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Teacher participation and pedagogical research in the educational sphere.

• Daniel Hugo Suárez Daniel Hugo Suárez Universidad de Buenos Aires
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.505
• Published online: 30 September 2019

Narrative documentation of pedagogical experiences is an alternative and emergent focus of educational research that promotes teacher participation in the processes of research-training-action in the educational field and seeks to make the relationships it configures between power and knowledge more horizontal. Theoretical, methodological, and epistemic-political criteria inform the rules of composition and the validation of constructed pedagogical knowledge, and this methodological framework organizes narrative and autobiographical practices so that educators can reflect on and rename the pedagogical environments they inhabit. Additionally, educators can engage in a series of peer-critique reading-writing exercises that are focused on revising different versions of recounting pedagogical experiences. Moreover, the pedagogical field has a democratizing potential due to the public nature and specialized circulation of these narrative documents.

• narrative documentation
• teacher participation
• qualitative research
• pedagogical research
• teacher training

A version of this article in its original language

Narrative Documentation of Pedagogical Experiences: Educational Research and Teacher Participation

This article presents and unpacks the methodological potentials of narrative documentation of pedagogical experiences (Suárez, 2007 ) as an emerging modality of qualitative educational research that promotes teacher participation in the process of knowledge production, professional development, and action in the field of education and seeks to make the relationships between power and knowledge it intersects with and constructs more horizontal and democratic. This educator research-training-action strategy (Anderson & Kerr, 2007 ) arranges a series of narrative and autobiographical practices to allow participants the opportunity to tell stories about their professional practice. These interpretations of the school environment and the teaching profession are put into writing so that they are opened to inquiry, public deliberation, and change. In this way, narrative documentation is tied to a research tradition and a pedagogical movement oriented toward the democratic transformation of education and generates and sustains collaborative and networked spaces in the field of educational research and teacher training (Bueno, Catani, & Sousa, 1998 ; Suárez, 2015b ; Suárez & Argnani, 2011 ). Narrative documentation is particularly interested in activating the pedagogical memory of school and “narratively deepening” the public discourse surrounding education through the production, publication, and circulation of pedagogical experiences written by educators (Contreras, 2015 ).

The objective of this article is to demonstrate part of what we have learned during 20 years of “methodological and political experimentation” (Martínez Boom & Peña Rodríguez, 2009 ) through a succession of projects and experiences working with narrative documentation together with diverse figures within the pedagogical field. As a research group and a university extension of the Department of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, we have worked with educational boards, school administrators, and ministries of education, labor, and social development at the national, provincial, and municipal levels. Additionally, we have worked with teacher unions and organizations, teacher training colleges, and other national and Latin American universities; regional and national educational networks and international teacher collectives; educational movements; and social organizations from different countries in Latin America. And we have done this at different territorial scales, with different numbers of participants, in diverse places, and at many different levels throughout the educational system as well as with a variety of organizations in the educational field. We have involved different stakeholders as participants, including teachers from all grades and modalities within the educational system, school principals and supervisors, technical and professional teams, educational directors, and in some instances ministers and secretaries of educations, educational union leaders and social activists, community educators, and literacy teachers within social and community organizations (Suárez, 2016 ).

Through this intense, productive, and collective experience, narrative documentation has garnered legitimacy as a research-training-action strategy for educators that is inscribed, developed, and validated within the field of education and that works to illuminate, problematize, and deepen forms of saying and doing in the world of education. Narrative documentation forms part of the expansion of “biographical space” within the territory of education and pedagogy (Arfuch, 2002 ; Suárez, 2014a ). Its intention is, through participation, to re-elaborate public pedagogical knowledge through the knowledge of experience that educators construct when they teach and when they inhabit, work within, and name their worlds (Contreras & Pérez de Lara, 2010 ). Its training objectives work toward the organization of “communities of mutual attention” (Connely & Clandinin, 1995 ) that foster horizontal relations between participants and encourage the reciprocal transmission of “secrets of the trade” through writing, lectures, commentary, and conversation about the stories of educational experiences.

To achieve these goals, the work plan for this particular form of pedagogical documentation arranges and mobilizes a number of methodological precautions so that the participants reflect on significant moments from their experience as educators and within their professional lives. The methodology ideally facilitates reflection, tension, and debate within the pedagogical understandings that have been formed by educators’ professional and working lives and allows them to reconstruct, problematize, and transform this methodology through narrative documentation of lived experiences in schools and within communities of practice (Suárez, 2014b ). In this way, as these narratives are incorporated into research-training collectives that adopt the modality of workshops, the participants become “educator narrators” of their own pedagogical experiences and engage in cooperative writing and rewriting processes, reading with their peers, and informed conversation regarding their different narratives. Through these key moments of the methodological mechanism of narrative documentation and with the coordination of other more experienced narrator teachers or university researchers, the participants carry out the narrative research and the pedagogical documentation of their own educational worlds and share in processes of self and co-training processes among their peers (Suárez, 2012 ).

In the course of this collective and cooperative work, teachers train themselves at the same time that they are narrating, researching, and categorizing the ways in which they give meaning and ascribe significance to their professional and work environments. When the narrator educators recount and reinscribe past events from the schools in which they work, they make explicit their experiential knowledge and rework it by searching for works and narrative plots that account for its vitality and dynamism. In this way, they transform their practical consciousness into discourse (i.e., it becomes the subject of enunciation, reception, dialogue, and interpretation), and this discourse and knowledge is thus made available for critique, evaluation, commentary, and new readings and interpretations both from the narrator educators and from other educators, researchers, and stakeholders within the field of education. In this sense, the formative practice of writing and then reading one’s narrative alone is compounded by the reflective power of the alternative readings and commentaries of the other educator narrators and researchers.

Finally, when this collective of teachers presents the stories of their pedagogical experiences, elaborated within their framework and circulated within diverse, specialized circuits of reception, they become the authors of pedagogical texts and documents, therein intervening in educational debates within the field of pedagogy. For this reason, through the theoretical-methodological combination of an research-training-action strategy, we argue that documenting one’s own experience is neither simply writing stories nor is it writing them alone.

Research-Training-Action for Educators and the Methodological Criteria for Qualitative Social Research

The theoretical and methodological criteria that inform narrative documentation of experiences are themselves specific to the field of pedagogy and to “research on educational experiences” (Contreras & Pérez de Lara, 2010 ): they work to organize and standardize the development of the research-training-action model for teachers in accordance with the rules of the engagement that regulate the field of situated practice and pedagogical inquiry. But, despite this specificity, the methodological precautions for pedagogical work between peers is inspired by and in dialogue with some traditions of qualitative social research that favor its deployment. Through these criteria, this strategy also involves debates within the field of educational science and educational research. These research traditions, in conversation with narrative documentation, produce ethnographies of education, autobiographical and narrative research, action-participation research, participatory teacher research, educator workshops, and, fundamentally, research workshops for teaching practices.

However, our work as narrative teachers and university researchers focusing on the narrative reconstruction of teaching practice is difficult to categorize in any strict sense as one of these forms of educational research. It takes ideas from them, but it arranges and reworks them according to their work strategies, which are, as previously emphasized, fundamentally pedagogical. From educational ethnography (Rockwell, 2009 ), it appropriates the imperative to document the undocumented aspects of daily life within schools and the need to give “thickness” to their textual productions. However, the stories of educators’ pedagogical experiences are not constructed as ethnographic reports; they are not “thick descriptions.” Educator narrators have other compositional rules and different end goals than anthropologists, and while their narratives can be of interest to educational anthropologists as “primary sources,” their primary destinations and imagined readers are other teachers and stakeholders in the field of pedagogy.

Autobiographical narrative (Bolívar, 2002 ) considers its methodological contributions in relation to the autobiographical reconstruction of the professional trajectories of educators (Bullough, 2000 ) and has the potential to account for lived experience—to document it and problematize it. However, the stories of experiences that educator narrators recount and rework in the documentation workshop are configured around educational (or pedagogical) experiences and are not about the professional biographies of the educators. They contain autobiographical elements, but they are not, in a strict sense, autobiographies or life histories. The stories encompass the pedagogical experiences in which the educator narrators have participated, including the educational and historical works that they live in and talk about. For this reason, they do incorporate autobiographical elements, but they do so in a way that contributes to the “pedagogical narrative” of the story.

Together the participation-action-research model and the teacher-action-research model (Anderson & Kerr, 2007 ) emphasize the epistemological, methodological, political, and ethical importance granted to the participatory processes of knowledge production and to the nonhierarchical conversations between academic researchers and the participants/subjects in agreeing upon the terms of the production process.

Participatory-research-action, and teachers’ research action (Anderson & Kerr, 2007 ), likewise pays attention to validating criteria as a strategy of knowledge production. This approach draws significantly from teaching workshops on qualitative and participant research, especially the “workshop methodology,” that is, a particular way of organizing, orienting, and managing, time, space, theoretical, and methodological resources for social research in order to facilitate participation within the framework of dialogical research approaches (Batallán, 2007 ). It has also developed faith in the potential of productive empathy within collaborative and participatory work between researcher-coordinators of workshops and teachers while working as researcher narrators in practice.

However, the approach differs from these workshops in several ways. Perhaps the most is that narrative documentation is not intended to involve or incorporate practicing teachers in qualitative social research on teaching practices. Rather, it invites teachers who narrate their pedagogical histories to recount their educational experiences, or to do what they usually do—tell pedagogical stories—but within certain rules of the engagement and under predetermined organizational and methodological conditions, the definition of which they are also invited to participate in. In fact, these narrator teachers are increasingly involved in the management and maintenance of the political, organizational, institutional, and pedagogical conditions that make the processes of narrative documentation possible. This is yet another difference.

The Trajectory of Narrative Documentation: Moments of Research-Training-Action for Educators

As mentioned earlier, throughout the past 20 years we have carried out many experiences of narrative documentation in the field, and each instance has been specific, unique, and conducted with different actors from the pedagogical field, within different scopes, and with the participation of different teacher-narrators. One of the methodological potentials of narrative documentation of pedagogical experiences is the ability and plasticity of the mechanism to adapt to diverse contexts and locations, as well as to different political, institutional, and pedagogical circumstances that characterize and situate those contexts.

Beyond the specific way in which this modality of teacher research-training-action has been adopted in each case, it is possible to identify a successive and recursive series of “methodological moments” that facilitate a more detailed description of the trajectory of pedagogical work that narrative documentation sketches, as well as a deeper understanding of how the teacher narrators actively participate in each one of these instances. These successive and recursive moments include (a) the management of appropriate political, institutional, and pedagogical conditions for the participatory teacher research-training-action; (b) the identification and selection of experiences to document; (c) the writing and revising of different versions of narrated experience; (d) reading, commentary, and conversation about successive versions of the narratives; (e) the publication of the narratives; and (f) the circulation of the narrative documents in specialized circuits of reception. This article describes these synthetically and offers some examples that highlight the participation of the teacher narrators and other actors in the pedagogical field at each point in the process. This shows how they are involved in the processes of reworking the knowledges constructed through pedagogical experience.

The Management of Political, Institutional, and Pedagogical Conditions

This strategy of pedagogical work between peers imagines a rupture with the conventional and established modalities of teaching work, as well as a rupture in the routine flow of educational activities. It involves inventing times and spaces and establishing norms and micro-politics that guarantee opportunities for research training and collaborative work among teachers and between teachers and academic researchers that are difficult to procure. For this reason, managing and maintaining political conditions and institutional qualifications so that educators can be actively involved in the processes of narrative documentation is necessary for narrative documentation to act as an effective mechanism. The narrative documentation of experience is inscribed and developed within the pedagogical field, a field in which it is not always easy to find normative and administrative resources for pedagogical research regarding educational stakeholders and professional development between peers.

In fact, the projects that have been effectively undertaken in the field have managed to carry out their goals because each one was supported by a series of work agreements that sustained the initiative until its successful completion. When these political and institutional arrangements are not achieved, it makes it difficult to develop a process of narrative documentation. This serves to illustrate the importance of these arrangements in light of the difficulties many projects face in establishing themselves and obtaining any continuity. For example, the project of narrative documentation of pedagogical experiences in early levels developed together with the management of the level in three educational regions of Buenos Aires province could only be deepened and expanded in one of the educational regions (La Matanza), as long as agreements with the Regional Head of Education and a group of educational supervisors dedicated to teacher research-training-action could be secured. The results of this negotiation were that the regional scholastic administration included narrative documentation as a possible line of work for supervisors, managers, and teachers at all educational levels within the local educational policy plan. In the other educational regions (Pilar and San Martín), in contrast, once the province-wide project was concluded, the work was discontinued, because, among other reasons, the regional educational heads did not give the project their support, there were no institutional authorizations for the participation of teachers, and no educational stakeholders demanded it.

To sustain the conditions necessary for the production of narrative documentation, the methodological mechanism must anticipate the work from the beginning and throughout the working process in cooperation with researchers, teachers, and institutional references and educational administrators (authorities and technical teams of the ministries of education, school supervisors, school directors). This requires the definition of the specific moments of exchange in order to reach these agreements and establish the rules of engagement that enable the journey of participatory research-training-action. This includes an “invitation” to teachers to join the work and requires a clear explanation of the responsibilities the process entails, as well as the cautions, guarantees, and certifications that are institutionally available that make participation possible. The incorporation of teacher narrators into the collective and into the process of narrative documentation is necessarily voluntary, in contrast to the usual, obligatory official “calls,” and their participation must be negotiated throughout the process.

Identification and Selection of the Experiences to Document

The identification and selection of experiences to document could be considered the initial moment of the documentation process in a strict sense, although the intellectual operations that are involved with its development are also found at other moments throughout the process. The tasks that define what experiences will be documented are strategic in at least two senses. First, they involve the negotiation of expectations and research approaches, training, and pedagogical intervention from different sectors and actors. Second, these agreements on what to document impact the preliminary development of the working pedagogical relationships between peers that regulate the narrative practices and qualitative research of teachers during the whole process.

For these reasons, the selecting criteria to identify and select appropriate moments of narrative documentation can be thought of as a point of intersection between the more general objectives of pedagogical policy that champions narrative documentation and the more specific objectives that the processes pursue in the field. This effort to reconcile and make diverse interests and their languages legible is a determining factor when recruiting teachers to participate in the initiative. In the previously mentioned project aimed at documenting, through narratives of experience, the world of early education in three educational regions in the province of Buenos Aires, for example, the Provincial Office of Early Education indicated its interest in compiling accounts of pedagogical experiences with “early literacy” and “socialization within the norms of coexistence.” However, during the fieldwork, the local processes of narrative documentation carried out by the coordinators and the narrative teachers tended toward other themes in which they were interested. Although only half of the accounts collected told pedagogical stories addressing the questions preselected by the province, the other narrative documents helped to enrich the range of issues incorporated into the educational policy agenda for this educational level.

While essential first steps in the process, the tasks of narrative research associated with identification and selection are also (usually) present throughout the entire process. One reason is that the same individual and collective process of interpretation and commentary on successive versions of the stories can redirect the focus and interest of the narrator teacher to other lived experiences. In addition, once the experience being documented has been selected, it then becomes necessary to work persistently to identify different aspects of that experience (scenarios, contexts, personalities, voices) in order to configure the narrative interest of the story. Finally, the practices of narrative and autobiographical inquiry of the participant teachers reconfigure their ways of understanding, their pedagogical judgement, and the ways in which they narrate the events within the educational sphere.

Identification and selection involves a congruence of relatively complex intellectual operations. First, through workshops, a set of exercises are made available to evoke lived pedagogical experiences from teachers, as well as to reveal fingerprints and material traces of the pedagogical practices they employed. Teachers are able to search their personal memory, as well as the memories of other teachers and “key informants,” in the institutional memory of schools or organizations and thus achieve a primary reconstruction of the experience in question. Next, they are asked to recount this reconstructed experience orally to their colleagues within the group. The act of “telling their story to others” allows each participant teacher to construct a first draft of the narrative plot of the account and, at the same time, to make a first attempt at putting the reconstructed experience into objective terms. Likewise, their colleagues and the coordinator contribute to the process by questioning this first draft and inquiring into the sparse, blurry, or controversial aspects of the story.

After these first drafts, the teachers engage in a series of writing exercises, working toward a better objective account of the experience, although this is still an intermediate step. This process, where peers and the coordinator read the first drafts, facilitates a new round of reflections and exchanges that lays the foundation for the next. Likewise, these interpretations inform the subsequent comments, questions, and observations that are returned to the teacher who wrote the initial draft, initiating conversations about the outlines. Clearly, the operations of narrative and autobiographical research that the mechanism of narrative documentation deploys involve the self-reflective collaboration of the collective through a series of “data collection techniques”: field notes, open interviews, conversations with key informants, professional journals, photographs, and videos.

Writing and Rewriting Accounts of Pedagogical Experiences

The process of narrative documentation anticipates a second moment of work specifically oriented toward the writing and rewriting of different and successive versions of the teachers’ experiential accounts until arriving at a “publishable version” of the text, that is to say, until the experiential account in question aligns with the combination of criteria laid out by the peer collective for the publication of the texts produced within the workshop. In this decisive moment, the teachers carry out a series of very specific textual productions, taking the trial histories and the first texts produced during the moment of identification and selection as the primary source but also incorporating the stories, commentaries, and descriptions offered by the interviewees, other documentary records of the experience (projects and plans, records of observations, evaluation reports, professional journals, videos, photos), and, of course, the memories activated, reflected on, and recreated throughout the process of writing and rewriting.

Each revision is an occasion for teachers to deepen their inquiry into the experience through extensive conversations and interviews, archival work and the systematization of documentary materials, new analysis and interpretations of the materials that have been revealed, and reworkings of the lived situations and the actions taken. Each new account or version of the account is an opportunity to create a “clean copy” of the experience, to think about it again, interrogate it again, and name it again but with other words, meanings, and questions. This is the moment in the process in which the account is textually “fixed,” although always in a provisional manner, to the experience and in which it acquires a degree of objectivity that allows it to be reworked and questioned again and again with more distance. At the same time, this is the moment in which the teacher narrators provide the narrative plot with a pedagogical density that connects and gives meaning to the different events, actions, and contents of the experience, which until that point have been dispersed and fragmented.

Through the progressive reconfiguration of the plot, the narrator teachers incorporate their own descriptions and interpretations of the events recounted into the text, and they put them in tension with the point of view of the other participants within the experience. The account of the experience gains verisimilitude and complexity as its narrative is rewritten and revised throughout the process of documentation. Simultaneously the teachers, as they write and revise, develop a discursive awareness that they did not have before. Teacher training, pedagogical research into the educational sphere, and narrative practices are connected until they are collapsed within the same process of documentation.

The process of producing different versions of a story requires, additionally, other complementary writing practices, not necessarily narrative, that work together to increase the self-reflexive aspect of the process and generate a significant body of documentation and sources for reach revision. In addition to stories of pedagogical experiences, the moment of writing and revision includes the production of field notes, accounts of experiences of writing, cards, essays and autobiographical notes, indices, schemas, outlines, reports, and chronologies that accompany and inform the narrative production of teachers.

Almost all of the strategies that are used at this point in the process tend to convert speech and conversation into writing and, more specifically, into written accounts of experiences. They usually begin with a prompt for the teachers, to spark their writing and help them begin their first-person narration. Due to the current conditions of production of texts in the educational sphere, teachers are often encouraged to write in an uncompromised and depersonalized style. In contrast, narrative documentation depends on teachers embracing their role as both the protagonists and the narrators of their histories. For this reason, one of the first exercises that teachers are asked to engage in is writing an autobiographical account of something that they would usually communicate by speaking or conversing.

The workshop exercises are organized so that each teacher defines a “writing plan.” The exercises are intended to guide a series of decisions related to the title and the content of the account, while other, more advanced exercises work to manage the narrative details in relationship to time within the story and the position of each teacher as the narrator of his or her pedagogical experiences. At the same time, other suggested methodologies of the narrative documentation mechanism promote writing a chronology and later a report of the experience; others, more systematic and complex, propose building out an index and an outline or sketch of the experience in question.

Reading, Commentaries, and Conversation Regarding the Experiential Account

The practices of reading, commenting, and conversing about narrations of experiences that teachers carry out throughout the research-training-action process are intimately interwoven with the rhythms, dynamics, and logics of the writing practices of the subsequent versions of the texts. However, they manifest a clear methodological specificity and observe a series of specific operational guidelines. The steps involved in “pedagogical editing” include the following:

Readings and revision by other teacher narrators and the coordinator-researchers of the process of the partial and final versions of the narrative accounts and of the other complementary texts produced by the participants;

Reflection, interrogation, and interpretation, individual and collective, of the “world of the story,” that is, of the content (aspects, questions, and interpretations) of the narrated pedagogical experience;

Pedagogical conversation and deliberation between peers, in a group environment and regulated within a workshop environment focused on these experiences and the reconstruction of pedagogical knowledge through narration;

The development and communication of questions, suggestions, and commentaries, written or spoken, by teacher narrators that inform and are informed by the readings, reflections, interpretations, conversations, and deliberations over the accounts of the experiences in question; and

The evaluation of the communicability of the text and of the reception of the pedagogical account and the process of making a decision with respect to the opportunities for its publication and circulation within specific networks.

Through this series of practices, the teacher narrators inscribe their accounts within a network of readings among peers, receive comments on their texts, and offer commentary on the texts of others, with the end goal of collaborating throughout the process of pedagogical documentation and enriching their initial accounts. For this reason, the activities carried out during pedagogical editing are decisive within the processes of training and participatory research that regulates the mechanism of narrative documentation. But these tasks are strategic, not just because they contribute to an increase in the volume in publication of teachers, narratives, but also because they are intended to collaborate with and reflect on the process of narrative and autobiographical research with teacher protagonists in order to document their experiences and to help them form more subtle, informed interpretations and descriptions of the educational sphere.

This moment in the process is highly recursive and is extended over time and at the same time is committed to the collective dimensions initiated by the mechanism of narrative documentation. The activities of interested reading, the exchange of comments, and conversation between peers that is activated during the narrative’s development transform the objects of thinking, provisionally grounded through the writing and revision of the stories, into objects of group reflection, inquiry, and collective questioning and joint problematization of the narrated experiences. The solitary act of writing and revision of the stories is thus disrupted by the reading and commentary of others (peers and the coordinator of the process), and the pedagogical narrative configured by the teacher narrator in the account begins to be reconfigured in conversation with the lectures, shared deliberations, and successive revisions, therein generating mutual attention in a community of specialized pedagogical practices and discourses.

The following is a fragment of a reconstructed pedagogical narration created in a narrative documentation workshop in Rosario de la Frontera, Salta province. The passage alludes to the process of writing and revision completed by the teacher Mariela S. This version of the account was created through a teacher collective within a network of northeastern Argentine schools and was coordinated in the field by Susana C. with the advice of a university research team and university support.

Mariela accepted Susana C.’s invitation to write about a pedagogical experience, and, after a personal exchange with her, methodological orientation, several conversations with colleagues, attentive reading of the pedagogical materials on the subject, and the completion of various preliminary writing exercises, she wrote a first version of her story It was worth it!

The hall of Jesus College in Salta was full. Students, professors, teachers, and parents from all over the province settled in as best they could in the aisles and the doors . . . there were no empty seats left. At my side, Cecilia Nazán looked at me nervously, with a frozen smile, she wanted to hide, poor thing! Both of us trembling! Zulma Céliz, the other author of the project presented at the Eighth Science and Technology Fair was absent, having left for our city of Rosario, with great regret, for another job. “How did we end up here?,” I asked myself . . . The images passed rapidly through my head. My 2° year student Physics student Zulma was the one whose initial unease led us to investigate the contamination of the Rosario river, and Cecilia joined the team. We wanted to demonstrate that our river was contaminated with very dangerous bacteria. . . . Then, we got a laboratory in Salta to analyze the water, we sold raffles in order [to] pay for every cent, we were buried up to the ankle in water and mud in order to collect the samples, and we walked with our noses wrinkled in the middle of the dump, we wrote and discussed and we wrote again . . . And then came the display in the Edgar Leal school, with the stand put together with so much effort and help from relatives and friends; after the joy of “passing” to the province stage. The three exhausting trips in Salta, where the jury questioned, reviewed, evaluated, again and again. . . .

There we were: the faces of students and teachers were a mix of nerves, anxiety, and even anguish Some cried with emotion, or laughed euphorically, others cried with frustration. If I had asked them as I asked myself, if such effort was worth it? Because in those moments I thought, how much work! How many complications! Was it worth it? My answer arrived from the microphone of the presenter, who announced . . . “And the First prize in the Natural Science Category, Level H, goes to . . .” (To whoooooooooo?! Say it already!!): When the river sounds, microorganisms rise!! . . . from the Institute of Superior Education Number 6024 of Rosario de la frontera.” What? We looked at Cecelia, only half understanding, we couldn’t breathe . . . We walked down the aisle as if we were dreaming, the Minister Altubre put something in our hands, the people congratulated us as we passed, “they’re the ones from the river” said some, “they’re the ones from Rosario de la Frontera” said others . . . Yes, yes it was worth it, I thought with tears in my eyes.

In this version of the story, Mariela joined the narrative documentation workshop that Susana coordinated and in which other teacher narrators had already participated. Before reading her text, Mariela listened to readings and read preliminary versions of the written narratives of experiences written by colleagues; she listened to commentaries on those texts; and she herself thought of some suggestions, observed how the teacher narrators took notes, responded to interpretations, corroborated points of view, entered into conversations with colleagues about their texts, and recommended pedagogical reading to inform the expansion of the narratives. After this, she was encouraged by Susana to read her first draft of her narrative. She read it out loud and received several spoken comments from the coordinator and some of the teacher narrators. The observations of these teachers were primarily suggestions to provide additional information so that they could better understand the experience and to restructure it. The coordinator suggested that she expand “a little more information about the content of the experience” and suggested she better describe the “disappointment” that some colleagues felt. In response to this observation, Mariela confessed that she did not want to mention this in her text in order to “not complicate the institutional setting by raising these issues.” However, during the conversation she took field notes and exchanged points of view, made clarifications to questions, and marked her text with her own comments.

After this, some of the participating teachers took copies of Mariela’s first draft, read it, and sent her comments, questions, and suggestions for revision in writing and by marking up the original. Susana also made commentaries of this kind, as well as facilitated the textual material and described the work done by the team of researcher-coordinators who did not participate directly in the workshop. After analyzing them, this team indirectly engaged with the editing process by sending the following commentary to the local coordinator of the process:

Mariela’s story is very well told, the expressions are endearing, the descriptions are interesting. It raised several questions for us, because we desired to know much more about the experience of winning the prize than about the prize itself. And here is the question: it would be great if she could expand on why she decided to pursue this experience, who were these teachers and students and what were their respective educational levels, the what and the why of this history. If not, the experience seems a bit obscured and trapped in the mere fact of having won the prize, without being understood. From an initial reading it seems that all of the work “was worth it” because they won a prize. But why was this experience valuable pedagogically? This is the richness of this story that is missing. Another very interesting issue appears in this story that could be workshopped: how the profession is valued. [External validation] is so necessary that at times it obscures the pedagogical results, or the one is obscured by the other. In this respect, some questions that could help revise the text: Why was is so important to win the award? Why did winning a prize make a pedagogical experience worth the work?

As we can see, the observations of the coordinating team were also oriented toward asking for more information in order to clarify the story, but it also took the next step of suggesting some individual and collective reflection regarding the role of external validation within the text, above all regarding what it has to do with the pedagogical meaning of the experience for its protagonists and the narrator and the problematization of the assumed positions. Through these commentaries, Susana continued to encourage the revision process, offering Mariela suggestions and observations about her story. Mariela was already prepared to revise her story using the feedback from her colleagues and process coordinator. She then wrote a second version of her experience:

Memories of a Professor from a Science Fair. It was worth it! The hall of Jesus College in Salta was full. Students, professors, teachers, and parents from all over the province settled in as best they could in the aisles and the doors . . . there were no empty seats left. At my side, my student Cecilia Bazán, looked at me nervously, with a frozen smile, she wanted to hide, poor thing! Both of us trembling! Zulma Céliz, the other author of the project presented at the Eighth Science and Technology Fair was absent, having left for our city of Rosario, with great regret, for another job. “How did we end up here?” I asked myself . . . The images passed rapidly through my head. My 2° year Physics student Zulma was the one whose initial unease led us to investigate about the contamination of the Rosario river, and Cecilia joined the team. We wanted to demonstrate that our river was contaminated with very dangerous bacteria . . . Our work would serve a social function, a service to the community; they would know why and to what extent the Rosario River was contaminated, they would know the danger connected with recreational activities in its water or using them to irrigate the orchards. For me, as a teacher, I had set a goal for myself: to bring the investigation to the school and to demonstrate that it was possible for the Instituto Tercario to be of service to the community. So , we got a laboratory in Salta to analyze the water, knocked on many doors asking for help and despite the fact that few responded to our request, we learned that in life, when you want something very much . . . you can achieve it. Not everyone turned their back on us and thanks to them we moved forward; we sold bonos contribución in order pay for every cent and were able to pay for the costs of the project, we were buried up to our ankles in water and mud in order to collect the samples, and we walked with our noses wrinkled in the middle of the dump, we wrote and discussed and we wrote again . . . And then came the display in the Edgar Leal school, with the stand put together with so much effort and help from relatives and friends; and then the joy of “passing” to the provincial stage. The three exhausting trips in Salta, where the jury questioned, reviewed, evaluated, again and again. . . . There we were: the faces of students and teachers were a mix of nerves, anxiety, and even anguish. Some cried with emotion, or laughed euphorically, others cried with frustration. If I had asked them as I asked myself, if such effort was worth it? Because in those moments I thought, how much work! How many complications! Was it worth it? My answer arrived from the microphone of the presenter, who announced . . . “And the First prize in the Natural Science Category, Level H, goes to . . .” (To whoooooooooo?! Say it already!!): When the river sounds, microorganisms rise!! . . . from the Institute of Superior Education Number 6024 of Rosario de la frontera.” What? We looked at Cecelia, half not understanding, we couldn’t breathe . . . We walked down the aisle as if we were dreaming, the Minister Altubre put something in our hands, the people congratulated us as we passed, “they’re the ones from the river” said some, “they’re the ones from Rosario de la Frontera” said others . . . Yes, yes it was worth it, I thought with tears in my eyes. Gone were the voices of those who diminished our labor, of those who told us not to get our hopes up about receiving any recognition because in the capital there would be hundreds of more innovative projects . . . As we returned to our home, I thought on what this experience meant to my students (my little ones); on the inspiration it would bring to my colleagues who were disenchanted with this profession that at times can be so unrewarding (only at times). All things considered, the positive elements of this experience transcended any prize. What we shared and learned as scientists and as humans enriched us as people, and enriched me as a professional; Now I know that as a pedagogical experience, research within the classroom helps our students to experience what a scientist feels when she or he is frustrated or thrilled with her/his work. I remembered why I chose to be a biology professor, and how much I love what I do: I guide the hand of “my little ones” to learn and value nature together. Yes, I know that all this about a vocation is out of style, but I understood that if I undertook so much trouble to see this project through, it was precisely because of this antiquated notion: my vocation as a teacher; and the good part, the best part of all of this is that it’s only the beginning!

In this new version, the bold text indicates changes and expansions introduced by the teacher narrator. Reviewing them synthetically, we see that first there is a new “conceptual title” that emphasizes the teacher narrator’s own participation in the experience. Next, by including entirely new paragraphs, the author expands the story and the narrator contributes more specific information about the pedagogical experience in question, which allows us to understand the point of view of the protagonists in connection with the pedagogical value of the story. This also illuminates the unequal local power dynamics that motivated their self-censure. Additionally, these added textual fragments impact the narrative structure of the account, therein modifying the value judgements articulated by the teacher narrator and transforming the account into a denser and more detailed narrative of an experience.

Based on what Susana pointed out about Mariela’s writing decisions, Mariela expanded information about the experience and multiplied her content; she censored by omission the expansion of her story; she maintained the structure of the story and the narrative events and the tone and the style of the narrative; and she modified the storyline, some of the content (themes, questions, and interpretations) of the story, and the pedagogical value of the experiences to the extent that one could say that the story is a “different” experience from the story narrated in the first version.

The collective, organized by the coordinator of the local documentation process, considered and deliberated on all of these elements, changes, and interpretations within Mariela’s writing and revision processes. Regarding the editing process, Susana developed a case study, gathered materials and diverse documents for its analysis, and presented them to the collective of teacher narrators in the workshop. One of the themes that dominated the conversation regarded the analysis of the process of inquiry and training developed through the teacher narrator, as well as the different interpretations put into play. Another topic of discussion was how the successive transformations of the text were supported by revisions that at the same time entailed individual and collective reflection between peers. As a complement to these reflexive exercises, Susana also suggested new writing practices for teacher narrators, this time in reference to the experience of researching and documenting the educational sphere itself through stories about pedagogical experiences. The results of this reflective writing was a new account of Mariela’s experience that was integrated into a new cycle of reading, commenting, and conversing within the collective. Through all of these materials and exchanges, the collective of teacher and coordinator made decisions with respect to the accessibility and relevance of the story and referred it to the coordination of the pedagogical network for publication.

Publication and Circulation of Narratives of Pedagogical Experiences

Although they correspond to a specific moment toward the end of the teacher research-training-action process, the political, methodological, and technical problems of publishing the narratives of experiences are present thought the entire process. Once the experiences that will be documented have been selected, throughout the process of writing and revision, and above all during pedagogical editing, debates and exchanges about the “criteria for publication” arise. These collective instances of decision-making almost always focus on which narratives of experience to publish and in what format. In this way, issues related to the publication and circulation of the stories of experience are updated at every step in the process and engage increasingly active participation from teachers as “editors” of their own narrative production. However, throughout the mechanism of narrative documentation, a specific moment is clearly distinguished in order to debate and collectively decide the strategies, supports, and modalities of publication. Be it through the reflective exercises, debates, and conversations fostered by pedagogical editing of narratives or through the creation of ad hoc “editorial committees,” a series of operations can be identified as a different kind of work. Toward the end of the process, the debates and the decisions about publication return to a conversation about how to use these narratives of experience to intervene in public debate, especially with regard to education.

The publication and circulation of the narrative documents represent the culmination of the process regulated by the mechanism of narrative documentation and, at the same time, result in an important political-pedagogical event. All of the mobilization and organization of time, space, and resources comes together in the act of making concrete results public. The publication of these educational histories as told by teachers constitutes a strategic instance of the process, precisely because it is the moment in which the teacher narrators become the authors of pedagogical documents, and, through them, their knowledges and experiences reach the highest possible level of objectivity.

The circulation of the narrative documents is connected to the activities of publication and the attempt to intervene in public debate, particularly with regard to the specialized debate over education, through the narratives of experience produced within collaborative pedagogical networks. In fact, the diffusion of the narratives of experience through different mediums, supports, and strategies, and in different circuits of reception, increases the political impact of the publication, making it more specific in determined environments to pedagogical deliberation and complmenting it with its struggle to legitimize itself as a valid form of knowledge. However, the strategies of intervention at different levels and with different educational actors that the circulation of narrative documents establish are of a different nature from the previous ones because they involve the mobilization of efforts, resources, and innovation within the collectives of teacher authors into other circuits of production of pedagogical discourses and practices.

For this reason, it can be described as an example of pedagogical work between different peers that, in generic terms, tend to respond reflectively, operationally, and politically to the question of what to do with the stories once they are published. Their meaning is based precisely on fostering effective and lasting revisions of the dynamics and relations of pedagogical work in schools, of the modalities of curricular and research organization in teacher training institutions, and in other environments within the field of education on which pedagogical knowledge is created, legitimized, and circulated. Ultimately, it is the ability of the collectives of teacher narrators to circulate their intellectual production that ends up validating the pedagogical work of teachers in the field of education. After all, this strategy of research-training-action is not just about better understanding the educational sphere but also about working to transform it through new discourses and modes of pedagogical thinking.

So what have been the contributions of politically and methodologically experimental works on narrative documentation within the educational field, especially pedagogy in teacher training and pedagogical research? What contributions have been made to the debates about qualitative research and research-training-action in education? Consider the following important issues that may generate future conversations.

The first is to collaborate in order to deepen debate within the field and tradition of critical pedagogy, primarily by working to construct an affirmative pedagogical discourse through the use of imagination and construction and proposing a model of research-training-action among teachers focused on the elaboration of narratives and experience. In this sense, we inform the epistemological, methodological, and political viability of constructing alternative pedagogical proposals in teacher training materials, pedagogical research, and curricula that complement the “horizontalization of criticism” by expanding the “horizon of possibility.” Second is the proposal of a horizontal training strategy between teachers that anticipates and projects the incorporation of teachers and teacher narrators into communities of practice and critical pedagogical discourses that work together to reconstruct the language of pedagogy. The narrative documentation of pedagogical experiences can collaborate in the confirmation and the unfolding of pedagogical networks and collectives of politically and pedagogically mobilized teacher narrators that imagine, think, say, and make in ways that envision public education differently. Finally, together with other pedagogical experiences of research-training-action, a collective construction of a pedagogical political movement has occurred in which networks and collectives of teachers are engaging in different conversations in order to research their pedagogical practices and work toward the democratization of education.

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• v.4(8); 2022

A guide to pedagogical research for scientists from a biological sciences background

Melissa m. lacey.

1​ Biomolecular Sciences Research Centre, Department of Biosciences and Chemistry, Sheffield Hallam University, Howard Street, Sheffield, UK

Georgios Efthimiou

2​ Department of Biomedical and Forensic Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, Hardy Building, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull, UK

How we teach science and engage with the public, particularly in fast moving subjects such as microbiology, are constantly being reflected upon, improved and innovated. This has led to a significant increase of pedagogy publications by microbiology educators in higher education that have had a positive impact on teaching quality, student retention, progression and course satisfaction as well as how science is communicated with the public. In this paper we describe the different types of pedagogical manuscripts that biological scientists could write and the benefits that derive from doing so. We provide a glossary of terms often seen in educational literature. Project design and qualitative and quantitative research methodologies are discussed, highlighting ethical and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) considerations. Suggestions are made regarding how to network with colleagues who are also keen on writing pedagogical papers as well as examples of good practice. Lastly, a handy how-to-start guide aims to help with first steps. We hope that this paper will be a useful survival manual for colleagues who wish to engage in exciting pedagogical research in the field of microbiology and the broader biological sciences.

Introduction

Pedagogy is the study of teaching and learning in an educational setting and spans early years, through schools and colleges into higher education and out into the general public. At its heart, pedagogy research aims to improve the experience and outcomes of learners utilizing evidence-based approaches, often framed around the actions of the educator. Within a higher education setting, academics are primarily concerned with the university student experience and the retention, progression and attainment of students. In addition, interests may lie in the transition for students from post-16 education into higher education, aspiration of school students to study in higher education as well as the public’s understanding of scientific research. This has led to the development of various creative interactive approaches for improving student participation and experience in the lecture theatre, classroom and laboratory as well as initiatives focusing on increasing student attainment and narrowing the awarding gap of marginalized student groups [ 1–5 ]. As a result, the volume of pedagogical papers published by teaching-oriented natural scientists has increased significantly during the last 5 years [ 6 ].

Microbiology, as well as a stand-alone degree subject, is a key component of Biosciences courses due to the role of microbes in human, animal and plant diseases as well as being invaluable to the field of biotechnology. Microbiology teaching faces similar challenges to those across the sciences, with microbiology students traditionally being required to memorize the names of microbial species, link them with specific diseases and then remember numerous virulence factors and disease symptoms, elements that many students find challenging and often frustrating [ 7–9 ].

Public engagement or outreach is often seen as distinct from higher education pedagogy but shares many similarities as it predominantly aims to understand the impact of work and participants’ understanding of, or relationship with, science. Pedagogy research undertaken in schools and colleges is critical as it inspires the next generation of scientists. Although outreach events are often targeted to the public instead of university students, the latter can be often involved in such activities, participating in the noble cause of science communication. Citizen science projects link school and college outreach with science communication to the general public, which can be invaluable in raising public awareness about major microbiological issues such as COVID-19 and antimicrobial resistance [ 10 ]. Finally, papers describing outreach activities are also extremely useful in evaluating and sharing best practice and innovation [ 10–12 ].

Motivations for undertaking research in pedagogy

Pedagogy research is rooted in driving evidence-based improvements to students’ education. In addition to the clear benefits of pedagogy research for the improvement and support of learning and educational experiences, undertaking and disseminating pedagogy research has several significant benefits for the individual academic, their department and institution, as well as the wider scientific community.

For the individual academic researcher, when improving their own teaching and making the associated modules/courses better and more sustainable, undertaking research to quantify the impact on students gives evidence of good and excellent practice. Creating traditional outputs (conference talks, manuscripts) from this research gives scholarly impact to support career development, such as appraisals, Higher Education Academy fellowships, promotion applications as well as funding bids. These are particularly helpful for academics in teaching-focused roles such as teaching fellows, colleagues who want a career change from research to teaching and PhD students who are interested in a career in university teaching [ 13 ].

Departments and institutions benefit from improving teaching, learning and assessment and student performance and satisfaction, as these can directly help improve NSS (National Student Survey (UK)) scores and university league table rankings for an academic institution [ 14 ].

For the wider scientific community, undertaking and disseminating pedagogy research allows the sharing of new ideas and tools for improving teaching and can lead to the formation of a valuable body of pedagogical literature for the community. Practices for pedagogical research, such as statistics, ethics and elements of study design, can be standardized and built upon, leading to comparable and transferable results of higher quality and stronger impact, driving better quality teaching and outreach. Finally, outreach papers show us new ways for attracting the public’s attention about key microbiology issues that directly affect our lives and communities [ 15, 16 ].

Aim and objectives

The aim of this paper is to motivate and facilitate microbiology, and more widely biological sciences, educators in higher education to carry out and publish innovative pedagogical and science communication research. This will be achieved by highlighting the benefits of doing so, how to navigate challenges that might be encountered and finally suggesting solutions for making things easier through this journey, especially for individuals starting out in the world of pedagogy writing. To achieve our aim we will provide useful information about pedagogical terminology, project design challenges, research methodologies, and networking with research partners and mentors.

Pedagogy literature and the language it uses

Microbiology, and more widely biosciences, pedagogy research can be found in a range of outputs that mirror traditional scientific research, and include blogs, conferences posters and presentations, book chapters and journal articles. Pedagogy and public engagement journals range from social sciences-based journals (e.g. Public Understanding of Science , International Journal of Science Education ) through to subject based educational journals (e.g. FEBS Open Bio , Access Microbiology ), with subject-based educational journals being more accessible to researchers new to the field.

As with any field, pedagogy has its own style and language ( Box 1 ), with biosciences education journals having a style which can be seen as a mixture of a science-subject journal and sociology journal. Microbiology-based journal research articles, such as in Journal of Applied Microbiology , are written in short concise text, with multiple tables, graphs and figures with clearly defined introduction, methods, results and discussion sections. Sociology-based journals such as Public Understanding of Science and Journal of Research in Science Teaching , may have more descriptive language and a different layout, with an extended introduction leading to a theoretical framework, methods section, analysis and conclusion. As a newcomer to the field, it is often easier to access and develop knowledge and confidence in biosciences education journals before migrating to sociology-based journals.

: Top 10 new words

A new research area means new words. In this box there are a variety of different approaches, theoretical bases, data collection and analysis methods that will be explained in more detail in the rest of the paper. Here is a summary of what each of our top 10 new words means as a source of reference.

Iterative approach – where the research method, data and research outcomes are revisited as each piece of research is analysed to best answer the research question.

Focus group – a group of participants brought together to discuss a predetermined set of research questions. Focus groups are typically recorded and transcripts made for further analysis [ 52 ].

Mixed methods – where both qualitative and quantitative data are collected and analysed by researchers to answer the research question.

Coding – coding underpins both thematic analysis and grounded theory and is the process of labelling sections of text. Different types of coding range from the initial process of describing qualitative data to scanning data for predefined codes [ 53 ].

Thematic analysis – a method of qualitative analysis which identifies common elements known as themes . Thematic analysis is flexible and relatively straightforward compared to a full grounded theory approach [ 26 ].

Themes – developed during thematic analysis themes are key and recurring phenomena, ideas or patterns that are relevant to the research question. Themes are identified by coding .

Grounded theory – a common method of qualitative analysis. The analysis is grounded in the data and takes an iterative approach to coding, constructs and theories [ 27 ].

Categories – within grounded theory, coding is first used to identify concepts (analogous to themes in thematic analysis ) and these concepts are further described and identify real-world phenomena.

Theoretical framework – an existing theory, such as science capital , that research study is based around. This gives a specific lens, or viewpoint, from which the research question answered.

Science capital –a common theoretical framework which is based on social and cultural capital. It is how much science, and affinity to science, someone has accumulated in their lifetime, and includes scientific knowledge, attitudes and values towards science, interaction with science media and family science-based skills, qualifications and employment [ 18, 54 ].

How to undertake pedagogy research: a start to finish guide

Stage 1: project design.

Pedagogy research ideally starts with an idea and research question. The project is then planned and undertaken in much the same way as biological research; it is initiative-taking in its design, is hypothesis driven and can lead to high-quality research. To consider in this stage: What is the research question? Is it relevant? How does the research design answer this question? To be able to fully plan a research project all elements must be considered, from ethics, to methodologies and data analysis (see stages below).

In some instances, a project or event has already been planned or even undertaken, and the author(s) would like to write it up, most often as a case study. This observation-driven approach may lead to difficulties if ethics and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) considerations are not in place before data collection.

An additional form of project design, more frequently seen in social sciences, is when research can start with collecting data and then develop a narrative or hypothesis from that, hence grounded theory, where the act of interaction with the project leads to the hypothesis [ 17 ].

Theoretical frameworks are most often found in social science journals as opposed to biological sciences-based journals. A theoretical framework is an educational theory upon which the research question and method is built or hung. They can be viewed as different approaches to view the same question, whereas in microbiology researchers may take a metagenomic or culture-based approach to learn more about a particular disease state, and theoretical frameworks can give different lenses to look at the same question. Theoretical frameworks are a very different way of thinking and organizing research than biologists are used to, so if starting to framing research around one, it would be advisable to collaborate with an educationalist or sociologist in the first instance [ 18 ] ( Box 2 ).

Learning theory

Most pedagogy research will, perhaps unknowingly, draw on or be based around an learning/educational theory. These theories are often described as a lens to look at a research question or data set, or a window to look into a room with the research question or data inside, with different windows, or learning theory, giving a different perspective on the data. It is tempting to speculate that an easier analogue for bioscientists is a different methodology, which when applied to the same bacterial strain, will give different data sets that allow the research to investigate different elements of the strain. Widely used and study learning theories are:

• Behaviourism – think Pavlov’s dog; education is about the learner being influenced by both positive and negative environmental stimuli. The learner is seen as passive.
• Humanism – education is all about the learner; focusing on creating an environment to meet the learner's education needs with the teacher assisting the learner in this journey.
• Cognitive – think the brain as a computer; learning is influenced by internal and external factors. Learning is built on prior knowledge.
• Constructivism – building blocks; the learner builds upon previous experience and interactions to build (construct) new understanding.
• Connectivism – think the internet; learners draw on a large pool of knowledge and make connections within the information to undergo learning [ 55 ].

Stage 2: Ethics and GPDR

Depending on the type of biosciences research undertaken, researchers may have very little to vast amounts of experience in ethics. For those with little experience, ethics for the entry-level researcher is discussed. Ethics is a major consideration of pedagogy research, and most journals will not allow publication without it in place; however, many higher education institutes do not permit retrospective ethics, so data collected specifically for a research project without ethics in place may be unpublishable and may even need to be destroyed.

Ethics applications can be time consuming, but as part of the project design process they provide an important opportunity to think about what the purpose of the research is, consider what the best research questions are in the context of existing literature and ensure the most appropriate methodologies are used. Starting ethics applications for the first time often feels overwhelming, and resources such as those by BERA [ 19 ] can be of use as well as institution-level ethics training in addition to a mentor. Key ethical considerations are around protecting those involved in the study, the researcher conducting the study and the research institute. Asking questions in the design of the experiment will aid the ethics process.

For example: Do I really need to collect these data? Are all the elements of your questionnaire or focus group questionnaires needed? If you do not need the answer to the question to answer your research question, then why are you asking it?

Will any student group be advantaged or disadvantaged through my action? If you have two groups, one being given better teaching than the other, then this is unethical as it is disadvantageous to one group over the other. To ensure this does not happen, the alternative teaching method can be offered to the other group after the intervention evaluation.

Could what you are about to study put you, or your institute, on the front page of the local or national newspaper for the wrong reasons? If what you are going to research is possibly contentious, think about how you are going to manage the research so it does not bring you, or your institute, into disrepute.

Within the UK and EU, data protection (GPDR) compliance is critical for researchers and is often embedded within the university's ethics procedures as there are several core overlapping elements. For example: where will the project data be stored and who will have access, why do they need access? Data should be as secure as possible and only those in the research team should have access.

Are the data only being used for what the participants consented to? Are the data as anonymous as they can be whilst being stored? Data do not have to be fully anonymous, but storing information that is not needed, such as names and email addresses, increases the severity of a data breach.

Finally, many universities now require completion of a Data Management Plan before starting any work.

Stage 3: Research methodologies

Pedagogy methodologies are diverse and span complex numerical data sets that life scientists feel familiar with to qualitative data that is the analysis of words, ranging from short open text responses within questionnaires to semi-structured interviews and written text. Choosing the correct methodology for a study, one that will allow the research questions to be answered, will vary depending on the project, budget and the confidence of the researchers in utilizing these methodologies.

Broadly speaking, pedagogical research is split into quantitative and qualitative research methods, with research that combines them referred to as mixed methods. Some data may be pre-existing or already collected within the usual business of an institute, such as assessment marks, module and course reviews, and student demographics, whereas other data will be collected within the study. Quantitative data are typically collected through questionnaires/surveys and qualitative data can be collected through questionnaires in the form of short and longer free text responses, focus groups and interviews as well as through participants' written reflections [ 20 ].

Mixed methodology is a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies brought together to answer the research question. This mixed methodology could be within the sample data collection, for example the combination of Likert scales and short answer questions within a questionnaire, or within a study, for example with a questionnaire and its analysis providing a basic understanding of the research question and then focus groups, informed by the previous data analysis, being used for in-depth analysis of more interesting or complex issues [ 21 ].

Stage 4: Data collection

Questionnaires are ideal to collect the views of a large group and are ideally quick and easy for participants to fill in. Key elements of questionnaire design are being research question-focused and ensuring the questionnaire is accessible and straightforward to answer [ 21 ]. It is also important to identify how biases are going to enter the data set. Think about how the questionnaire is presented to participants; are only engaged students at the session? If the questionnaire is to the public at an outreach event, are attendees opting-in to fill in the questionnaire or are researchers undertaking exit questionnaires to gain a representative sample [ 22 ]?

Focus Groups are a good way to gain more detailed and nuanced research from a group of participants and allow the participants to discuss and explore ideas or questions together. Focus groups are structured by pre-determined questions and the design of these questions is key to answering the research question [ 23 ].

Structured Interviews also utilize pre-determined questions but are conducted in a one-to-one setting. They are more time consuming than focus groups to reach the same number of participants but can give a more detailed data set. Structured interviews are ideal when discussing personal experiences but particular care is needed of the power dynamic between the interviewer and interviewee. The biases within focus groups and semi-structured interviews come primarily from asking leading or unsuitable questions and who the participants are, and if they are representative of the communities the research wishes to engage with, as well as participants not feeling comfortable in the setting and answering the questions how they think the interviewer wants them to be answered [ 24 ].

Stage 5a: Data analysis – quantitative data

Quantitative methodologies are often where life scientists start in terms of pedagogy study design, as this is the data that biological scientists are most familiar with. If Excel, R or Prism (other software is available) can be used then researchers feel more comfortable in their abilities to analyse them and draw relevant conclusions.

Some quantitative data feel very familiar; interval/ratio data such as student marks and participants’ ages can be analysed in a similar way to data frequently analysed as biological scientists, with corresponding statistical analysis, such as t -tests and ANOVAs, and their nonparametric equivalents being utilized.

Ordinal data are those which can be ranked, often in the form of Likert scales, where participants identified their experiences on a scale, e.g. 1 – strongly disagree to 5 – strongly agree. These data can be analysed as numeral values but as they are ranks, rather than values, care should be taken in the analysis of such data and most often medians are reported rather than means and statistical methods such as Krusall–Wallis and Mann–Whitney’s utilized.

Finally nominal data, such as gender, course and ethnicity, are often key in answering research questions and can be used within bivariate analysis to determine differences between groups of students in terms of their attainment or student experience and also analysed within their own right with frequency tables and statistical analysis such as Chi-squared tests [ 20, 25 ].

Stage 5b: Data analysis – qualitative data

Qualitative methodologies and data are often new and unfamiliar to microbiologists and biologists but offer a richness of data that cannot be achieved by quantitative methods. In the simplest sense qualitative data analysis is the analysis of words, either the written word or transcripts of spoken words. They can range from the analysis of short responses within questionnaires through to analysis of multiple, hour-long interviews. Unlike quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis has a more iterative approach, with analysis being undertaken, and further literature reviewing followed by further analysis. Similarly, data can be re-analysed after further work as well as within a mixed methodology, with short answer questionnaire responses informing questions for focus groups and interviews. Software such as NVivo is widely used for analysis of large pieces of data such as transcripts of interviews and focus groups.

Thematic analysis is the qualitative method of choice for most subject-focused educational research, as it allows an accessible approach to analysing open text and focus/group interview data without having to undertake the more complex task of working within analysis frameworks such as grounded theory. Briefly, thematic analysis is where researchers identify themes within data, such as motivations or experiences, and the data are then coded with these themes. Themes can be predetermined based on the research question (close-coding) or be based on the data (open-coding). Reflection on the literature and an iterative approach can evolve themes determined by open coding in axial coding. If these themes are part of a mixed data set, such as a questionnaire, themes can become part of the data set, and act as quantitative, nominal data. This is a conforming way for many life scientists to start qualitative research, because although the data and analysis were qualitative, the merging of the data with quantitative data returns the researcher to the safe space of spreadsheets and numbers, tables and graphs. For larger pieces of data, such as reflective essays, focus groups and interviews, thematic analysis provides a framework to pull out key themes within a dataset, with examples of text being given to support these themes upon dissemination [ 20, 26 ].

Grounded theory is a more involved approach, with themes being replaced with concepts and categories and an extensive iterative approach taken. Briefly, grounded theory is more often used where qualitative data are collected over a period of time, with each round of data collection and analysis impacting the research questions and future methodological design. Grounded theory is often used to make new theories and frameworks; these are more often seen in pedagogy journals at the social sciences end of the spectrum, rather than subject area-specific journals [ 20, 27–29 ].

Examples of good practice

Pedagogy encompasses a wide range of topics, which are often interlinked and build upon one another. Some of these papers start with a certain research question, while others involve an evaluation study following the introduction of an educational activity.

Innovative teaching methods: Creative flipped classroom approaches where learning changes from teacher-centred to learner-centred have become excellent alternatives to the traditional methods of delivery [ 30–32 ]. They usually involve problem-solving exercises, teamwork, journal clubs and debates. In these cases, the instructor initiates and moderates the activity, but most of the work, subsequent discussion and often peer reviewing is undertaken by the student groups [ 30, 31 ]. Case studies of innovative teaching can often describe beneficial activities such as field trips, summer placements, events and laboratory experiments [ 3, 11, 33, 34 ]. In addition, innovative teaching methods and resources can also be used with outreach with schools and colleges as well as the general public [ 11, 12, 35 ]. For instance, Duckett et al . [ 36 ] ran a Night at the Museum activity, where visitors attended a Halloween-inspired microbiology-themed series of interactive exhibitions hosted within a national museum.

Games: Gamification of teaching in higher education is another very successful trend. Introduction of creative games can improve engagement, as students learn in a recreational and enjoyable way, and it boosts enthusiasm about the field of study. These methods can also be used to engage the public and school children. Types of such activities include card, computer, board and role-playing games [ 37–41 ]; this approach can also be used for research project design [ 17 ]. For example, Efthimiou and Tucker (2021) [ 39 ] applied a microbiology card game that combined the use of microbe trump cards and Cards Against Humanity questions, managing to boost student performance and enthusiasm [ 39 ].

Use of social media: The use of Twitter, Facebook and other social media in microbiology teaching has been found to be very effective. For instance, Racaniello [ 42 ] showed that utilization of science blogs and podcasts via social media allows microbiologists to easily teach about complex science [ 42 ]. Piantola et al . [ 43 ] launched an ‘Adopt a Bacterium’ project via Facebook, an activity that was very positively evaluated by the students, helped them to change their attitude on how to process information and facilitated knowledge retention [ 43 ]. Furthermore, Twitter was employed for delivery of #EUROmicroMOOC, the first free worldwide Microbiology Massive Open Online Course content analytics indicated that more than 3 million users saw their posts [ 44 ]. Finally, WhatsApp was used effectively for teaching microbiology, although several students were concerned about the time adjustments required before this approach is routinely used in their curriculum [ 45 ].

Increasing equality for marginalized groups: Using student data (ethnicity, gender, educational history, socioeconomic background, etc.), researchers can increase the accessibility and equity of teaching by ascertaining the impact of an intervention on different marginalized student groups compared to their peers [ 46–48 ]. The same approach can be taken when determining if the participants of outreach events are representative of the wider community or if some groups are underrepresented [ 36, 49 ]. For instance, Hubbard [ 48 ] followed a series of data-driven approaches to address systematic awarding gaps, aiming to improve equity and diversity for success in higher education.

Student experience: How students interact with their curricula and their experiences in higher education can be investigated and how these experiences are affected by students' self-esteem, stress or confidence can also be examined, often in collaboration with an educational psychologist. Such studies can lead to improvements of performance and retention by taking a student-focused approach in curriculum and pastoral support design. For example, Okpala et al . [ 50 ] highlighted the effects of parental involvement, instructional expenditures and family socioeconomic attributes on student achievement.

Reviews: Collection, description, critical analysis and synthesis of recent publications on a specific pedagogical topic, as well as meta-analysis of their data, can be very useful for colleagues who want to familiarize themselves with an area and its controversiality [ 50, 51 ]. For instance, Oliveira et al . [ 6 ] wrote a very useful literature review about emerging technologies as pedagogical tools for teaching and learning science.

How to find your people

Scientific research is enhanced by collaborations and mentoring, and pedagogy research is no different. Depending on your institute, you may already be in a department with active pedagogy researchers, there may be a group of like-minded colleagues wishing to start publishing research or you might find that you are the first person in your department to start pedagogical research. The lack of research partners, mentors and critical friends when starting a new research area can make it difficult to start, so how do you find your people?

Most institutes that undertake teaching will have learning, teaching and assessment or student voice working groups at college/faculty and university level if they are not present within departments (the name of these groups will probably vary from institute to institute). Look for people doing interesting things and groups already in place; start from the local level of your teaching teams to your department, then wider to your college/faculty and research institute and then finally across your whole institute. You may find a research partner within your teaching team and a critical friend outside your department.

Finally, look for your national and international networks. The biosciences pedagogy community is incredibly welcoming and supportive and runs workshops, mentoring networks and conferences where you can meet new friends, research partners and mentors. For example, The Microbiology Society has the Microbiology Educators Network and the Royal Society of Biology the Biosciences’ Mentoring Network. The Microbiology Society and the Royal Society of Biology have pedagogy and outreach workshops and conferences that run throughout the year.

How to get started

Beginning a new field of research can be daunting and it can be difficult to know where to start. In addition, funding for pedagogy research is limited and so academics often do the lion’s share of the project, which can be difficult in an often already time-pressured environment. There are some similar steps to make starting your research easier.

Step 1: Don’t go it alone – finding your people is important but finding a research partner is invaluable. Having someone as invested as you in your project to discuss the research, share concerns and help drive the project will make starting research in a new field much less daunting and keep the project moving.

Step 2: Put the learners first – pedagogy research is all about having an evidence-based approach to teaching, learning and assessment, so put improving learners’ experiences at the heart of projects.

Step 3: Bat smarter not harder – embed your pedagogy research in current practice or a current role. Complement what you are already doing.

Step 4: Use the resources you already have – the chances are that you will not get lots of time or money to do your pedagogy research, so be canny with the resources you have. Final year capstone project students can undertake pedagogy research, and coursework from higher education training courses can be adapted to form an introduction to a paper.

Step 5: Start with what you know – if you are apprehensive about mixed methods and qualitative research, that is OK; start with what you know. Quantitative data that already exist, or are easy to collect, can form interesting data sets and are within the comfort zone of most biological scientists.

Step 6: Have an achievable aim – knowing what you want out of your research is really important. You might want your first small piece of research to be written up into a blog for your institute or be presented at a conference and then the next project be a journal article. If you are not sure where you can publish your work, get familiar with journals and the type of papers they publish. Do not be afraid to email journal editors and ask if they would potentially be interested in your work; knowing where you are aiming a paper early on makes it much easier to write.

Step 7: Remember: if you are not having fun, you are not doing it right! – pedagogy research shows what you are doing has a real impact that affects students and the wider public lives and thus it is really rewarding. The biosciences and microbiology pedagogy research community is very friendly and supportive, so research here is hard work, but really, really good fun.

Funding information

This work received no specific grant from any funding agency.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Paula Simpkin, Katherine Rawlinson and David Smith for their role as a critical friend in drafting the manuscript.

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Abbreviations: ANOVA, analysis of variance; BERA, British Educational Research Association; GDPR, general data protection regulation; NSS, National Student Survey.

Pedagogical Research

Pedagogical Research (PEDRE) is an open access, double-blind peer-reviewed and scholarly journal which covers all areas of the educational sciences. Pedagogical Research publishes four issues per year (January, April, July, October). 

Pedagogical Research (PEDRE) is published by Modestum  DOO, Serbia.

Online ISSN: 2468-4929

DOI: https://doi.org/10.29333/pedre

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• Table Of Contents

pedagogy , the study of teaching methods, including the aims of education and the ways in which such goals may be achieved. The field relies heavily on educational psychology , which encompasses scientific theories of learning , and to some extent on the philosophy of education , which considers the aims and value of education from a philosophical perspective.

Teaching methods

The teacher and the learner.

In the act of teaching there are two parties (the teacher and the taught) who work together in some program (the subject matter) designed to modify the learners’ experience and understanding in some way. It is necessary to begin, therefore, with observations about the learner, the teacher, and the subject matter and then to consider the significance of group life and the school. It will then be possible to consider the factors and theories involved in modifying a person’s experience and understanding. They include theories of learning in education, of school and class organization, and of instructional media.

A child enters school with little if any attainment in written expression and leaves it capable of learning much from human culture . It was thought originally that such progress was just a matter of learning, memorizing, associating, and practicing. The work of psychologists has revealed, however, that the growth of the pupil’s intellectual powers must include a large element of development through different phases, beginning with simple sensorimotor coordination ; going on to the beginnings of symbolizing, helped by the growth of language and play ; and then on to logical thought, provided the material is concrete; and, finally, in midadolescence, on to the power to examine problems comprehensively, to grasp their formal structure, and to evoke explanation. Regarding emotional experience, the child progresses from direct, immediate, uninhibited reactions to more complex, less direct, and more circumspect responses. The physical growth of the child is so obvious as to need no comment. Any attempt to educate the child intellectually and emotionally and for action must take account of those characteristics. Education must pace development, not follow it and not ignore it. The components in the child’s overall educational growth are physical and mental maturation, experience, formal teaching through language, and an urge in the learner to resolve discrepancies, anomalies , and dissonances in experience.

What is required of teachers is that they enjoy and be capable of sharing with children work programs designed to modify their experience and understanding. That means making relevant experience available to the student at the right time. The teacher must be mature, have humour with a sense of status, be firm yet unruffled, and be sympathetic but not overpersonal. With large classes, the teacher becomes a leader of a group, providing stimulating learning situations.

The subject matter taught also has a marked influence on the total teaching situation. It may be conveniently divided into the broad headings of languages, humanities , sciences , mathematics , and arts . Although each group of subjects has something in common with others in terms of the demands it makes on the thinker, each area has also something quite specific in its mode of development. Languages call for verbal learning and production based on oral work, particularly during the early phases. The humanities call for an understanding of cause-effect relations of immediate and remote connections between persons and institutions and between human beings and their environment . The sciences call for induction from experience, though deductive processes are required when the laws of science are formalized into mathematical terms. The humanities and sciences both depend on the ability of the learner to hypothesize. Mathematics calls for the ability to abstract, symbolize, and deduce. An interest in the formal and structural properties of the acts of counting and measuring is fundamental. Arts and literature call for a fairly free opportunity to explore and create.

A large part of the teacher’s role is as a group leader, and the group life of the school and the classroom must influence the teaching situation. Group life shows itself in the dynamic structure of the class—including its manner of reaching group decisions, the hierarchy of its members, the existence of cliques and of isolated individuals—and in its morale and overall response to the school and the rest of the staff. Individual pupils also conduct themselves under the influence of the groups to which they belong. Their achievements and attitudes are subject to evaluation by the group, leading to support or ostracism, and they set their standards according to those influences.

In many schools, the range of ages in any class is about one year, and the narrow range makes for some uniformity of subject-matter coverage. But in rural one- and two-teacher schools, groups of children may be heterogeneous by age and ability, and the mode of teaching has to cope with a number of smaller subunits moving along at different rates. The teacher’s problem is to coordinate the work of those small, dissimilar groups in such a way that all get attention. Creative free activity has to be practiced by one group while another has more formal instruction from the teacher.

The effect of “ streaming ,” or “tracking”—that is, selecting homogeneous groups by both age and intellectual ability—has promoted much inquiry. The practice evokes extreme opinions, ardent support, and vociferous condemnation. The case for uniformity is that putting pupils with their intellectual peers makes teaching more effective and learning more acceptable. The case against it draws attention to its bad effects on the morale of those children in the lower streams. That view supports the heterogeneous class on the grounds that the strongest are not overforced and the weakest gain from sharing with their abler fellows. Experimental evidence on the problem is diverse .

The school community is housed in a physical complex, and the conditions of classrooms, assembly places, and play areas and the existence (or nonexistence) of libraries , laboratories , arts-and-crafts rooms, and workshops all play their part in the effectiveness of the teaching-learning situation. Severe restrictions may be caused by the absence of library and laboratory services.

The social forces immediately outside the school community also influence the teaching situation. They emanate from home, neighbourhood, and wider social groupings. Teaching is a compact among several groups, including teachers, students, and parents, in the first place, with youth organizations and civic and sometimes religious groups playing a secondary role. The overall neighbourhood youth subculture also sets standards and attitudes that teachers must take into account in their work.

Evidence-Based Teaching

Pedagogy: What It Is & Why Matters?

Is pedagogy just a fancy word for teaching? Partly, but it is also much more.

What Is Pedagogy?

Pedagogy includes but goes beyond the notion of teaching. It encompasses everything a teacher does to help students learn.

And, pedagogy is focused on helping children to learn. Andragogy is a similar concept, but it is focused on helping adults learn.

Beliefs are Drivers of & Part of Pedagogy

Your beliefs drive your actions, and therefore, your beliefs are part of your pedagogy. These include your beliefs about:

• The purpose of education
• Your role as a teacher
• How to treat students and manage their behaviour
• How your students learn
• The best ways to teach your students
• How to go about assessing your students’ learning

But where do these beliefs come from? A lot of our beliefs come from untested theories and fashionable fads. Sadly, many of these theories and fads have little if any grounding in evidence at all.

Evidence-Based Pedagogical Beliefs

Beliefs drive your actions. Put another way, your pedagogical beliefs drive your pedagogical practices . Embracing evidence-based pedagogical practices involves:

• Being willing to let go of or change some of your existing beliefs
• Based on what research has found about how to best help students learn

Trusting research over popular opinion is a pedagogical belief. And, it is the foundational belief of evidence-based pedagogy .

What You Do as a Teacher Matters!

A second core belief of evidence-based pedagogy is that what you do as a teacher makes a difference to your students’ growth and success .

Students success at school is helped or hindered by many factors. Some of these are outside of your control. These include:

• Students who suffer frequent illnesses or chronic conditions such as ADHD
• The home life of your students
• Students natural abilities and tendencies

Yet, without denying the impact such factors have, what you do as a teacher also makes a difference to how well your students do at school.

9 Evidence-Based Pedagogical Practices

As research is ongoing, we are discovering more and more about how to help children learn. So, there is no single list of pedagogical practices that is set in stone. Yet, here is a snapshot of what we know now.

Your Relationship with Your Students Matters

Forging a positive and professional relationship is an important pedagogical practice. It has a direct impact on your students’ academic success. It also has an indirect impact through influencing things such as students’ self-efficacy, engagement and behaviour.

Clarity & Alignment are Crucial Pedagogical Practices

You need to be clear about what you want your students to learn. It doesn’t matter whether you achieve such clarity through learning intentions, goals, success criteria or some other method. What matters is that you are clear about what your students must know and be able to do to achieve success – and how you will assess that success. See – Teacher Clarity .

Then, you must align what you teach, how you teach and what you get your students doing accordingly.

Either-Or Beliefs Can Be Flawed Ways of Thinking

Quite often, different ways of teaching are presented as polar opposites. For example, teacher-led explicit instruction vs. student-led discovery and inquiry learning. Sometimes, such a comparison is worthwhile as one is clearly more effective than the other. Yet, often, a more nuanced understanding is needed. For example, two seemingly opposing approaches may work well together or may be appropriate at different stages of learning.

See – Finding 2 .

Some Teaching Strategies Have More Impact Than Others

Keeping in mind the importance of nuance, sometimes a particular teaching strategy has more impact than alternative teaching strategies. The size of such differences can be measured using effect sizes, percentile gains or months progressed. See 10 Evidence-Based Teaching Strategies and 6 High-Impact Teaching Strategies .

Choosing high-impact teaching strategies is an essential pedagogical practice. However, lower-impact strategies can also be useful when they are easy to implement and used to complement rather than replace higher-impact strategies.

What Your Students Do Matters Too! And, it is a Pedagogical Practice

Pedagogy is about what you do as a teacher. Yet, this includes what you tell your students to do – and what they do matters too. For example, having your students practice new things and spacing this practice out over time has a large impact on their success. So too do other strategies, such as connecting new learning to prior knowledge, identifying similarities and differences and checking their work .

Managing Your Students’ Behaviour Makes a Difference

Managing your students’ behaviour is a crucial pedagogical practice. It affects your students’ learning, as well as your own sanity. Forging positive teacher-student relationships helps. So too does teaching well. But you also need a bank of strategies specifically designed to manage your students’ behaviour.

See – Top 10 Behaviour Management Strategies

Intervention for Struggling Students Helps

Using evidence-based practices in your own classroom helps. But sometimes more is needed. In such cases, working with other people in the school to offer struggling students additional support is an important pedagogical practice. One evidence-based example of such support is Response to Intervention .

Enrichment Programs Work, but Acceleration Works Better

At the other end of the spectrum, you need to make decisions about how to help your high-achieving students to progress even further. It is very easy to let such students coast along, but they deserve as much challenge and support as every other student in your class. Research shows that enrichment programs work. However, accelerating bright students has a larger impact on their learning.

Formative Assessment & Feedback Make a Difference

Formative assessment refers to any form of assessment with the primary purpose of helping students to correct and improve what they have done. It can be as simple as an incidental observation of a student trying to find the area of a rectangle, or as complex as an analysis of a persuasive speech. Whether simple or complex, such formative assessment forms the basis of feedback that you provide to your student. Such feedback tells them how they have done and what they need to do to improve.

FREE eBook on How to Give Feedback

Pedagogy in a Nutshell

Pedagogy is a synonym for teaching. But it is more! It is a synonym for the different things teachers do to help their students learn.

This includes various aspects of the teaching process, including planning, teaching, and assessment.

Yet, pedagogy also involves other important activities, such as relationship building, managing students’ behaviour and collaborating with others.

Research On Pedagogical Practices

Download a Sampling of Research on the Above Pedagogical Practices

SHAUN KILLIAN (MEd., MLead.)

Shaun Killian (me) is an experienced and passionate teacher, as well as a past school principal. After a heart transplant and having both my legs amputated, I am not yet capable of returning to work. Yet, my passion for helping students succeed has led me to use my time to research teaching and associated practices. I then share what I find in practical ways through this website. The greatest compliment I have ever received from a past student was I never left any student behind. That is mission of most teachers and I hope you find the information on this site useful.

2 thoughts on “Pedagogy: What It Is & Why Matters?”

I think the biggest different between pedagogy and teaching is the understanding of how students learn, learning about learning.

Hi Alexandra I agree that understanding how students learn is an essential aspect of pedagogy and one that is not captured under the term teaching

Comments are closed.

2021 shaun patrick killian

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Digital Educational Experiments: Re-conceptualising Families’ Roles as Competent Educators and Co-researchers for STEM Conceptual Development

• Open Access
• First Online: 11 July 2024

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• Suxiang Yu 10 ,
• Prabhat Rai 10 &
• Marilyn Fleer   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1224-5510 11  

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research ((PCHR,volume 13))

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Over the past few years, the COVID-19 Pandemic has posed new challenges, such as unexpected lockdowns and restricted research site visits to our educational experiments with families. These challenges demand that we develop innovative ways of working remotely with families using digital tools, leading to our development of digital educational experiments in family settings. In digital educational experiments, researchers no longer visit children’s home settings, whereas families take up a more expansive role: they not only take up a pedagogic position for skilfully implementing the Conceptual PlayWorld [CPW] with infant-toddlers but also a co-researcher role for collecting meaningful digital data of CPW sessions for answering relevant research questions. It is not only essential to understand families’ changing roles in digital educational experiments under the new research conditions but also necessary to understand how researchers can come up with a new study design that motivates and empowers families to take up the new educator and co-researcher roles successfully and thus generating high-quality research data for better understanding effective family STEM pedagogy and young children’s STEM conceptual development. This chapter reports a CPW storytelling and mini-workshop study design for a digital educational experiment. It is argued that this new digital educational experiment design opens new possibilities for high-quality remote research with families.

You have full access to this open access chapter,  Download chapter PDF

• Digital educational experiments
• Families’ roles in research
• Conceptual PlayWorld
• Motives and demands

1 Introduction

Educational experiments have been theorised as an effective research method for studying young children’s development from a cultural-historical perspective (Hedegaard, 2008 ). In an educational experiment, researchers intentionally transform “ practices in the problem area to bring out the central relations ” (Hedegaard, 2008 , p. 182). This transformation of practices for more motivating conditions for children’s development can only be done through authentic cooperation with educators in implementing pedagogical interventions (Hedegaard, 2008 ). In traditional educational experiments through site visits, it is vital for researchers and research participants to work together to formulate and revise the intervention by considering both the planned activities and children’s actual activities (Hedegaard, 2008 ). However, in digital educational experiments, where researchers have limited access to the direct research site due to being physically remote, families, as the research participants, have to take up more responsibilities in implementing pedagogical interventions and data collection. In other words, in digital educational experiments, families must assume the role of competent educators for their children and the role of co-researchers. Existing literature shows the feasibility of training families to take up pedagogical roles such as teaching their children literacy or improving their children’s behavioural issues at home through research interventions (Purcell-Gates et al., 2014 ) as well as the feasibility of positioning families as co-researchers to collect video data related to their children’s development and their everyday practices at home even though there are some challenges and limitations (Aarsand, 2012 ). However, more needs to be known about the study design principles that support families to take up the pedagogic position as competent educators for implementing pedagogical intervention and the researching position as co-researchers for data collection, especially when the educational experiments must be conducted remotely and digitally, like the situations we have experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through reporting a digital educational experiment design of a doctoral research project conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter aims to share some experiences regarding how a storytelling and mini-workshop design empowered families to successfully take up the roles of educators and co-researchers in the digital educational experiment. It starts with a brief discussion of guiding principles for the digital educational experiment design, followed by the study design, then data examples to show the outcome of the study design, which is then culminated with a brief conclusion.

2 Two Guiding Principles for the Digital Educational Experiment Design

2.1 pedagogic design: mini-workshops and storytelling sessions.

The quality of the research data generated in educational experiments significantly depends upon the intervention implementers’ pedagogical understandings and practices (Hedegaard, 2008 ). When the educational experiment is conducted in family settings, either the researcher needs to have the ability to implement systematic intervention and transform children’s social situation of development in the digital activity settings created (Nedovic, Chap. 15, this volume ), or they need to support participating families to develop the motives and competence as competent educators to implement Conceptual PlayWorld (CPW) intervention in their family settings systematically. The second approach is adopted in the design of this particular digital educational experiment. Therefore, pedagogic design thinking must be applied to the study’s design (Rai, Chap. 12, this volume ). In other words, researchers’ interactions with families need to support families in enhancing their understanding and competence in independently implementing CPW sessions at home. Due to the busyness of modern family life, mini-workshops and storytelling designs are applied to engage and motivate families in digital educational experiments. Details of the design will be explained in the next section. For a more expansive reading on how educational experiment model has been used to work with families read (Rai & Fleer, under review ).

2.2 Collective Digital Activity Settings: Mutual Alignment in Motives

Authentic collaboration occurs when the researcher and families have a mutual alignment of motives. The researcher needs to ensure the study design allows the researcher and families to communicate and negotiate their motives for participating in the research activities, the demands they place upon each other to achieve their objects of the research activities, and their efforts to meet each other’s demands. Therefore, another principle underpinning the study’s design is to maximise opportunities for clear mutual communication of expectations and demands as well as making the best effort to meet each other’s demands. The following study design section explains strategies for creating mutual alignment in motives.

3 Study Design and Implementation

The purpose of this educational experiment is to explore the implementation of the five characteristics of the CPW model to allow for “ an evolving theoretical understanding and for the creation of new and better practice conditions fo r” infants and toddlers’ STEM development in family settings (Hedegaard, 2008 , p. 182). The data were collected in two research rounds: one in March and one in July 2021, with nine families in each round. For each round, three sets of timeslots were offered for families to choose according to their convenience. Therefore, the number of families in each group varied, generally around two to five. The chosen storybook for this Conceptual PlayWorld is “ We Are Going on a Bear Hunt ” by Michael Rosen.

The digital educational experiment starts with a pre-CPW semi-structured interview with each family, which allows the researcher to learn about the families’ current institutional practices and their motives for participating in the research activities. The researcher communicates to the families about their role as educators and co-researchers in the digital educational experiment, for they are expected to implement the pedagogical characteristics of CPW and to collect video observations, which will be shared and discussed in the mini-workshops. The researcher also explains to the families regarding the research aim, the research design, and their rights to withdraw from the research at any time without any reason. Thus, families are aware of their multiple roles in the digital educational experiment as research participants, educators, parents, and co-researchers. Families are also encouraged to share with the researcher regarding what support might benefit them during the study process.

After the pre-CPW interview, each group has ten half-hour storytelling and mini-workshop sessions, two sessions each week for five weeks. Each half-hour storytelling and mini-workshop session includes the following activities:

Greeting rituals (singing a hello song and making an acknowledgement of the country)

The researcher tells the story with the support of props, such as dolls, teddy bears, and virtual pictures, hoping that the storytelling creates a motive orientation for infants and toddlers to become interested in the We Are Going on a Bear Hunt story imaginary play.

In the mini-workshop presentation in each session, one or two pedagogical characteristics of the CPW are introduced alongside the recommendation of concrete play ideas and the sharing of implementation examples from families. Families are encouraged to share and discuss their confusions, challenges, learnings, and new plans for implementing CPW at home in small groups. Supported by the collective practice space created in digital activity settings of Zoom mini-workshops, when one family in the community gains a new play idea or learning of CPW, other families benefit from the new idea and learning, enabling the collective advancement of theoretical and practical understanding of the implementation of CPW for infants and toddlers in family settings. The researcher also openly shares her nervousness and uncertainty as a beginner doctoral researcher conducting the research and encouraging families to share their emotional experiences, either positive or negative, related to the implementation of CPW during the sessions or in emails between sessions. The ten mini-workshops are each planned with a digestible amount of information for families yet gradually support families to understand and implement CPW systematically at home. The actual plan and implementation of the mini-workshop are shaped and guided by families’ changing demands. Emails summarising the key points of the zoom session alongside mini-workshop presentation slides are sent to families after each session so that even if they occasionally miss sessions, they can catch up by reading the emails. The following is a plan of the ten workshops with the demands that families and researchers place upon each other.

Goodbye rituals (singing goodbye songs and reminding time for the next meeting)

4 Data Showcasing the Effectiveness of the Study Design

4.1 families as motivated co-researchers.

When families’ motives are understood, and their demands met, families are more motivated to stay in the study. The following is a summary of the participation and the data collected by each family in the study. In sum, families collected around 5.5 hours of high-quality home-recorded video data.

March round 2021

July round 2021

4.2 Families as Competent Educators

After mini workshop 3, one family came up with a problem scenario about getting across the muddy area without getting dirty. Their creative solution for this problem was to create stepping stones (they pretended onions as stones), and they introduced mathematical concepts such as counting how many stepping stones they needed to get across the muddy area (see Image 13.1 : counting; Image 13.2 : Going across the mud through stepping stones). Before the zoom session, the family also asked the researcher about this play idea, and the researcher responded to her in an email with an encouragement. Then, after the researcher received the video recording of this interaction, the researcher commented in the email response, trying to further motivate the family by making some positive comments alongside the researcher’s common-sense interpretation of the video data. The original email response commented on three videos that the family had shared that day, and the following excerpt focuses on the particular “getting across the muddy area” video:

Your problem scenario of going through the mud in the imaginary world is so creative! It’s sooo amazing! And I absolutely love it when you intentionally teach mathematical concepts such as counting stepping stones! I can see how engaged Jay (pseudonym) was. He listened to you counting the ‘stepping stones’ so attentively! And he was so excited about the mud, and he explored the mud through his senses, such as touch, taste. I love watching your interactions with Jay. (2nd April 2021 email)

Another example is an email from a family participating in the CPW educational experiment in July 2021. The family took the initiative to reach out to me and told me that they had continued applying the pedagogical characteristics they acquired from the CPW mini-workshops after the data collection. The following is a short quote from the family’s email sent to us two years after the data collection:

I’d like to think that both kids have somewhat excelled in their learning by using this skill to become more immersive and unlock their imagination (which seems to make the memories richer and deeper). I also think that as a parent, it has helped me to learn about how to play with them in a more engaging way and become more 'present' with them when we play. So, the program has dual benefits in our instance. (25th April 2023 email)

Going across the mud through stepping stones

5 Conclusion

This digital educational experiment shows that families have the competence and motive to take up diverse roles in digital educational experiment as research participants, parents, educators, and sometimes also act as co-researchers. The mini-workshops with families create new demands and offered conditions for families to try their innovative ideas in their family settings. The collaborative design of the educational experiment supports mutual alignment of motives between the researcher and families thus building a common knowledge (Edwards, 2011 ; Rai, 2019 ) to support responsive pedagogic action. It is argued that the mini-workshop and collaborative design of Conceptual PlayWorld supported digital educational experiment design and empowered families to assume the diverse roles in digital educational experiments.

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Yu, S., Rai, P., Fleer, M. (2024). Digital Educational Experiments: Re-conceptualising Families’ Roles as Competent Educators and Co-researchers for STEM Conceptual Development. In: Fleer, M., Fragkiadaki, G., Ødegaard, E.E., Rai, P., Sadownik, A.R. (eds) Cultural-historical Digital Methodology in Early Childhood Settings. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-59785-5_13

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How Can Teachers Integrate New Technologies Like AI Into the Classroom? ‘Be Open Minded and Take Risks,’ Says Friday Institute for Educational Innovation Executive Director and NC State College of Education Associate Dean for Translational Research Krista Glazewski

For more than 20 years, Friday Institute for Educational Innovation Executive Director and NC State College of Education Associate Dean for Translational Research Krista Glazewski has studied how complex problem solving can be supported through new, emerging and foundational technologies. Now, Glazewski said available technologies are finally catching up to practices and pedagogies that researchers and educators have envisioned. 

“We’ve known for a long time what we’ve wanted technology to be able to do. For example, using technology to pre-plan scaffolding possibilities based on known difficulties among students,” Glazewski said. “Now, technology is reaching a point where we can reliably expect that it can accomplish some of those tasks and that frees the teacher to be able to do a lot more of the on-the-fly decision making and makes it much more possible for a teacher to be responsive in the moment.” 

What Should Educators Know about Artificial Intelligence in Education?

One of the most talked about technologies in education right now, Glazewski said, is artificial intelligence (AI). Although the hype around AI has reached a peak recently, the technology has been present in education for about 30 years through applications like learning analytics and adaptive testing systems.  

But, new advancements in AI are allowing the technology to support pedagogies that it previously could not. For example, if students are struggling to understand a concept, a teacher could use AI to generate a different example, with a different context, to help make the idea more concrete. 

“AI is offering a lot of promise both for supporting learners in the classroom but also supporting teachers. I get pretty excited about how AI-assisted supports might help teachers do what they do differently or better,” Glazewski said. 

AI also has a strong potential to support student inquiry, complex problem solving and collaborative group inquiry processes, Glazewski said. 

Glazewski works on the National Science Foundation’s AI Institute for Engaged Learning , or EngageAI team, which is investigating how technology can be adaptive and responsive to students’ group processing and individual problem solving in real time. They’re using AI models to respond to students’ questions and needs, creating branching narratives within a game-based learning environment that combine to solve complex problems.

“One of the things that I get really excited about are the pedagogical models that really enable learning through problem solving,” she said. “Problem-based learning really offers a trusted approach that’s built on a long history of evidence and research. So, we can take these evidence-based approaches and use new technologies to help enable that.”

What Should Teachers Know About Integrating New Technologies Like AI?

When considering adopting new technologies for instruction, Glazewski said it’s important for educators to first consider student safety. 

Checking into components like data privacy practices, as well as compliance with state and federal regulations like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), is crucial. 

Additionally, teachers should ensure that the data models that drive the systems are ethically curated and produced, and represent a full demographic range. 

“A teacher should be really open and excited to try new things out, but also coordinate with their principal and their district offices to make sure that they’re in compliance with local, state and federal policy,” she said. “We need to have confidence in how the technology was built and to be able to understand that this was built in an ethical, transparent way that the company itself should be able to explain it.”

Most importantly for teachers, Glazewski said, is to keep an open mind when implementing new technologies and understand that the introduction of any new teaching practice takes time and practice, and comes with a bit of trial and error. 

“I think the main thing is to just be open minded and take risks. All of these new strategies and technologies are going to involve some risk and probably some failure, so we also ask teachers to do what they would tell their students to do, which is learn from failure, move past it,” she said. “We aren’t going to get it all right the first time, but we are going to get it right.”

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Collaborative Concept Mapping: Investigating the Nature of Discourse Patterns and Features of a Concept Map

• Hlologelo Climant Khoza University of Pretoria
• Bob Maseko University of Malawi

Research in science education has established the significance of collaborative concept mapping as a powerful strategy in fostering conceptual learning. During such collaboration, students talk about concept map features (i.e., concepts to include, linking words, and cross-links) in constructing a joint map. The quality of the concept map produced depends on the nature of discourses that happen in these collaborative interactions. We explored the nature of discourses between pairs of biology students collaborating on concept mapping and how these discourses contribute to the enhancement of different features of the concept maps. Six students individually constructed weekly individual maps on different topics and then came together in pairs to construct a joint concept map. Their discussions during collaboration were audio-recorded. Both the individual and joint concept maps were analyzed for knowledge of breadth, knowledge of depth, and knowledge of connectedness. To analyze the discussions and understand the nature of the discourses, both deductive and inductive coding approaches were used. The coded episodes were then categorised into the nine discourse patterns identified by Fu et al. (2016). We then matched the episodes with the concept map features that were discussed. Findings indicate that the biology students’ collaboration exhibited mostly knowledge-sharing discourses when deliberating on the three features of a concept map. In turn, the number of valid concepts and propositions improved from individual to joint maps. Although the students’ discussions of cross-links were characterized by knowledge-sharing discourses, most of the joint maps did not show improvement in terms of the number cross-links. We discuss these findings and provide implications regarding the value of understanding the intricacies of discourse patterns in collaborative concept mapping.

La recherche dans le domaine de l'enseignement des sciences a établi l'importance de la cartographie conceptuelle collaborative en tant que stratégie puissante pour favoriser l'apprentissage conceptuel. Au cours de cette collaboration, les élèves discutent des caractéristiques de la carte conceptuelle (c'est-à-dire des concepts à inclure, des mots de liaison et des liens croisés) pour construire une carte commune. La qualité de la carte conceptuelle produite dépend de la nature des discours tenus lors de ces interactions collaboratives. Nous avons exploré la nature des discours entre des paires d'étudiants en biologie collaborant sur la cartographie conceptuelle et la façon dont ces discours contribuent à l'amélioration des différentes caractéristiques des cartes conceptuelles. Six étudiants ont construit individuellement des cartes hebdomadaires sur différents sujets et se sont ensuite réunis par paires pour construire une carte conceptuelle commune. Leurs discussions pendant la collaboration ont été enregistrées. Les cartes conceptuelles individuelles et communes ont été analysées du point de vue de la connaissance de l'étendue, de la connaissance de la profondeur et de la connaissance de la connexité. Pour analyser les discussions et comprendre la nature des discours, des approches de codage à la fois déductives et inductives ont été utilisées. Les épisodes codés ont ensuite été classés dans les neuf modèles de discours identifiés par Fu et al. (2016). Nous avons ensuite mis en correspondance les épisodes avec les caractéristiques de la carte conceptuelle qui ont été discutées. Les résultats indiquent que la collaboration des étudiants en biologie présentait principalement des discours de partage des connaissances lorsqu'ils délibéraient sur les trois caractéristiques d'une carte conceptuelle. Par ailleurs, le nombre de concepts et de propositions valides s'est amélioré entre les cartes individuelles et les cartes communes. Bien que les discussions des étudiants sur les liens croisés aient été caractérisées par des discours de partage des connaissances, la plupart des cartes conjointes n'ont pas montré d'amélioration en termes de nombre de liens croisés. Nous discutons de ces résultats et fournissons des implications concernant la valeur de la compréhension des subtilités des modèles de discours dans la cartographie conceptuelle collaborative.

Author Biographies

Hlologelo climant khoza, university of pretoria.

Dr. Climant Khoza is a Lecturer in Science Education at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He holds a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand. His research interests include science classroom talk and discourses. He is also interested in the development of science pre-service teachers’ knowledge base for teaching as well as using self-reflexive methodologies to study his own practice.

Bob Maseko, University of Malawi

Dr. Bob Maseko is Senior Lecturer in Science Education at the University of Malawi Chancellor College. He holds a PhD from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. He received his BEd and MEd in science education from the University of Malawi and University of Leeds, respectively. His research interests include the development and enactment of PCK in different classroom contexts, the use and deployment and affordances of various technologies as well as teachers’ interaction with curricular documents in the teaching and learning process.

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Krieglstein, F., Schneider, S., Beege, M., & Rey, G. D. (2022). How the design and complexity of concept maps influence cognitive learning processes. Educational Technology Research and Development, 70(1), 99–118. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-022-10083-2

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Nearly half of children born in Wales in 2002-03 classed as having special educational needs – this may have negatively affected their attainment

Senior Lecturer in Psychology in Education, University of Bristol

Lecturer in Education, Swansea University

Disclosure statement

Cathryn Knight works for the University of Bristol. She received funding from the Nuffield Foundation for this research.

Emily Lowthian works for Swansea University. She received funding from the Nuffield Foundation.

University of Bristol provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.

Swansea University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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Nearly half of people born in Wales in 2002-03 were classed as having special educational needs (Sen), our new research has indicated, raising questions about the system used to diagnose a generation of Welsh children.

Our report for the Nuffield Foundation found that 48% of this group, who are now aged 20 to 22, were identified as having Sen at some point before they turned 17. In some cases, this may have negatively affected their educational outcomes.

Pandemic disruptions meant complete data was only available for this year group. However, we also identified several factors that made some children born in Wales between 2002 and 2008 more likely to receive a Sen diagnosis – including being a boy, being born in summer, and being on free school meals.

Our findings suggest children from these groups may have been over-identified (and those not in these groups potentially under-identified). A new system for identifying educational needs was introduced in Wales in 2020, and the number of children being diagnosed has since fallen significantly – it was 20% lower in the year after the new system began.

Our findings suggest the previous system was not effectively supporting learners with Sen to achieve academically. We found the more time a child spent with a Sen diagnosis during their education, the less likely they were to to meet nationally expected levels of attainment.

Sen are identified when a child has much greater difficulty learning than most of their peers, or a disability that limits their use of typical educational facilities. This may include autism, dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and moderate learning difficulties.

Our research , funded and reviewed by the Nuffield Foundation and scrutinised by our research advisory group (including academics, policymakers and practitioners), analysed education data from over 200,000 children in Wales born between 2002 and 2008. We wanted to understand who was being identified as having special educational needs, and the impact this had on their academic achievement.

We found some key common factors that increase the likelihood of children being identified as having additional learning needs for all the children in the study, born between 2002 and 2008.

Boys were 5.5 times more likely to be identified with Sen than girls. While it’s possible boys may be more likely to have learning needs, there may be gender bias at play too, meaning boys’ behaviour gets more attention. Girls may also be better at masking their special educational needs.

Poverty also played a large role. We found that children who had free school meals throughout their education were four times more likely to be identified with educational needs, compared with those not receiving free meals. Alongside this, children born in the most deprived neighbourhoods were shown to be even more likely (4.6 times) to be identified with learning needs.

What’s more, learners born in the summer (so younger in their year group) were three times more likely to be identified with Sen than those born in the autumn.

These findings highlight how a child’s environment can contribute to the identification of educational needs. They also raise concerns about the effectiveness of identification processes, particularly given the unexpectedly high number of learners identified with Sen.

It suggests a potential issue of over- or under-identification of certain children. Younger children may not actually be more likely to have additional learning needs – they might just be behind due to their age. It is crucial to understand a child’s environment and their individual situation to effectively support their learning needs.

We also found the earlier that special educational needs were recognised, and hence the longer a child’s education was spent with these known needs, the less likely children were to meet nationally expected levels of attainment. This shows that whatever additional support children identified as having educational needs were receiving, it was not effective in mitigating the impact of their learning needs on achieve their learning goals.

Our research mirrors similar national findings. Evidence from the Education Policy Institute in England also found a high number of children – 39% – in the cohort taking their GCSEs in 2016 had been identified with special educational needs and disability (Send) at some point in their schooling. Other research has shown that children with Send in England are far less likely to meet expected learning standards than their peers at Key Stage One.

Recognise diverse learning needs

However, our research also raises questions about the current identification system being used in Wales. While some children in the 2002-03 cohort may have been over-identified, the fact these children were identified as having additional needs means their schools felt they required extra help. These children may go under the radar in the new system.

We believe a more inclusive model for supporting children’s learning is required, which takes their individual circumstances into account when providing help.

An effective system should give support that allows children with additional learning needs to meet the national expectations, at a minimum. To improve academic attainment levels in Wales, it is crucial to prioritise effective support for this potentially very large group of learners.

Inclusive educational initiatives that recognise and support children’s diverse learning needs are necessary. By acknowledging that children can have different learning needs at different times, schools can consider how they can support all learners – not just those who are identified with additional learning needs.

The reforms introduced by the Welsh government are changing the way children are identified and supported. We believe the methods used to identify learning needs should be rigorously reviewed, with a new focus on ensuring accuracy, fairness and inclusivity. Environmental factors such as the child’s age in a year group should be taken into consideration when identifying their learning needs.

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