Context and problem

The international educational community is progressing in multiple and important ways.  This trend can be seen throughout the levels of educational provision, including teaching, learning, and across the educational ecosystem.  

While there was longstanding appreciation for the importance of teacher effectiveness¹, the importance of teacher development as a continuous, iterative, and reflection-driven² process is gaining ground in both theory, research, and practice.  While the last decade has seen increasing discourse around non-academic dimensions of student learning (e.g., 20th century skills for the future workforce³), there is now growing recognition of foundational importance of socio-emotion and meta-cognition not only as means to achievement-focused ends⁴, but as ends in themselves⁵ while values-driven educational objectives begin gaining attention, with the student-led educational provision becoming a normative ideal⁶.  More recently, cultural and contextual considerations have started gaining attention, with the Black Lives Matter movement, with decolonisation rightly trending as a long overdue issue for society and research investigation⁷.  These cultural, racial, and between-country divides are pervasive, and find themselves playing a primary, even central, role in educational inequities⁸.  

There is thus an influential minority who are privileged with the resources, power, and voice that is needed in order to make meaningful change.  Yet, the dominant few have for a long time done little to share power, let alone shift it, to increase educational capital where change is most needed.  Rather, the bulk of their efforts have been to maintain the status quo⁹.  

Meanwhile, cultural values are beginning to gain recognition for their undeniable role in the real-world classroom.  Researchers, policymakers, and educational leaders can no longer deny the inseparable nature of teaching, learning, and values-based frameworks—especially those in the Global North, where the licence to claim universality and value-free frameworks is fast losing ground.  

Symposium focus

We come together to contribute innovative research foci and approaches to address our shared concern regarding these issues.  

Our symposium brings together innovative research foci that centres the most affected actors of education.  Within education generally, the most affected actors are students.  Around the world more widely, the most affected—and hitherto disadvantaged—actors are learners with African heritage.  As we do, we actively look for opportunities and the potential emergence of divergent values and priorities.  

Our symposium brings together innovative research approaches that are methodologically innovative research.  We present our own methodological frameworks, too, both of which are multimodal in nature: the inquiry graphics method elicits actor responses through multimodal artefacts (Paper 1, Lackovic); the systematic consultation framework collects actor responses through multimodal data streams (Paper 3, McIntyre).  We explore classic grounded theory as applied to a new area of research for that approach: namely, student motivation as revealed through walking interviews and student-led working parties (Paper 2, Salter).  All three methodological approaches are actor-led to draw out meaning and experiences as defined and expressed by the actors themselves.  In doing so, we aim to re-dress historical imbalances in the research process and in the way in which knowledge generation is done.  

To conclude the symposium, celebrated mixed methods scholar, Prof. Anthony Onwuegbuzie will share his comments and recommendations on the three papers.  In his latest work, Prof. Onwuegbuzie has been developing methodological frameworks that amplify participant voices, dismantle power imbalances, and advance inclusivity both at the methodological and the philosophical level.  

Altogether, we much anticipate a ground-breaking symposium that advances the democratisation of the research process, to actively centre the most affected actors in education as co-researchers and co-creators of knowledge. 

1. Kyriakides, L., Christoforou, C., & Charalambous, C. Y. (2013). What matters for student learning outcomes: A meta-analysis of studies exploring factors of effective teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 36, 143–152. 2. Meijer, M.-J., Kuijpers, M., Boei, F., et al. (2017). Professional development of teacher-educators towards transformative learning. Professional Development in Education, 43(5), 819–840. 3. Karaca-Atik, A., Meeuwisse, M., Gorgievski, M., et al. (2023). Uncovering important 21st-century skills for sustainable career development of social sciences graduates: A systematic review. Educational Research Review, 39, 100528. 4. Desoete, A., & De Craene, B. (2019). Metacognition and mathematics education: An overview. Zdm, 51, 565–575. Hausman, H., Myers, S. J., & Rhodes, M. G. (2021). Improving Metacognition in the Classroom. Zeitschrift Für Psychologie, 229(2), 89–103. 5. Ambaryani, S. E., & Putranta, H. (2022). Improving learners’ metacognitive skills with self-regulated learning based problem-solving. International Journal of Instruction, 15(2), 139–154. 6. Grant, S., Leverett, P., D’Costa, S., et al. (2022). Decolonizing school psychology research: A systematic literature review. Journal of Social Issues, 78(2), 346–365. 7. Morreira, S., Luckett, K., Kumalo, S. H., et al. (2021). Decolonising Curricula and Pedagogy in Higher Education: Bringing decolonial theory into contact with teaching practice. Routledge. 8. Finneran, R., Mayes, E., & Black, R. (2023). Pride and privilege: the affective dissonance of student voice. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 31(1), 1–16.