Context and challenges
Institutional structures, cultures and practices are a sub-set of wider socio-political discourses. In the early 21st century they reflect the dominance of the market as a mechanism and discourse for describing how people and institutions interact, privileging competition over exchange and the efficient use of resources over other social values, such as support for the vulnerable. Through a desire to avoid risk linked to the demands of the markets in which they compete, universities in the USA and much of Western Europe developed ethical review processes to avoid reputational damage and potential litigation arising from research studies carried out under their auspices. This new audit culture is policed by various regulatory mechanisms such as institutional Ethical Review Boards (ERBs), the term used throughout this book, but sometimes called Human Research Ethics Committees or Institutional Review Boards, depending on national settings.
For researchers, this new regime took the place of traditional professional cultures. It regimented them into particular models of research design or normative approaches to gaining consent and relationship-building with participants rather than risking novel qualitative research designs which might generate valuable studies of marginal socio-cultural situations. It left researchers with the task of preparing project applications which represented culturally appropriate designs with demonstrable ethical integrity while identifying and mitigating risks and promoting beneficial outcomes for society.
Limiting what is considered appropriate research design constrains researchers from harnessing existing theoretical and methodological ideas to answer new questions and develop novel theoretical and methodological understandings (BERA, 2018, para 59). Researchers need the space to be critical and open-minded about what evidence is needed and how this might be appropriately sourced in order to carry out research in culturally appropriate and sensitive ways. Such research will make the familiar unfamiliar, challenge assumptions, taboos and power differentials and reach marginal and vulnerable members of society (Busher and Fox, 2020). Despite their support of a utilitarian ethical framework for research projects, ERBs can be persuaded to support critical, creative or novel methodological approaches. However, researchers must provide the evidence that such approaches will demonstrate ethical integrity and create valuable research that is socially beneficial and unlikely to cause the university any reputational harm.
This book considers the challenges of undertaking ethical and critical qualitative research in education using a variety of methodologies, including those based on participatory, visual and digital methods. It shows how studies can gain a âfavourable opinionâ from an ERB by foreseeing problems and minimising the potential for harm while trying to maximise benefits. It provides educational researchers with resources to explain their choices of research methodology, methods and processes to ERBs while deepening their ethical and methodological thinking. The authors of the chapters reflect critically on the messiness of the lived realities of their research projects, their use of less common research methodologies to suit particular social situations and how they might have acted in other ways to tackle the problems they encountered, including those of power and discrimination. For this reason, throughout this book non-gendered language is used unless gendered language is thought appropriate or relevant.1
To guide the chapter authorsâ reflections, the editors of this book invited them to illustrate their discussions with examples from their practice and to respond to four questions:
- What values prompted you to do this work and how did you share these with participants?
- What were the ethical considerations raised beforehand and how were these tackled in terms of meeting obligations (including to ERBs), maximising benefits and dealing with issues arising during the study and its publication?
- What does âempowermentâ and âvoiceâ mean to you as a researcher and how did you express this to your participants?
- In what ways were the participants given opportunities to be empowered in or through your study?
These questions were derived from the editorsâ collective reflections on their personal research and publication experience of thinking critically and ethically, and from engaging in British and European Research Association discussions and debates over the last decade. Two of the editors, Alison Fox and Carmel Capewell, are currently convenors of the BERA Special Interest Group in Research Methodology in Education; Alison is also a member of the BERA Blog editorial team and was part of the working group responsible for revising the BERA Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research, at the time of writing this book in its 4th edition (BERA, 2018). Hugh Busher is a former member of BERA and a member of the European Conference for Educational Research (ECER), attending networks on research in Ethnography and research in Social Justice and Intercultural Education and on Teacher Education. Carmel and Alison also work with Australian networks of researchers who have shaped their thinking.
The following sections outline the different authorsâ contributions to the book. The first section considers in brief the main foci of each chapter. The second section presents some of the themes that appear to emerge across chapters, but leaves it to readers to develop those ideas further.
Separately
Each chapter can be considered a case study of a particular research project by established researchers in the field of education who used a variety of less common methodologies to address questions of ethical and practical importance in a range of different UK and international contexts. Each chapter illustrates how researchers reflect on their decisions about research design through discussing the specific ethical and methodological dilemmas they encountered. The chapters are arranged in two sections, the first being six studies with and for children and young people of school age, and the second being six studies focused on adult learners.
In Section 1, three of the chapters are based on international research in Southern Africa and Ireland, with the others being based on research in England. McGregor, Frodsham and Deller focus on the persistence and perseverance necessary to overcome an ERBâs reluctance to support research on childrenâs views, voice and volition. In it they consider how ethical issues and concerns can be overcome if researchers can show that data in a research project can be collected and presented without distressing participants and making teachers feel uncomfortable. The key to this, they assert, lies in showing how the recording of childrenâs creative actions and utterances can avoid invading their privacy through the careful and thoughtful handling of visual and verbal data by researchers.
Chamberlain, Buckler and Mkwananzi focus on building a case for inclusive ways of knowing. They start from the standpoint that children and young people are experts in their own lives, a theme taken up in a different way in a later chapter by Busher. As such, they claim that the research process should value childrenâs perspectives through a research process of ethical and authentic engagement with them. They provide a case study of a research workshop in Zimbabwe which challenges the reader to critically reflect on the ethical and political pursuit of inclusive education. It also raises question about how values associated with inclusive education are negotiated, made explicit and upheld (or not) through the design and implementation of research principles and processes that seek to be inclusive.
Working with young people with autism and ADHD in Ireland is the focus of the chapter by OâSĂorĂĄin Mc Guckin and Carr-Fanning, based on their experiences as teachers of young people. They reflect that, âas in other parts of Europe, this now requires teachers to become âexpertâ in autism theory and practiceâ (p. 40). However, a major issue is for autistic participants in research to understand what research in practice means. The authors reflect on how researchers can transform the technical language used in research to reduce the barriers to understanding for autistic participants. They consider the ethical tensions of the ongoing nature of exploring a phenomenon such as literacy with autistic people and discuss how to enable teachers of autistic learners to embrace collaborative research projects with and for young autistic and ADHD children and their families.
The complexities of hearing studentsâ voices through the use of photo-narratives is discussed by Busher. He considers the ethical and micro-political complexities of a research project which tried to help students to express their identities in relation to the official policy and value discourses of a secondary school in England. However, this raised questions about the flows of power, micro-politics and ethics in school-based studies. Students can often articulate clearly what they experience as effective and ineffective teaching and learning practices and relationships between teachers and students. While this can help teachers and senior staff to reflect on their practice, it can also be perceived, especially by senior staff, as a threat to their authority. The chapter also reflects on the ethical permissions the researchers negotiated with their universityâs ERB and collaboratively with teachers and students.
Capewell shows how diaries and hearing maps can form a diagnostic tool to facilitate communication between adults and three- to seven-year-old children with glue ear in England. She considers how, by keeping diaries, children can break down a situation to analyse and express the impact of the environment on their ability to access understanding of speech in noise. Like two earlier authors in this book she argues of the importance of encouraging children to play a central part in data generation; giving them the choice of how much and when they recorded their perceptions; and decision-making over the interpretation of the impact different locations had on their ability to understand what is said to them. She found that children as young as three years old demonstrated sophisticated analytical and evaluating skills. It suggests that many of the concerns of ERBs regarding exploitation of children as participants could be challenged and overcome if researchers develop a methodology through which children control their participation in research and are consulted in the design stages.
Arising from research with migrant learners in South African primary schools between 2016 and 2019, Hanna discusses the use of the picturebook as a creative visual research method. She points out that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNICEF, 1999) expects children to be allowed to be involved in decision-making on anything that affects them, a point made by several other authors in this book, too. Like these other accounts, Hanna thinks that this responsibility extends to involving children in research to help make their voices heard. By using a wordless picturebook, The Arrival by Shaun Tan (2007), she wanted to show the children that their experiences were important to her as a researcher, in a school environment where home cultures were rarely discussed. Although this empowered children to share their voice, it also generated a major ethical risk. Through learners empathising with the characters, children could reveal more than they might have wished about their backgrounds, opening up sensitive conversations that she sometimes felt unqualified to navigate.
Section 2 of the book focuses on studies carried out about, with and/or for adults as learners. Four of the chapters are based on international research across Europe, in Denmark, Southern Africa and Thailand, while two relate to studies carried out in England. As with the chapters in the first section, each chapter draws on researchersâ lived experiences with participants who were vulnerable because of personal characteristics, such as gender, age or identified disabilities, or were made vulnerable because of their situations, such as having been displaced from their home country, being trainees/students or working in isolation.
How teachers can empower their own professional development through using Twitter chats is the focus of Emkeâs chapter. Her participants were freelance language teachers across Europe, in danger of working in isolation with their groups of students. She places educational Twitter chats, i.e. moderated tweet conversations linked to a unique hashtag (#), under the spotlight to reveal a little studied example of how empowerment can occur. She argues that investigations into educational Twitter chats need to engage with human and non-human actors in such studies, including the language teachers, the researcher and the Twitter platform, to overcome narrow, instrumental understandings of âself-empowermentâ. Her study reveals evidence that could be useful to other such professionals, and so, as such, highlights how dissemination will be important as an ethical responsibility for researchers in reaching out to them in terms of maximising a studyâs benefits.
Christensen raises ethical concerns about exclusions that took place in problem-based learning (PBL) completed in small study groups for students in two Danish universities. As a professional teacher she began to be concerned about student behaviours she observed during periods when students were left to themselves to complete their PBL project. She uses notions of power, subjectification and problematisation to challenge how groups are naturalised in the Danish pedagogical discourse as fundamentally good and unproblematic by revealing that this is far from the studentâs experiences. The research raised questions about the ethnographic exposure of exclusion in group learning and the obligation for a researcher to rethink their own role, which Christensen describes as âethosâ.
Jack reflects on the role of displaced populations in institutional ethics approval processes and calls for greater participation of the displaced in the design and implementation of research of which they are the focus. ERBs tend to consider displaced people as a âvulnerable populationâ needing protection, rather than people who can contribute to the debate as to what constitutes ethical practice for them. Consequently, the concept of vulnerability may serve to justify and perpetuate paternalistic and imperialistic approaches to research about and with those who find themselves in fragile contexts. She challenges that ERBs located a long way away from the site of a study may not be best placed to act as the arbiter of ethical practice there. In the case of her research in refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border, she proposes that, if the ERB had encouraged and supported the participation of the communities of displaced people in the research design, the research might have been more closely able to meet sound principles of ethical research.
Fox, Sida-Nicholls and Loe reflect on methods which reveal the social dimension to trainee teachersâ needs and support in their chapter. They focus on the role of a socio-mapping tool developed for use with training trainees to reveal their social networks, as information which can be useful to them and those who support them throughout their training. Such insights can benefit the trainees, the training providers and those in their school placement contexts. The authors propose the importance of making explicit a traineeâs personal network in order to better understand their ability to develop a relational resilience and how this might contribute to suc...
