A lightbulbTwo nice things happened to me recently. First, I got to work with a brilliant team to co-create Sparking ‘Aha’ Moments: A Resource for Teaching Research Methods. This resource encapsulates the spirit of the NCRM Pedagogy Network in which we relish discussing, sharing, researching and developing research methods pedagogy. Second, one of the editors of British Journal of Educational Studies wrote inviting me to update our 2014 paper Learning as Researchers and Teachers: The Development of a Pedagogical Culture for Social Science Research Methods?. The paper, he said, remains one of the most highly cited pieces and continues to shape conversations across the field. This got me to thinking about the NCRM pedagogy workstream and all we have achieved over our time together.
Building a pedagogical culture
I am proud of that early paper and my initial tentative steps to make how we teach and learn research methods part of the conversation at NCRM. Collaborating researchers and I were responding to the problem of a lack of pedagogical culture at that time, that is, to the absence of a body of work systematically drawing links to inform practice and advances in the field of research methods education and training.
What came next was a decade of NCRM work in which the conversation grew and became enriched by a programme of empirical research. This research has shown how methods teachers (trainers) go about their craft in thoughtful ways, demonstrating their pedagogical content knowledge and giving insight into why they work in the ways they do. This includes decisions about what data work for teaching which skills and concepts, and how to engage learners most productively with those data. As well as drawing insights from the published literature, we had the privilege of talking with methods teachers far and wide, facilitating a process in which these expert and committed teachers were reflecting on, and making explicit, their craft knowledge.
Pedagogy research
The NCRM pedagogy research comprised, in addition to literature review, multiple methods, designed specifically for the purpose of building the pedagogic culture. We called them methods that teach. They were employed specifically to foster dialogue rather than judge; ours has always been an alongsider position as fellow teachers, learners and developers of methods. Our video-stimulated recall, reflection and dialogue, for example, embodied our goal to get teachers and learners focusing together on classroom (or lab) action in constructive detail. And our methods learning diary circle was designed to generate data and mutual support in equal measure.
What we discovered
Being involved in the process of all this has been a privilege. The challenge for me in this blog is to summarise the learning from it. I start with what we did not find. We did not find what constitutes best practice in research methods education. We never set out to do this, wanting the work to be more exploratory, dialogic and developmental in nature. Our working assumption that some practices work well in some contexts for some people was borne out. But we did find that:
- methods teachers and learners value hands on active learning approaches whereby learners get to work in supported ways with data, especially data that is personally meaningful in some way
- they appreciate the power of accounts of the messiness, imperfection, struggle and emotion in research when these are shared and reflected upon
- equally, they know the importance of showing the theory behind the logic, the logic behind the decisions, and the decisions behind the action of research
- teachers become adept at reducing the cognitive load involved in learning new or complex methods and the new language involved in them, employing strategies like making visual analogies, creating glossaries, identifying threshold concepts, working in linear progression and/or through supportive immersion.
Resources for trainers
This is an indicative list rather than exhaustive summary. The NCRM's library of resources for trainers has bitesize summaries as well as case studies and in-depth reads, all intended to prevent methods teachers from having to rely on trial and error, as Mark Early claimed was the case a decade ago.
The contributors to our most recent resource Sparking ‘Aha’ Moments exemplify perfectly Lee Shulman’s defining characteristics of pedagogic content knowledge: that good teachers understand “the most powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations” for making subject knowledge comprehensible.
While NCRM, and ESRC who have funded us, cannot take all the credit for such understanding, they do deserve credit for sponsoring the pedagogy workstream that has enabled the pedagogic culture to grow and the field of research into research methods education to become more firmly established.