Doing Educational Research

Overcoming Challenges In Practice

Marit Honerød Hoveid, Lucian Ciolan, Angelika Paseka, Sofia Marques da Silva, Marit Honerød Hoveid, Lucian Ciolan, Angelika Paseka, Sofia Marques da Silva

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526482426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Investigación en educación

Every educational research project has challenges and obstacles that need to be managed and overcome. This book uses real case studies employing a wide range of research methodologies and drawn from educational contexts across Europe to explore these challenges offering flexible and universal guidance that you can apply to your own research.

Published in partnership with EERA, this book is:

· Realistic and informed: It explores a range of perspectives on educational research, from planning to data collection to international collaboration

· Challenging: It integrates a holistic and critical view on the process of educational research

· C ulturally aware: It covers a variety of research projects from different countries and encourages you to challenge dominant perspectives in education

This is the first major English language textbook for postgraduate and postdoctoral education researchers that represents and explores the range of research traditions that exist throughout Europe and what they mean in practice.

Part I Getting Ready for the Unexpected

An Introduction to Challenges in Educational Research

Sofia Marques da Silva

Lucian Ciolan

‘First and foremost: have fun!’

‘So watch out for methodological watchdogs!’ (Pierre Bourdieu in Wacquant, 1989: 54)

Vividly lived experiences and decisions taken while doing research persist largely unexplored and unaccounted. Research trajectories are not linear and are shaped by a wide scope of influences, judgements, issues of credibility, competing interests or of limits in addressing specific education questions. Decisions we make when conducting research are rarely divorced from concerns related to the social implications of our research. New developments related to the politics of financing research, to higher education institutions competing globally, to the use of new technologies to generate data, to the inclusion of participants in the research design, or to education taking place in a diversity of new contexts are introducing new questions that need to be addressed. This book has the overarching aim to provide a collection of chapters that may work as a guide to better understand and reflect on our decisions and to become more focused on identifying and dealing with different types of challenges.

What is this book about?

The focus of this book is on discussing challenges selected by contributors, which have emerged within a research project. This book provides the reader with different types of compromises and negotiations that researchers make either to maintain high quality standards or to design research that makes sense to their contexts and participants.

This book brings together a group of researchers from the field of education to share their views and generate knowledge about challenges while enrolled in a research project. We asked for their narratives and accounts on their processes of transformation while doing research. The aim was to have a collection of contributions focused on different challenges, using a diversity of methodologies and, thus, accounting for research activity within a diversity of designs in educational research. Alongside this, a dual aim was to have a diversity of countries represented and to illustrate the value of contributions of researchers from different nationalities, generations, schools of thought and research cultures. This edited book is designed around cases, each one providing a detailed discussion focused on research challenges and the scenarios in which they are disclosed. It is aimed to assist particularly PhD students and emerging researchers, and is directed to those who need to find answers and elucidations to assist their on-going or starting research project.

What is the focus? Challenges and cases

What qualifies as a challenge? Doing educational research is about constructing pathways and possibilities for human understanding, making sense of educational and social phenomena, interactions, policies and practices. Today, researchers are being challenged by new and multi-sited contexts and phenomena, collective definitions of agendas, dealing with the multi-modal nature of the information that affects education practices, policies and discourses. Research conditions, organisations and cultures have also increasingly changed over the past decades. Research may have become a standardised application of techniques and instrumental solutions, through an increased pressure on delivering outcomes that have a market value; or it may have become a more transparent and negotiated process, involving research participants working collaboratively, against dominant forms of thinking. These are two very different frames of reference for educational research.

We understand that methodological challenges are also theoretical challenges: these might be the challenge of engaging participants; of negotiation and dealing with different powers – institutional, contextual, political; of maintaining a methodological critical perspective; of understanding our own agency; of developing equitable partnerships; of doing educational research in familiar contexts and the difficulty in creating the necessary analytical strangeness (Silva, 2011). Challenges might be at an epistemological level and demand epistemic disruptions (Meneses, 2008; Santos, 2008) or may be everyday life decisions aimed at sustaining participants’ commitment during the process, evoking researchers’ feelings of vulnerability (Dickson-Swift et al., 2007). Doing research involves experimenting in awkward situations and often finding ourselves in uncomfortable places, making controversial decisions, often challenging methodological prescriptions (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Either way, while undertaking an enquiry, researchers are always embarking on both an arduous and gratifying endeavour.

We consider of equal importance the capacity of the researcher to understand the challenges of the research process as they occur in practice and the capacity to make decisions to overcome these challenges. Researchers need to be reflective practitioners themselves and have the capacity not just to carefully design and conduct the process to obtain valid and reliable data and results to advance knowledge and/or improve policy and practice. They also need the capacity to be reflexive in relation to their own process of research, in order to understand what they have done as well as imagine and predict challenges they may encounter, what decisions they make and what can be learnt for their own future projects or for other researchers facing similar challenges.

This is not a common methods book. Other excellent publications already cover different methods and methodologies, from classic approaches to the most up to date research designs and innovative techniques for collecting and analysing data. In the past decade we have seen a proliferation of books and handbooks on methods with an increasing interest from different generations of researchers. This book is not dedicated to methods and respective techniques nor is it about decisions at every step of a research process. Other books dedicated to methods already cover topics on how to design and conduct a research project in education.

Why is this book unique?

This book focuses on a European dimension of doing educational research. This is understood not as a celebratory, Europeanised or exclusionary perspective, as problematised by Philippou (2005), but as a global and ‘joint project that envisages democracy, pluralism and an intercultural approach to diversity’ (Enache, 2011: 110). In this introduction the editors would like to allude to the fact that this is an international collection of contributions, with a diversity of cultural, linguistic styles and institutional backgrounds. A question raised in a publication accounting for a roundtable during the ECER 2014 anniversary celebrations in Porto, is very much adequate to this book: ‘Who is given voice within this forum?’ As explained in the publication, ‘This question is specific for the EERA and ECER, and is maybe a question we need as a constant reminder of the multiple landscapes of nationalities and languages we operate in’ (Hoveid, 2015: 23). This plurality of belongings is at the centre of the attempt to create understandings and agreements on interpretations (Gadamer, 1989), and it reminds us of, and keeps us awake to, the power relations within the dialogic process of reaching a common meaning through an hermeneutic understanding (Habermas, 1984, 1988).

The book draws on a diversity of researchers’ experiences while developing their research within specific projects and it represents the opportunity to demonstrate how a networked collaboration may be cultivated across diversity. The European dimension has been a central discussion for a long time within EERA, fostering vivid discussions and controversies about the meaning underlying this idea, which is influencing research policies and communities at European level (Moos and Wubbels, 2014). This book is a contribution to develop a bit further what might be included and framed by this dimension, of an inherently blurred, yet distinctive, but never complete, nature. By doing this we are not seeking isolation, by just including research projects uniquely developed on European soil, but we are making space for educational researchers across Europe. This is also our tribute to EERA history and a contribution to the construction of a European educational research space (Keiner and Hofbauer, 2014; Lawn et al., 2003; Sirota et al., 2002). The European dimension will hopefully be seen both in this and other publications from EERA and in the organisation itself frequently inviting ‘researchers to share the journey undertaken so far and through this become engaged in the future development of the association’ (Hoveid, Keiner and Figueiredo, 2014: 401).

EERA has been fostering high-quality education since its foundation in 1994 (Madalin´ska-Michalak, 2018); an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About The Editors
• About The Contributors
• About EERA
• Part I Getting Ready for the Unexpected
• An Introduction to Challenges in Educational Research
• 1 Doing Educational Research
• Part II Negotiating Research Contexts And Demands From The Field
• 2 Entering A Fluid Research Field
• 3 Using Photo-Elicitation Interviewing To Bridge Social Gaps
• 4 Producing And Sharing Knowledge With A Research Field
• Part III Exploring Other Paths For Interpretation
• 5 Doing systematic literature reviews – ‘net fishing’ or ‘whale hunting’?
• 6 Doing Participatory Stories Research – Detoxing Narratives
• 7 Doing Multi-Level Statistical Modelling With Hierarchically Nested Samples
• 8 Doing Data Analysis – Collaboration, Creativity And Critique1
• Part IV Building A Common Ground For Understanding
• 9 Discussing Sociological Gaps And Power Relations In An International Setting
• 10 Addressing The Context In Cross-National Comparative Research
• 11 Organising International Collaborative Research For Social Inclusion
• Part V Bridging Research And Policy
• 12 Shaping The Research Puzzle In An Intervention Project
• 13 Navigating Multi-Perspective, Multi-Level And Longitudinal Research
• 14 Meeting The Expectations Of Different Actors At The Science–Policy Interface – Monitoring Of Education For Sustainable Development In Germany
• Part VI Getting Ready For An Open Future
• 15 Educational Research – A Space Of Risk And Uncertainty
• Index