The ethics of including and ‘standing up’ for children and young people in educational research

In this special issue of the IJIE, a group of education researchers foreground their ethical deliberations when including learners in research agendas. On the surface, we could claim as researchers we are ethical: we work through institutional ethics committees, are ethical in our research practice, and argue that the right of the child to be heard is both an ethical issue (Clark et al. 2014) and a human rights issue (UNCRC 1989). The diversity of papers represent our values and beliefs when working and including all learners in research agendas, as shown in our untangling of the diverse issues we experience while researching alongside young children. When we are listening to student voice, being confronted by poverty, appreciating cultural diversity and acknowledging intergenerational imperatives ethical dilemmas and questions arise.

However, such a complacent view of ‘being ethical’ might be an optical illusion, in that we are not able to see what restrictions are placed on us as researchers and often ‘outsiders’ of the communities within which we work. Drawing on Waller’s (1932) work are we merely create an illusion that we are doing ‘the right thing’? When we experience a sense of freedom or general confidence that we are ‘ethical’, and that we believe our research agenda benefits the child, this may prevent us from engaging in deeper levels of ethical deliberation, Through rationalising our actions, do we protect ourselves from asking the tough questions created through research with children, and with the increasing multiple technologies we use in our research?

Ethical questions that arise in the research presented in this issue have challenged, and changed, the way we think, incorporate and explore ethics in research. No longer can we continue to rely on standardised university or institutional ethical protocols to ensure that our research is ‘ethical’. Instead, the ongoing reflexive nature of ethics means the focus on researchers to become more sophisticated in their understanding of ethics in research must lie within each researcher, alongside the standard ethics committee processes. The domain of ethical practice must lie centrally with the researcher in negotiation with their research participants: the cultural and political context of our research creates both the challenges and the answers. In the majority of the examples within this special issue, researchers have used technology within their research agenda, and in all cases have investigated an aspect of partnership – with students, teachers, parents and family to understand their phenomenon under investigation.

The imperative to include children and young people in educational research, and in more participative ways, is both educationally important when exploring policy and practice contexts, and a human rights issue. Increasingly then, researchers are exploring new ways to include children in the process of research, and along with this are joining in supporting teachers to challenge the status quo for learners. As a form of activism, real change can occur through including learners in research agendas that are about them. In doing this, complex ethical dilemmas emerge.

In attempts to move beyond a tokenistic level of ‘student voice’ research, and into action with and for the child, researchers are conceptually challenged around what is ethical, how we understand the competing tensions around ethics in the child’s diverse settings, and how our research practices change as a result.

In this special issue researchers from several countries (New Zealand, United States, Scotland, Australia, Chile and India) grapple with ethical challenges they face in their research with children. Collectively, these pieces show several key themes to consider when working with diverse learners and the ethical challenges our work presents:

1. Using student voice does challenge status quo within schools and families. Dissonance might be created by student voice for families or teachers.

2. Cultural issues and indigenous agency are inherently related to how we think about ethical practices with young children.

3. Child voice and agency are socioculturally situated.

4. Informed consent, and consent is complex, socially and culturally situated and becomes an ongoing process. Reaching informed dissent is as important as consent.

5. Research with children increasingly incorporates components that add complexity and richness to the research programme such as intergenerational, cultural diversity and the inclusion of all learners.

6. Establishing trust with children is critical for research to be valid, and valued by the children.

In Cowie and Khoo’s paper, a useful framework is proposed when researching with young people. In their work, they draw on their learning across several projects to consider how accountability is determined by the three ‘A’s’—access, authenticity and advocacy. Their examples demonstrate how these three inter-related notions of ethical practice allow researchers to consider and increase accountability to learners and research participants. Mitra and McCormick’s article introduces the reader to ethical challenges faced in their Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). They also draw our attention to being accountable to students, and in their examples demonstrate how teachers need to ‘stand behind’ student research. As they state ‘teachers must be willing to support and defend the questions that students create’.

Within this collection, researchers have also explored how to represent the culturally diverse ethical positioning when working with children and family. In O’Neill et al.’s paper, their culturally informed interpretation of data demonstrate ‘ethic of care for ethnically and culturally diverse child research participants’. Child voice and agency are demonstrated as being socioculturally situated, and they call our attention to the importance of providing children with ‘enhanced domestic voice’. In Bourke et al.’s paper, a sociocultural analysis of ethics is considered using Rogoff’s (2003) three lens of analysis: cultural-institutional, interpersonal and personal. They use the different sociocultural lenses to analyse the complexities of ethical processes and practices at the beginning of a research project that involved children’s informal and everyday learning. They explore the multiplicities and complexities that emerge when researchers are attentive to the practices and values of the settings that children’s and researchers’ lives traverse.

Sinha’s paper foregrounds ethical considerations when researching with indigenous groups, specifically, identifying dilemmas that arose when working alongside Sabar communities of Jharkhand, India. In Sinha’s research with the indigenous, the marginalised voice, and particularly with children in multiple disadvantages, she explores the ‘ethics of engaging’ with children and youth. She describes how it took four months before the children could trust her as a researcher and as she states, ‘in the first month, children would run into the jungles upon hearing the rustle of my footsteps; by the second they would follow me at a distance only to vanish when I turned to greet them in their language’.

While the issue of informed consent is considered across many of the papers in this special issue, at the heart of Mayne and colleagues’ paper is whether or not young children are capable of making an informed choice about their participation. Through the use of ‘interactive nonfiction narrative’ with three-year-old children, their findings encourage researchers to be innovative in how young children are engaged in the informed consent process and offers interactive nonfiction narrative as an effective rights-based informed consent option. Mayne et al. really wanted to find out whether young children could be capable of making an informed choice about their participation if they were engaged in the process in their own way, through storytelling. They provide a practical means to ensure that the process is ‘user-friendly’ and age-appropriate to ensure that the young child’s voice is heard.

Wall’s paper in this issue also focuses on young people and provides three examples of drawing-based visual method used with samples of children ranging from 4 years old to 16 years old. In her research, drawing from a wider programme of research, Learning to Learn, researchers attempted to include all learners who wanted to participate and needed to be afforded a ‘voice’ but needed other means than conversation to do so. For Wall, exploring ways to include learners through ‘more authentic and warrant-based’ means, a range of diagrammatic approaches (i.e. visual methodologies) were employed. Her paper outlines and critiques the approaches used. Jadue Roa investigates the ethical issues she faced when involving five- to seven-year-old children who were transitioning from kindergarten to first grade in Chile. Using a visual participatory research, she was interested in finding ways to ensure that the children’s rights to be heard were represented. This provides another example of a researcher findings ways to negotiate the research understanding with children, to ensure that they could participate on their own terms.

Collectively, these papers raise issues around ethical dilemmas when researching with children and young people, but all accounts are solution-focused and explore ways to facilitate a more ethical, deliberative process, where the establishment of trust is central to an ethical engagement with young people and their families. As researchers we are learning to explicate ethical dilemmas in order to improve our research practice and you are invited to pick up the challenges these authors make public. The freedom to research alongside young people is only afforded if we continue to unmask the illusion that well-intentioned research is always ethical.