Learning from experience: towards inclusive educational research in Cambodia

ABSTRACT

Aimed at contributing to the literature related to inclusive educational research in the context of a developing country, this article looks at the power relations between researchers and the researched by critically analysing the approaches and methods used. Drawing on the author’s personal experience conducting research with people with disabilities in Cambodia, it has been argued that researchers’ self-consciousness of their privileges vis-à-vis the researched with disabilities in the knowledge production process alone does not ensure that their research is ethical, unless actions are taken to address those power differences. This, the article argues, may be somewhat impractical in certain contexts due to resource and institutional constraints. The article also draws attention to some context-specific issues in Cambodia that may lead researchers to unconsciously ignore the knowledge and experiences of people with disabilities in the process of conducting research on inclusive education.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusive education
• inclusive research methods
• participatory action research
• Cambodia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Nuth conducted his doctoral research on international development and disability studies at RMIT University, Australia. He is currently a lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Zaman University, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Notes

1 During my field research, it appeared that my attempts on several occasions to approach other disabled people’s organizations (representing people with intellectual and hearing/visual disabilities) to join the meetings with the CDPO failed. I decided then to organize meetings with these organizations individually.

2 During my interviews with research participants with disabilities, there were many instances where local dialect and metaphors were used. For example, one research participant said: ‘They earn; they eat themselves. We earn; we eat ourselves.’ The phrase carried meanings related to how the participant and her family needed to rely on themselves for survival in the absence of communal or governmental support. Such a metaphorical meaning may be lost, should I have relied on a translator or a transcriber without direct interactions with the research participant myself in Khmer.