This book concerns âFreedom Research,â which is a term used to describe research that is free from orthodoxy, which adapts, or which knowingly critiques, accepted conventions about the ways in which research should be conducted. âFreedom Researchâ is the name given to a form of educational research that seeks to be vigorous, rigorous, robust, authentic, imaginative, creative and above all ethical.
Freedom Research is a new conceptual understanding of research underpinned by an argument that the conventions of traditional approaches to research in education may be confidence sapping and constraining to both the early career and the mature educational researcher. The purpose of this book is to explain how you can be free from conventions and approach research with greater freedom to be innovative and creative. This first chapter seeks to explore the concept of Freedom Research and to explain what can replace the orthodoxy of research conventions. Freedom is itself not a neutral term. It is a term that few will object to, in that we all wish to be free and would choose freedom, perhaps, for ourselves and others in many contexts, but in each context, the word will have different meanings and implications. Concepts of freedom are cultural and it is not a matter of all or nothing; you can be free to a greater or lesser extent and in some respects and not others. This book seeks to convince you that freedom in our practice of research is not just possible but highly desirable in a world in which research conventions, I suggest, restrict and limit.
Two moral dimensions are considered in this book: external and internal morality. External morality concerns itself with those values we hold as a community of researchers that assist us to avoid the atrocities done in the name of research in past times and also to have ethical standards in our research. Internal morality concerns those values one holds dear to oneself, which underpin the choices we make in a research context. These are interlinked and only separated for ease of consideration in this book. It is my contention that Freedom Research, by addressing these two forms of morality , has the potential to free us from socially imposed and out-of-date constraints on our research choices; it liberates us from stifling orthodoxies and provides us with a rigour and robustness that prevents us from sliding into knowing that is unsubstantiated or non-evidential.
Oneâs values contribute to the kind of researcher one is or hopes to be. The concept of identity of the researcher, to which I shall return, is important to the choices made in our research. Who one is, determines the kind of researcher one will be. Knowledge of who one is can facilitate autonomy in research. Definitions of freedom frequently refer to physical ease or constraint, such as freedom from bondage, or grace of movement and frankness of manner. Isaiah Berlin argued in the 1950s that there are two types of freedom or liberty : negative and positive freedom. Negative freedom is freedom from interference. Warburton (2001) describes it in a negative manner. âYou restrict my freedom when you restrict the number of choices I can make about my lifeâ (p. 5). Warburton cites Berlin (1969):
The extent of a manâ s [sic] negative liberty is, as it were, a function of what doors are open to him; upon what prospects they open; and how they are open. (p. xlviii)
It is important to note that negative freedom involves doors being open, not a choice on whether to go through them. Negative freedom is freedom from barriers in a given context. Negative freedom embraces the absence of discriminatory practices , for example, in an educational context, such as inclusive practice for disabled children in mainstream education . Positive freedom is, as Warburton describes, the freedom to do something rather than freedom from interference:
The âpositiveâ sense of the word liberty derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his [sic] own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be instrument of my own, not of other menâs acts of will. (p. 131)
Positive freedom is the freedom from self-inhibition or is the ability to make a desired choice. In an educational context, positive freedom might be the choice by adults who are nervous or uncertain of education after a bad school experience to engage trustingly in adult educational opportunities. In this book the barriers or conventions that keep doors of opportunity closed will be discussed. I also seek to convince the researcher to step through the doorway by pushing convention aside. These concepts of freedom are not without their critics, but they do provide a useful means of considering freedom and are, I would propose, frequently interlinked. Freedom is defined here as a state of mind that recognises positive and negative freedoms and seeks to manage these in order to be free from the constraints of orthodoxy.
It is my contention that the conventions of research close doors that otherwise might be open (negative freedom ), and that the people choose not to go through them (positive freedom) for a range of reasons linked to orthodoxy, such as fear and anxiety, conformism or untroubled acceptance of the social norms. I define orthodoxy as received or established doctrines. I am not implying that there is a single methodological orthodoxy in educational research; indeed educational research is varied and multifaceted, but the research process has embedded in it implicit understandings of what is acceptable and what is desirable in a research context, which serve to marginalise and complicate the creative, the innovative and the different. I do not intend here to describe the social history of the Enlightenment that led to the initiation and development of many of the conventions of research. Rather, I intend to outline in this book my reaction to the conventions that have been and are apparent to me in the course of my life in the research community.
Orthodoxy
Orthodoxy is a complicated concept and is used here to embrace those ideas that conform to established standards. Examples might include the orthodox or established methods of sampling that have a name such as convenience or snowballing or random, the desirability in educational research of triangulation or accepted off-the-shelf methods for collecting data. Furthermore there are conventions or the established view of what is proper behaviour, such as the choice of one and only one, preferably a named paradigm for postgraduate research; completing ethical consent forms; and presenting data as analysed post rather than during data collection. Orthodoxy can be useful in that it provides for accepted means of doing research that do not require lengthy explanation; for example we do not need to describe or justify triangulation necessarily for it to be generally accepted as a good thing.
It is not, however, sufficient to declare oneself to be free from conventions; one needs to ensure that the freedom chosen is responsible and has the benefit of others or âbeneficence ,â or a desire to âdo good,â as its objective. One example of beneficence is the desire to improve pupil learning. Hence, our freedom needs to be underpinned by a moral stance or ethics, values and virtues . In this book overall, I seek to show how the autonomous researcher can work in a research context with individual freedom from stifling conventions. I seek furthermore to show how this freedom may apply at each stage of the research process, and how one can learn to become autonomous. The conventions to which I refer are mainly, but not exclusively, the conventions of the natural sciences , which I would argue are entirely appropriate to my ontological understanding of the nature of our physical environment in that I believe there is an observable physical reality. They limit, however, the conception of and implementation of research in the social sciences and this field of educational research, where there is the complexity of individualsâ own perceptions of reality that are frequently being described. The conventions or adaptations of them have become social norms in our research community and, therefore, lend (and have lent) themselves to critique by many people over the course of this and the last century.
There can be subtle and hidden norms which limit freedom in a research community in what I think are insidious and damaging ways to the pursuit of knowledge and knowing. For example, the overt as well as subtle valuing of only research that is written in journal articles by higher education institutions in many countries limits the expression of our findings to a defined length, academic voice, learned tone and text medium. I had a student, for example, who found this limiting for her PhD, which was about a dialogical model of teaching, and she felt it to be more appropriate to write a text full of font changes and sizes and orientations of text on the page to communicate the complexity of what she had studied. A more subtle example of unwritten laws came to my attention recently at a conference, where an autoethnographer, who had described herself as the âhuman instrument of inquiry,â was criticised for being insufficiently âobjectiveâ in her reflective practice . This was a criticism that came from an expectation that we can and should always be objective in educational research or, indeed, that objectivity is both possible and desirable. May (2003) is helpful in discussing objectivity in this context:
Particular ideas of neutrality, such as the maintenance of objectivity through positioning the researcher as nothing but a passive instrument of data collection are now exposed as falsehoods that seek to mask the realities of the research process. The knower (as researcher) is now implicated in the construction of the known (the dynamics and content of society and social relations). (p. 2)
I shall explore these conventions further through this book, as they are multiple, multi-layered and, I suggest, incessant and limiting.
I think it is important to assert at this early stage that I am not throwing the baby out with the bath water. Conventions can be useful as a shortcut to avoid having to really think about why we do things. They can also be a shorthand for useful practices . It is crucial, I suggest, to have criteria of quality , of reliability and of the validity of research, but these need to be more sophisticated and exacting than mere conventions or covert social norms and I shall come back to validity later in the book, in Chap. 8. I am not underestimating the value of literature that has sought over many years to assert the quality criteria we should use for qualitative research. I am simply pointing to the overt and covert social norms that limit us in many ways in the pursuit of knowledge . I am aware that my point of view will be contentious, as I am debunking some of the culturally accepted norms of a research community. I defend my right to say this through reference to John Stuart Mill (1895), who asserted my right to be eccentric and outspoken and free from a constrained life. He asserted that interference was limiting. His âharm principleâ proposed that only views which cause harm should be suppressed, and this links to my own philosophy that all is possible if it leads towards beneficence . Some will see my critique of these social norms as a threat to the foundations of rigour and robustness of research; on the contrary, I see my crit...