This guide illustrates how teacher researchers can conduct ethically sound qualitative studies with diverse populations, including refugees, immigrants, and people with disabilities, by using humanizing approaches that place relationships at the center. The authors draw on their study with refugee families to describe their methods and discuss the tensions related to research with families with refugee backgrounds and the importance of a critical reflexivity that calls for intentional listening, humility based on ways of knowing, and reciprocity that allows for incommensurability in research relationships; the tensions in working with institutional review board standards; listening to and engaging students from a diversity of perspectives; working with interpreters from a decolonizing perspective; understanding reciprocity between families and teachers; and considerations for expanding work with other vulnerable communities. Annotation ©2022 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
This guide is for educational researchers interested in conducting ethically sound qualitative studies with diverse populations, including refugees, documented and undocumented immigrants, and people with disabilities. Through a description of a case study with refugee families, their children, school personnel, and liaisons, the authors highlight humanizing methods—a multidirectional and dynamic ethical compass with relationships at the center. Topics in the book include working within the limitations of Institutional Review Board (IRB) standards, using cultural and linguistic liaisons to communicate with research participants, and creating reciprocity with research participants and their families and communities. Through accessible real-world examples, the text covers the full arc of a project, from conceptualization, to navigating human subjects committees, to the complex task of representing ideas to academic and community-based audiences.
Book Features:
- Engages readers in the complex and sometimes uncertain terrain of working across diverse constituencies in school–community partnership research.
- Centers practical and ethical tensions in fieldwork as sites from which to learn more about research participants and researcher values.
- Includes reflections by contributing authors on how to work with non-dominant students, ensuring full equity and inclusion for all learners.
- Models an approach of metacritical reflexivity and researcher positionality.
