vocal processes. These narratives reveal ontological approaches for building respectful partnerships with an awareness of the power dynamics inherent to the research process and reflexivity about a history of colonizing approaches. While the stories reveal the complexity of negotiating roles, identities, and actions toward these aims, they also bring to light on-the-ground illustrations of how to make the effort, with offerings to other research teams on how to consider similar values in their future work. Ultimately, these chapters share the researchers’ vulnerability with the very human endeavor of forming relationships with collaborators and allowing the research to be shaped by and ...