This symposium considers how educational ethnographic researchers can sustain ethical practice in the field and persuade institutional organs of research supervision that they are doing so. All eight papers in the symposium reflect on the processes and practicalities of carrying out ethical ethnographic research in a variety of face to face public educational spaces, although one also refers to the importance of ethical practices when researching hybrid spaces. The last cannot be overlooked as many people’s lives nowadays, especially in the West, are lived online as well as face to face. The papers have been loosely grouped into two sets of four, each of which presents a variety of different voices and perspectives from several countries. One of the sets focuses on creating and applying knowledge systems to help researchers to construct ethical practice in the field and make visible their claims for ethical practice. The other set focuses on dilemmas in the field that educational researchers might or do face and how they sustain and make visible their ethical practice in those contexts.

The first set of papers in Part 1 of the symposium presents views from Algeria, Britain, Ethiopia, and Norway on how frameworks of ethical practice for educational research can be constructed, applied and audited to help researchers maintain ethical practice in the field and persuade institutional organs of research supervision that they are doing so. However, this approach raises dilemmas since strictly auditable statements of ethical procedures for studying individual human beings may be difficult to sustain exactly when trying to study groups of people in ethnographic studies even though the values embedded in those statements may be sustainable in various ways (Smette). However, ethical appraisal frameworks can be constructed to guide researchers’ practice (Idri) and help researchers to consider how to address ethical dilemmas in the field (Fox and Mitchell). They may also help research ethics committees to come to wise decisions when faced with research applications that may challenge tightly constructed notions of what constitutes ethical research practice in particular circumstances (Traianou). 

The rest of this abstract is  the abstract for the second part of this symposium, Ethics and Research in Educational Ethnography Part 2

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