Exchanges Featured Section: Inequality in Education – Innovation in Methods with
reflections by Dr Nicola Ingram and Professor Melanie Nind
Carli Ria Rowell (University of Warwick), Siobhan Dytham (University
of Warwick), Dr Nicola Ingram (University of Bath) and Professor Melanie Nind (University
of Southampton)
Abstract
Against a backdrop of
metamorphosis in the UK educational landscape and the increased focus on
‘innovation’ in research funding and postgraduate programmes, a conference
entitled ‘Inequality in Education – Innovation in Methods’ (IEIM) was held at
the University of Warwick in November 2014 to offer space to reflect on
‘inequality in education’ as a field of research and the impact, and future prospect
for ‘innovation in method’ in this field. This article introduces this featured
section, including reflections from Dr Nicola Ingram and Professor Melanie
Nind, who both delivered keynote addresses at the conference.
* * *
Introduction
Carli Ria Rowell and Siobhan Dytham
This featured section of Exchanges is based upon the
conference 'Inequality in Education, innovation in methods', which arose from a
funding proposal Siobhan and myself submitted to Warwick’s ESRC Doctoral Training
Centre competition for a doctoral event grant in December 2013. The aim of the doctoral
events grant is to enable students to organise a one-day interdisciplinary postgraduate
conference to be held at the University of Warwick during the academic year 2014-2015.
Therefore, the conference and this featured section is a year in the making.
Siobhan and I met one year prior to submitting the
proposal at the British Sociological Associations Education Study Group event
‘Young People's Educational Identities in Challenging Times’ to which Dr
Nicola Ingram is a co-convenor. Little did I know that my attendance at this
event of which was driven to attend by sheer curiosity (I had not yet started
my PhD) would provide the platform and networks for an event organised by
Siobhan and me. The subsidiary aim of the events grant was to enhance work on
individuals' PhDs or issues of mutual concern linking two or more PhD research
projects. Thus, it was specified that the conference topic must be close to the
areas of the proposers' dissertations and that the event should seek to bring
together scholars working within that area. It is in this vein that the
conference was structured around the themes of inequalities in education and
innovation in methods. The resulting event together with this featured section
of Exchanges reflects our interest in methodological advances within social
science research and inequalities within education whether this is within the
compulsory education system, special education or within the field of higher
education.
Within the UK, the metamorphosis of the educational
landscape has attracted significant debate amongst academics, politicians,
educational practitioners, the media and lay persons. Issues such as the recent
education cuts, the overhaul of GCSEs in England, the rise in tuition fees and
the expansion, privatisation and casualization of UK universities, means that
debate and research within the field of education is both timely and crucial.
At the same time, the notion of ‘innovation’ has been placed at the heart of
the methodological landscape. As such, many educational researchers, in
focusing their scholarly attention to educational equality, have developed an
array of innovative and exciting methodologies in order to access new data and
new groups of people. Added to this, Social Science funding bodies are
progressively inviting and fostering research proposals that are
methodologically ‘innovative’. Consequently, there is increased pressure for
postgraduate research students to deliver ‘innovative’ social science research
in order to demonstrate their competency within the global knowledge economy.
It is against this backdrop that we wanted to organise a
conference that would afford our delegates the platform in which to exchange
innovative methodological practices, sharing what works well and what does not,
as well as exploring future possible practices that could be drawn upon when
conducting social science research that seeks to explore and bring attention to
educational inequality. At the same time we wanted the conference to take a
critical stance on the idea of ‘innovation’, asking what is it, why do it and
does it improve our research? Thus, from the critical training offered to delegates
with an interest in innovation, a space was provided for them to think more
deeply about these ideas which, as already discussed, are becoming increasingly
important.
The event -- hosted
in the Wolfson Research Exchange on Wednesday 12th November 2014 -- was every
success. In addition to the five students presenters, we had keynote
presentations from Professor Melanie Nind (University of Southampton) and Dr
Nicola Ingram (University of Bath). In total, around 40 delegates attended,
including academic members of staff and industry practitioners from the
educational charity Teach First. Delegates represented a number of UK universities
including Kent, Manchester, Keele, and London.
The conference featured presentations, keynotes and an
interactive workshop in order to facilitate the exchange of innovative
methodological practices. The day was structured around three themes that arose
naturally form the abstracts submitted in response to an open call for papers.
The first two themes were ‘Race and Class’ and ‘Innovative Research Methods’,
followed by Dr. Nicola Ingram’s keynote ‘Boundary drawing? Experimenting with
art to understand identity’. Dr. Ingram explored the use of visual methods such
as Photoshop self-portraits, self-representational video, plasticine
model-making, visual diaries and the uses of working with artists for research
purposes. During Dr Ingram’s keynote, delegates participated in a 20 minute
plasticine model-making interactive activity and ended with a discussion and
questions from the audience regarding the use of plasticine model-making to
explore identity. The activity required delegates to make a model of their
academic self and ended with a critical discussion regarding the use of
plasticine model-making to explore academic identity. The final theme was that
of ‘Disability’ and the use of multimodal analysis, video ethnography and iPad
applications was explored in relation to conducting research with and alongside
students with autism. The day was drawn to a close by Professor Melanie Nind
whose keynote ‘Changing the social relations of research – innovation and
orthodoxy’ addressed the notion of innovative research methods.
In this featured section, we hear from postgraduate presenters
Farhat
Syyeda, Jessica
Heal and Jacqui
Shepherd and keynotes Professor Melanie Nind and Dr Nicola Ingram (both keynote
contributions are included below), who have written articles in which they
discuss their contributions to the conference in greater detail. Farhat Batool
Syyeda within her article entitled ‘A
Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Examining learners’ illustrations to
understand Attitudes towards Mathematics’ discusses her experience of working
with the freehand drawings of year 7 (KS3) and year 10 (KS4) (11 and 15 year
old) students, in order to investigate their attitudes towards Mathematics. In
Syyeda’s research, the students were asked to create drawings to illustrate
their vision of Maths and its impact on their lives as a way to offer students
an alternative form of communication to express their thoughts and feelings
about Mathematics. Secondly, in her article entitled ‘Research
with School Students: Four Innovative Methods Used to Explore Effective
Teaching’, Jessica Faye Heal outlines and critically discusses four
research methods which were employed to enhance how students from low-income
backgrounds engage in research exploring effective teaching. This article
discusses the use of approaches which scaffold a semi-structured interview, a
child-led classroom tour and a ‘draw and tell’ approach. The third and final
student article is that of Jacqui Shepherd of which is entitled ‘Interrupted Interviews’: listening
to young people with autism in transition to college’. Within her article Shepherd examines
the methodological approaches such as visual methods using iPad applications
and walking interviews to investigate the lived experiences of young people
with autism as they made the transition from special schools to mainstream
colleges of Further Education.
Further to this, Dr Nicola Ingram, in her article
entitled ‘Boundary Drawing – art meets research’ (see below), explores using
visual art in research and reflects on her personal experiences to discuss some
of the advantages of this pairing. Finally, in an article entitled ‘Changing the social relations of research –
innovation and orthodoxy’ (see below), Professor Melanie Nind reflects
on ‘innovation’ in relation to the social relations of research and broader
moves toward the democratisation of research.
Professor Nind argues that ‘innovation may be less to do with methods as
such and more about what the researcher sets out to do, including to transform
inequalities in research power dynamics and to enhance social inclusion’ (Nind,
2015).
To summarise, the contributions to this special feature
highlights that one of the central focuses of ‘innovation in methods’ was in
relation to the participants of the research. Though there exists increasing
pressure for research and researchers to be ‘innovative’ in either their
methods or findings it was not this reason that drove our delegates to
reconsider traditions and approaches to doing sociological research. It was
instead the need to think anew, in order to include participants and explore
areas of enquiry that would otherwise be excluded or constrained by traditional
and existing methodological practices in qualitative research. This, along with
issues of ethics and interpretation are discussed in the final
article within this featured section.
* * *
Boundary Drawing: art meets research
Dr Nicola Ingram
As a former secondary school art teacher who has found
her way into sociology I am interested in exploring what visual art can bring
to research by way of method. My particular interest is around issues of
identity and through my own experiences of creating art I have seen the
potential of visual creativity for exploring and expressing ideas about the
self. This has led me to experiment with the visual when conducting research,
in the hope that through the process of creating an artifact (in whatever
medium) I can access reflections that traditional oral based methods may
struggle to reach. Admittedly, this experimentation has not always been
successful but innovation never comes from playing it safe. I have experimented
with Photoshop portraits, visual diaries, giving participants hand held video
cameras, drawing, sculpture and Plasticine modeling. I have had the most
success with Plasticine modeling and it became a key component of my PhD
ethnographic research in schools in Belfast. The participants were given a
range of different coloured Plasticine and asked to create models that
represented who they are. After producing their models they were interviewed on
a one to one basis and asked to explain what their model represented and this
became the hook for a fairly unstructured interview. The strength of using this
approach is that I was able to gather very in depth and reflective responses
from my participants who were 15/16 year old working-class teenage boys (A
group generally acknowledged to be difficult to engage with). See Ingram (2011)
for some detail on the findings of this research and the responses of the young
men in relation to their models. Also see Abrahams and Ingram (2014) for
further research that builds upon this method.
Most recently I have been further experimenting with
methods by working with the artist, Barry Sykes, at the University of Bath. I
found it really fruitful to work with an artist and take myself outside my
research comfort zone. It has been a way to play with research methods without
being under any pressure to actually produce any research, as it was something
I got involved with outside of a formal research project. There was something
very liberating about removing all anxiety about getting it wrong and I think
that this absence of anxiety fed the creative process. We developed some ideas
based on a combination of both our interests. Barry was interested in the space
of the university and I was interested in students’ transitions from that space
and the places they hoped to occupy in the future. Our basic plan was to ask
students to create artifacts from different materials which represented aspects
of their experience of the university and their hopes, aspirations and plans
for the future. The materials were supplied by the artist and were a range of
random items that he was able to purchase on campus (including cherry tomatoes,
balsa wood, tictacs, paracetamol, rubber bands, and paper). When working with
art materials for the purpose of research it is good practice to be as
non-directive as possible so as to not lead the participants to create or say
particular things. The eventual idea we agreed on was to ask the students to
create a series of ‘identity-objects’ in response to a list of words. The words
were ‘home’, ‘refuge’, ‘work’, and ‘future’.
What resulted was the creation of a number of very
thoughtful and thought-provoking responses. The students created mini
sculptures that were imbued with meaning about their identities and we shared
the meaning of our objects in the group. Each person had the opportunity to
talk about what they had created and what it represented and then Barry and I
asked some probing questions to find out more. This worked as a group because
the students were all friends and the group was intimate, involving four
students, the artist and me. There are particular ethical issues with asking
people to reflect on the personal within group settings, specifically the
notion of exposing and exploring aspects of the self. Nevertheless there was a trust
amongst the participants that allowed this to be a successful way to conduct
the workshop. Additionally both Barry and I participated in the production of
‘identity-objects’ and talked openly about what they meant to us, exposing some
personal aspects of ourselves. Arguably, this sharing enabled openness amongst
all participants. Moreover, part of the power of creating before talking is
that the meaning of the object can remain hidden if the participant wishes it
to do so. It is possible for the participant to reveal only aspects of its
meaning and what they are comfortable sharing. In this way visual methods can
have an ethical component built into it as the participant has control over
what is said and has time to consider this as they make their object.
Using art can help to achieve greater depth than
straightforward one to one interviewing in research responses from
participants. If people are asked to create something it affords thinking time
in relation to a question and it allows for reflection. Furthermore when
discussing what they have created participants’ focus is deflected from the
self-conscious ‘I’ to describing the meaning of an object, therefore breaking
down some of the potential discomforts of focusing on talking about the self.
Visual art can be used as a powerful research tool, and in research on
educational inequalities can help to access the voices of the marginalized.
References
Abrahams, J. and Ingram, N. (2013) ‘The Chameleon
Habitus: Local students’ negotiations of a multiple fields’ Sociological Review
Online, 18(4), 2 <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/18/4/21.html>
Ingram, N. (2011) ‘Within School and Beyond the Gate: the
difficulties of being educationally successful and working-class’, Sociology,
45(7), 287-302
* * *
Changing the social relations of research – innovation
and orthodoxy
Professor Melanie Nind
The ESRC Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference and
Workshop on ‘Inequality in Education –Innovation in Methods’ provided an opportunity for participants and
speakers to explore the methodological challenges and opportunities associated
with researching inequality, or doing research in ways that challenge
inequality. Following on from papers on race and class, innovative methods, and
disability, the closing keynote needed to step back and look at the changing
social relations of research. I therefore began by looking at the nature of
innovation in methods and reasons for innovating, moving on to looking at
innovation beyond methods in broader research dynamics and ending by exploring
the democratisation of research.
Based on research conducted in the National Centre for
Research Methods (Nind et al. 2013; Wiles et al. 2013) I see innovation in
qualitative social research methods as rooted in genuine desire to improve some
aspect of the research process as well as in complex social relations including
the valued placed on innovation by commissioners and evaluators of research.
Innovation can comprise developments to established methods as well as the
development of new methods, and may involve methods crossing disciplinary
boundaries as in Nicola Ingram’s amalgam of art and social science. It is contested whether an innovation has to
have been taken up by the wider social science community (Taylor and Coffey
2008) or not yet filtered through to the mainstream (Xenitidou and Gilbert
2009).
Research into three cases of innovation showed a
relationship between making changes and ethical concerns (Nind et al., 2013).
The cases were Robert Kozinets’ netnography, Mary Kellett’s child-led
research and David Gauntlett’s creative
exploratory work with Lego bricks. This research saw innovators motivated by
the desire to address shortcomings and ethical concerns and going on to take
and manage risks in doing so. For the conference, the pertinent question was
where researching inequality in education – or any kind of social injustice –
might push innovative researchers methodologically.
Research concerning with people who have been
marginalised and had limited voice in research and sometimes even limited
representation is changing. Kellett (2005), for example, has been vociferous
about her desire to empower children to do their own research, which led to her
programme of research training for children. This emanates from a standpoint
epistemology in which children are seen as unique knowers of their worlds as
children. Similarly, people with learning disabilities have advocated for the
importance of their empathy as researchers of other people with learning
disabilities, their expertise by experience, and their inclusion in – and not
rejection by – the research community (Townson et al. 2004). Moving toward more
participatory research methods and approaches is frequently seen as ‘the right
thing to do’ (Holland et al. 2008), redressing the wrongs of labelling,
pathologizing, colonizing (see Walmsley and Johnson 2003; Smith 2012).
Sometimes the innovation is in the methods themselves, as
with so-called accessible or child-friendly methods, sometimes it is with the
level of dialogue and co-construction between researchers and participants
including a blurring of roles, and sometimes it is in who leads the research, a
necessity for research to be deemed emancipatory. But there are some important
tensions in this arena of inclusive (i.e. participatory/emancipatory) research.
Firstly, people from marginalised groups getting involved with conducting
research are seen as needing to learn and to adopt research conventions to be
taken seriously. This shapes lay researchers in our likeness. Being not too
innovative or different is necessary to be more successful. Academic
gatekeeping keeps in check the dangerous world of challenges to who does
research and how, so that if what is done is seen as too different or
challenging it is deemed not to be research at all.
Secondly, there is a danger of replacing one essentialism
with another - of replacing the knowledge of academics with the knowledge of
experts by experience, rather than bringing the different ways of knowing into
constructive dialogue. This can also lead to new groups being silenced in the
research, such as those in support roles who also often occupy marginal status.
It is important to remember that all voices are mediated, no knowledge exists
in a vacuum, and so the desire to get at pure experience or unsullied opinion
is misjudged. Moreover, there is a danger - if studies become so grounded in
the lived experience - that they can fail to generate the abstraction necessary
for advances in theoretical understanding.
Concerns with inequality underpin the turn towards
democratisation, to broader, more equal participation and consultation. This in
turn underpins an interest in research that in some way changes the dynamic
between research/researchers and the people who have traditionally been the
objects of that research. This means a changing discourse from research on
people, to research with those people, and perhaps by or for them. It raises
questions about who owns the research problem, who initiates the research, in
whose interests it is conducted, who has control over the processes and
outcomes and who produces the knowledge claims and owns the research. Thus,
democratic or inclusive research involves a broader range of knowledge-makers,
perhaps even generating meaningful social transformation (see Byrne et al.
2009).
Amid these turns towards the democratization of research,
innovation in methods is not the point - the point is innovation in what the
researcher sets out to do. The purpose is broader than adding to the body of
knowledge or even that knowledge having impact. It is to do something new for
those involved and affected, if not always to do something new
methodologically. A new research agenda emerges to transcend inequalities in
research power dynamics, demonstrate competence of marginalised groups, create
knowledge that is more valid and authentic, enable self-development, political
agency, increased confidence and skills, and lead to more active participation
and enhanced social inclusion (Nind and Vinha 2014). This is the wider picture
I wanted conference participants to take away for reflection.
Note: The keynote and paper draws heavily on Nind, M.
(2014) What is Inclusive Research? London: Bloomsbury Academic.
References
Byrne, A., Canavan, J. and Millar, M. (2009)
‘Participatory research and the voice-centred relational method of data
analysis: Is it worth it?’, International Journal of Social Research
Methodology, 12(1), 67–77
Holland, S., Renold, E., Ross, N. and Hillman, A. (2008)
‘Rights, Right On’ Or The Right Thing to Do? A Critical Exploration of Young
People’s Engagement in Participative Social Work Research, NCRM Working Paper
Series 07/08,
http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/460/1/0708%2520critical%2520exploration.pdf
Kellett, M. (2005) How to Develop Children as
Researchers, London: Sage
Nind, M., Wiles, R.A., Bengry-Howell, A. and Grow, G.P.
(2013) ‘Methodological Innovation and Research Ethics: Forces in tension or
forces in harmony?’, Qualitative Research 13(6), 650–667
Nind, M. and Vinha, H. (2014) ‘Doing research
inclusively: Bridges to multiple possibilities in inclusive research’, British
Journal of Learning Disabilities, 42(2), 102-09
Smith, L., Tuhiwai (2012) Decolonizing Methodologies:
Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd edn, London: Zed Books
Taylor, C., and Coffey, A. (2008) Innovation in
qualitative research methods: possibilities and challenges, Cardiff: Cardiff
University
Townson, L. et al. (2004) ‘We are all in the same boat:
doing ‘people-led research’’, British Journal of Learning Disabilities. 32,
72–6
Walmsley, J. and Johnson, K. (2003) Inclusive Research
with People with Learning Disabilities: Past, Present and Futures. London:
Jessica Kingsley
Wiles, R.A., Bengry-Howell, A., Nind, M. and Crow, G.
(2013) ‘But is it innovation? The development of novel methodological
approaches in qualitative research’, Methodological Innovation Online, 8(1),
18-33
Xenitidou, M. and Gilbert, N. (2009) Innovations in
Social Science Research Methods. Guildford: University of Surrey