Tracing policies, leadership practices and student experiences in multi-lingual settings: Lessons in education research methodology from Kazakhstan

Author(s):

Olena Fimyar (presenting / submitting) David Bridges (presenting)
Natallia Yakavets (presenting)
Liz Winter (presenting)
Ros McLellan (presenting)
Lynne Parmenter (presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education

Format:

Research Workshop

Session Information

23 SES 07 D, Tracing Policies, Leadership Practices and Student Experiences in Multi-Lingual Settings: Lessons in Education Research Methodology from Kazakhstan

Research Workshop

Time:

2014-09-03

17:15-18:45

Room:

B336 Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Christina Segerholm

Contribution

The purpose of the workshop is to share with the wider research community methodological lessons learned from a series of multi-lingual (English, Kazakh and Russian) and multi-disciplinary (policy sociology, philosophy, educational leadership and social psychology) studies analysing educational change in Kazakhstan (Bridges 2014). The research, which is now in its third year, approached the analysis of educational change from various perspectives: from the point of view of multiple centres of policy initiation; from the point of view of multiple centres of policy negotiation and enactment; and from the point of view of individual classrooms in the six study schools. In tracing education policy moves across international, national, regional and local terrains and linguistic boundaries, we kept continuous attention on education policies, leadership practices and student experiences – the themes around which we structure this workshop.

In proposing this workshop we invite researchers working in multi-lingual settings to reflect on the limits, opportunities and possibilities multi-lingual settings offer for mono-lingual and multi-lingual researchers working in environments that collect data affording different levels of access and equivalence. Central to this methodological reflection are the questions of language, translation and theory. These concerns can be formulated around the following questions. Do multi-lingual researchers gain a different understanding of the research field from mono-lingual researchers? How does a double role of researcher-translator affect a researcher’s participation in the process of research? What bearing does the translatability of professional discourses have on the framing (and translation) of research questions? To what extent is our knowledge of the field mediated by our theoretical perspective(s)? Or, perhaps more radically, what is more important in the field – the knowledge of theory or language? Because, to paraphrase Braidotti, ‘[the] work [of] a thinker has no mother tongue’ (Braidotti 1994, 21). And, on a more practical level, what are the participants’ actual experiences of dealing with multi-lingual and non-verbal data? What concerns and objectives guide the selection of qualitative versus quantitative approaches in doing research in multi-lingual settings?

To address the above questions, the discussion and practical activities will be structured around the themes of: 1) researching education policy in multi-lingual settings; 2) researching leadership practices in multi-lingual settings; and 3) tracing student experiences in multi-lingual environments by use of a mixture of task-orientated focus groups, closed-form surveys and language-independent means. Each part of the workshop will open with a brief reflection on Methodological Lessons Learnt. This will be followed by a discussion of two different sets of methodological tools: 1) those which use translation, live or textual, to address the question of translation and translatability between languages; and 2) those which aim to minimise the effect of the language on the data collected.

Each of the three presentations will include a practical activity and opportunity for the workshop participants to draw on their experiences of doing and translating research in a multi-lingual environment. We will conclude the workshop by proposing a tentative list of strategies and methodological recommendations on how to move beyond the analysis of ‘the surfaces of texts, events and interactions’ (Thomson 2008, 653) and gain understanding of the ‘logic of practice’, ‘stake in the game’, and ‘what “gets people moving” (Bourdieu 1990, 88) in multi-lingual settings. This workshop will start an important conversation which is long overdue in the fields of comparative and international education (Srivastava 2006; Fimyar 2014), leadership (Klenke 2008; Frost et al. 2014) and, at a more psychological level through capturing student experiences by means of different formats of self-construal and self-reporting of attitudes (Fielding 2004; Rudduck and McIntyre 2007; Cook-Sather 2010), the very real problems of conceptual assumptions of equivalence across language forms.

Method

Apart from the structure and procedures outlined above, opportunities for methodological reflection will be an important part of the workshop. In this section, drawing on our experiences of doing research in a multi-lingual environment, we will offer some opening remarks for starting this conversation. In the discussions we had in the field, at our team meetings and seminars series (http://sms.cam.ac.uk/collection/1356919) the question of meaning, understanding and interpretation has been always high on the agenda. This is not to suggest that understanding and meaning are easy to reach in monolingual settings, but a multi-lingual environment adds additional layers of complexity in understanding social processes including education. What is also apparent from our initial methodological reflections is that the experiences of mono-lingual and bilingual- or-tri-lingual researchers in multi-lingual environments are significantly different. Our mono-lingual English-speaking colleagues would often admit that a multilingual environment leaves them, as monolingual researchers (i.e. non-Kazakh or Russian-speaking), in a state of heightened alert and constant doubt. These feelings are reflected in the questions they ask themselves while waiting for translation from their Russian- or Kazakh-speaking colleagues: Do I really understand the meaning of what is going on? Do our participants understand the question being asked? Were my questions translated in the appropriate style and professional terminology your participants are familiar with and are ready to engage with? and so on. For a bilingual or a trilingual researcher the task is no easier. Apart from asking yourself all the above questions, at the time we assume the role of the translator, as two of the presenters from the Cambridge team did on multiple occasions, you are torn between the roles of the author (or for this matter, the researcher) and the translator. This double role of researcher-translator is challenging, not only because of the obvious explanation that translation is a skill and professional translation is a profession (different from the one of a researcher), but because it is virtually impossible to separate the two roles, with the role of the researcher dominating the role of the translator. In structuring our workshop we will provide multiple opportunities for participants to reflect on their own positioning within the field in roles of researchers, translators or researchers-as-translators (cf. Cook-Sather 2007).

Expected Outcomes

The workshop will aim to achieve three key objectives. Firstly, through structured discussions and practical activities the participants will add to their methodological toolbox tools for analysing education policy, leadership practices and student experiences from a psychological perspective in multi-lingual settings. Secondly, the workshop will address the gap in the literature around the issues of languages (other than English), translation and researcher positionality in the process of research (cf. Srivastava 2006). By doing so the workshop will bring the issues surrounding the act of translation back under the spotlight of research design and interpretative analysis. Thirdly, the workshop will explore the possibilities for continuing these important methodological reflections on the pages of special issues of the journals (e.g. Compare, Comparative Education Review, European Education) and edited and joint publications. A final objective is to move forwards the collective record of experiences in cross-cultural educational research. A considerable amount of educational research is sited in a single nation in a single language so cross-cultural issues are less obvious than the research presented in this workshop. However, living with multi-cultural societies, it is an imperative for educational researchers to consider conceptual equivalence and shared social representations in their research even if it sits in what seems a relatively homogenous national context. Keeping due regard for researchers’ difficulty or bias in ease of understanding across a dataset is a point to be held true for all research. Offering non-verbal responses, particularly for younger age groups is a tried and tested method to follow age effects, self-construal and attitudes within psychology and education so placing this in an international context hopes to spark the debate of alternatives to discourse (e.g. Colley et al. 2005) and the entire problem of interpretative analysis of others’ intended communications.

References

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