Ethics and Academic Freedom in Educational Research

Pat Sikes, Heather Piper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317979579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Formal ethical review of research proposals is now almost the default requirement for all – staff and students – planning research under the auspices of colleges and universities in many parts of the world. With notable exceptions, the extant literature discussing educational research ethics takes a meta-ethical overview, is negatively critical about the ethics review process per se, or comes from America and focuses specifically on the workings of the Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) there.

This book, however, contains stories of lived experience from the UK, Spain, New Zealand, Bangladesh, and Australia dealing with, inter alia: dissatisfactions with criteria against which research proposals and designs and, by extension, researchers themselves, are judged to be ethical; problems encountered in obtaining ethical clearance; changes which have had to be made to plans which are believed to have affected the ensuing research process and outcomes; cases where ethical issues and difficulties arose and required considered responses despite permission to undertake the research in question being granted; and benefits perceived to accrue from ethical review procedures.

Ethics and Academic Freedom in Educational Research will be of interest to researchers, students, members of ethics review boards and those teaching research ethics, primarily at postgraduate but also at undergraduate level.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Research and Method in Education.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Ethical research, academic freedom and the role of ethics committees and review procedures in educational research
• 2. Socially just research for social justice: negotiating consent and safety in a participatory action research project
• 3. One chairperson’s experience of ethical review: balancing principle, convention, relationship and risk in educational research
• 4. Research ethics and participatory research in an interdisciplinary technology-enhanced learning project
• 5. Fieldwork for language education research in rural Bangladesh: ethical issues and dilemmas
• 6. Researcher tales and research ethics: the spaces in which we find ourselves
• 7. Overstepping the mark: ethics procedures, risky research and education researchers
• 8. How an exchange of perspectives led to tentative ethical guidelines for visual ethnography
• Index