LITE Research: Unpacking the hidden frameworks underpinning research

Matthew Bachmann is a LITE Higher Education Research Support Officer. In this blog, he introduces his research into pedagogical research paradigms.

So, what’s happening in your classroom? No, really? Because what you think is happening there fundamentally shapes how you might evaluate it, or research it, or talk about it with colleagues.

We might say, or hear said, “this year’s students really threw themselves into the problems…”  or find that this year “the space just isn’t ideal for keeping group discussions going…” and only half-jokingly say “we run mid-module tests so I can assess the learning before it gets chased out by the next thing…” Each of these relies on what we think is going on in our classroom.

My work unpacks research frameworks (or paradigms). In nascent research areas this often gets messy: while the framework itself isn't under much scrutiny, the data that's downstream of it may be. A good example of this might be asking students whether they feel a 'sense of belonging' without ever confirming what we all mean by ‘sense of belonging’, and whether this changes based on other factors, such as the time of year. That foundational work of interrogating what we think is ‘going on’, and how what we're doing might shed some light on it, are usually labelled ontology and epistemology.

These frameworks are key to understanding what our data can tell us and what it can’t. Engaging with our frameworks directly is key to producing transparent research outputs which are useful for others to engage with in their own settings. Failing to critically engage with our frameworks, as a field, leads to us acquiring data without understanding the coding we’ve built in, like looking at strings of words without grammar. This doesn’t mean it's worthless or meaningless, but it won't do the work that we really want if we want to make change, evidence impact, or springboard future work.

Unpacking our frameworks in pedagogical research has some key challenges:

1. Pedagogical researchers are often new to this space and come from varied disciplines with varied backgrounds. Some will have experience of this type of work, some will not. Some bring subject area identities that have strong ontological or epistemic commitments, some come from subject areas without such, or without realising it.
2. Pedagogical research takes place in a deeply complex space - intersecting problems of geography, history, education, and sociology, as well as disciplinary differences. This can make the most basic questions of 'what do we think is going on in our classrooms?' or 'what are we trying to do with our students?' immediately rich in complexity.
3. Existing work on ontology and epistemology tends to direct researchers to how these topics are taught at university, typically on philosophy programmes. This creates a taxonomy of positions or arguments and builds understanding by seeing the 'moves' in the various arguments gradually through engaging with these questions organically. This separates the ‘what’ of different positions into the learning materials while the ‘why’ emerges in classroom discussion. This results in many guides for researchers on ontology and epistemology offering a taxonomy of available options from which they may 'pick and choose' without incorporating how or why to pick, what picking might mean for your research questions or methods, or why your choice might matter.

My current work is to offer an account of 'doing ontology and epistemology in PedRes' that simultaneously tackles all three challenges. How do we bring together researchers with wildly different experiences and identities to engage with complex questions of ontology and epistemology, when much of the literature offers only the ‘what’, not the ‘why’? What does 'doing good ontology and epistemology' look like?

First and foremost, it’s about recognising this as a research practice, just like making good methodological choices or doing robust data analysis. This means that developing our ontology and epistemology is more similar to developing other skills and competences in our research teams. There are two research skills that might offer useful analogies and direction for us to develop as a field: statistics, where we know what a statistical question looks like and have a rough idea about when to go find a competent statistician or to socialise a problem; and ethics, where we know what an ethical problem looks like and know that we'll need to socialise our research topic in order to get a broad set of ideas about it to help spot factors that might be hidden from us. In both cases, practice identifying problems and socialisation of our problems are key.

As pedagogical researchers, we need to train ourselves to spot these questions for what they are and create spaces for us to socialise them, in our discussions, in our teaching practice, and in our publications. Bootstrapping foundational questions to these others also helps understand how this relates to training, practice, expertise, communication, and publication.

All we need, then, is a guide to spotting the questions that’s cross- or multi- or non-disciplinary, and a shift in our research culture to create space to raise and contest and answer these questions as a community. The next stage of my research is understanding how different potential guides work, or don’t, for pedagogical researchers, and what the barriers and incentives are for making this type of change.

In the meantime, if you want to discuss any of these ideas, or how you unpack your own teaching experience, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!