Doing Educational Research: Overcoming challenges in practice

Based on the EERA/SAGE book project: Doing Educational Research: Overcoming Challenges in Practice, in progress, the four editors made a call for expression of interest in a symposium at ECER 2018 (we have later decided to call it a symposium workshop). Authors from 11 of the chapters responded positively and wanted to partake in an EERA session – symposium.

The main aim of this EERA invited session is to advance the reflection and discussion on key challenges in doing educational research from a European perspective and, at the same time, to consolidate and disseminate this future product of EERA: the SAGE book which will be published in 2019.

The key idea of the session is to encourage meta-reflection on educational research processes from the perspective of main challenges encountered by researchers and the way they face(d) these challenges. The discussions within each chapter of the book (for the most part) uses ongoing or terminated research project as a point of departure for the discussion of challenges. While a large majority of the presentations at the conference present results of research, we consider equally important to stimulate discussions around what happens in the process of doing educational research and to provide a discussion forum for these types of questions in educational research, which are often not talked about. The idea is that by deconstructing the different stages of the research process and the underlying challenges (see the three thematic areas below) researchers met in their field can help researchers better understand some of those issues that are at stake in terms of doing research, which we in this book have termed methodological challenges. The chapters of the book represent everything from single researcher projects to large scale international projects, altogether using a wide variety of methodological approaches, from desk research, narrative storytelling, photo elicitation, ethnomethodology to longitudinal multi-methodological approaches. What we find is that some issues are generic – cutting across all research fields, while others arise from the context where the research is conducted. It is not that these challenges are new, but the fact that they are discussed and related to ongoing projects and that researchers tell about what were done to solve the tensions that arose in the process of their research – is novel.

We pose a guiding question for the discussions we hope to raise in this session: Doing educational research – how can researchers address tensions created by their own research?

The organization of the session will follow a workshop format, with three different discussions running in parallel, each having a moderator from the editorial team, participants (from the conference) choose which discussion they want to follow before we start. The three topics (below) were generated from the challenges addressed in the chapters of the authors who signed up for this session. In each of these discussions, the authors will briefly present their chapter and the challenges they address and connect to the general question posed above. After a brief presentation by chapter authors (5 min) the moderator will open for a discussion within each thematic area. We will leave 1 hrs for this part. In the last half hour, lessons learned across the three themes will be discussed. The chair of the session (Hoveid) will moderate this section of the discussion.

From each tematic discussion authors / contributors will have a 5-7 minutes intervention to bring challenges in doing educational research to the table (3-4 contributions to each round table / workshop), and then a facilitated discussion will go for 30 min.