Section archive - Research Methods

Through examining related literature and incorporating the author's own experiences, she explores ethical dilemmas that social justice-oriented qualitative researchers may encounter as a result of conflicting multiplicities of difference among researcher(s), participants, and readers. Such dilemmas include incongruent interpretations between participants and researchers, and participants’ and researchers’ conflicting desires about what should be shared, intercultural (mis)interpretations, rapport issues, and conflicts between research life and home life.

The current paper reports a self-study of multicultural identities in a public high school ethnic studies class and a university multicultural education course in Hawai‘i, a unique multicultural setting in which no ethnic group is in the majority. Three important findings emerged. First, a personal-constructivist-collaborative approach to self-study in an intellectually safe classroom environment provides both students and teachers with a context for challenging their socially constructed assumptions about race, culture, and ethnicity. The second major theme to come out of the data analysis describes how the students’ stories became transformational teaching texts. Third, self-study is a multicultural pedagogy that promotes social perspective taking, tolerance, and understanding of diversity through personal transformation.

In this article, the author presents an approach to gaining awareness and deeper understanding of the practice of teaching through focusing on the lived classroom experience. The process is self-inquiry through engagement with Johns’ (2010) six dialogical movements, which results in gaining valuable insights into practice. The study highlighted some of the emotional aspects of the experiences of teaching and learning, and considered the importance of a teacher focusing on subjective response in order to gain awareness of self in practice. As a result of this narrative and guided reflection process, the author became more aware of the range of life experiences and abilities of the students, and he sought to arrange future sessions that were more encouraging and that attended to different needs more effectively.

This article has explored the question of whether student research undertaken in the context of taught modules should be subject to RE review. The authors contend that the RE review of in-class research involving human subjects will protect researchers, participants and the institution, serve to engender a strong RE culture within universities and ensure that students graduate with an ethical awareness not always evident in recent generations. The authors outline a number of mechanisms that can plausibly be used to address the issues of resource constraints that limit most REC’s in the contemporary environment. Of particular note are their novel suggestions of asynchronous review and the inclusion of students in the oversight process, with due safeguards built in.