Hard to teach: inclusive pedagogy in social science research methods education

ABSTRACT

Amidst major new initiatives in research that are beginning to address the pedagogic dimension of building capacity in social science research methods, this paper makes the first move to apply the lens of inclusive pedagogy to research methods pedagogy. The paper explores the ways in which learning social science research methods is hard and may be anxiety-provoking, which has sometimes led to a deficit discourse in which learners are positioned as ill-prepared and fearful. Learners can then be blamed for being hard to teach when an inclusive pedagogical lens would support a more asset-based discourse. Nonetheless, the authors argue that without traditional deficit-based solutions of the remedial class, special needs label or special teacher within the methods learning environment, methods teachers have developed their own responses. These pedagogic responses, elicited from the authors’ research using methods of expert interviews, focus groups and video-stimulated dialogue, address challenges associated with the learner, the learning material and the teacher’s context. The paper differentiates between practical solution-focused strategies and more holistic approaches. The authors illustrate how methods teachers reach out to diverse learners and they conclude that data and standpoints are used in inclusive teaching to make connections and to support learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusive pedagogy
• research methods pedagogy
• connective pedagogy
• pedagogic discourse
• pedagogic culture

Introduction

The research discussed in this paper is primarily aimed at understanding the pedagogy at work in social science research methods teaching. This includes an aim to advance the pedagogical culture (Wagner, Garner, and Kawulich 2011) and pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman 1987) in this arena. The broad questions include how the subject matter is taught and learned and how the methodological and pedagogical craft of methods teachers can be articulated. In this paper, the questions addressed are more specifically focused within the agenda of inclusion: What do methods teachers know about addressing the barriers to developing competence in research methods in the context of methodological debates and real-life scenarios? What inclusive practices have they developed and adopted? And is it helpful to bring in thinking about inclusive pedagogy when thinking about methods pedagogy and vice versa?

Values, according to Alexander (2009, 18), ‘spill out untidily at every point in the analysis of pedagogy’. Applying a lens of critical or inclusive pedagogy to a consideration of the teaching and learning of research methods means that we make such values explicit. For Alexander (2009, 11), pedagogy is ‘the act of teaching together with its attendant discourse’, and the discourse of inclusive pedagogy is not often associated with adults learning research methods, where the pedagogical discourse generally is under-developed (Kilburn, Nind, and Wiles 2014). It is mostly in research methods textbooks that we can find an articulation of inclusive values. For example, Connolly (2007) states his aim of ‘demystifying quantitative research and making it accessible’ and Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2010) identify their ‘pedagogy of engagement’ as they seek to connect learners to the social science process. We are treating inclusive pedagogy in a broad sense as about opening up – and involving everyone in – learning. This is in contrast to more disability-oriented concepts (Ainscow and Cesar 2006). We acknowledge, though, that we draw on literature from both ends of this continuum and that the ‘everyone’ in methods classrooms represents a selective/selected population.

Research (e.g. Howard and Brady 2015) indicates that learning research methods is hard. It places distinctive conceptual, procedural and technical demands upon teachers and learners (see Bourdieu 1992; Kilburn, Nind, and Wiles 2014). Methods learning may be more procedural than methodology learning, the former focusing on skills development and the latter on understanding of epistemology and ontology, but inevitably these are messily intertwined in the classroom if we want to develop post/graduates and professionals who are research literate and researchers who are properly competent. For teachers, challenges are exacerbated by the lack of pedagogic culture and curriculum (Earley 2014). The challenge of the perceived fear among learners of methods, especially in statistics (Ralston et al. 2016), has led to a deficit discourse in which learners are positioned as ill-prepared and fearful, then blamed for being hard to teach (Williams et al. 2016). This echoes somewhat the school-based ‘pervasive deficit discourses’ that Comber and Kamler (2004, 293) describe as remaining ‘dominant in classrooms and staffrooms … reproduced in student files, educational journals and conferences and reported as fact in media coverage’. An inclusive pedagogical lens is helpful ‘for shifting from deficit to asset perspectives’ (Hattam et al. 2009, 306), also helping to position teachers not as ‘targets of criticism’ but as knowledge producers (Comber and Kamler 2004, 294).

The stance adopted in this paper is that pedagogy is more than technique or method (Sellar 2009). Pedagogy instead is marked by the way in which ‘the coming together of the teacher and learner and the production of knowledge is a political process with inherent implications for teaching practice’ (Nind, Curtin, and Hall 2016, 33). As Rouse (2008; cited by Florian and Black-Hawkins 2011) has observed in the context of inclusive classroom practices, there is a close, reciprocal interrelationship between what teachers do, know and believe. Moreover, the way in which inclusive pedagogy is positioned depends not just on one’s values and ways of knowing, but the cultures one has been immersed within. Florian and Black-Hawkins (2011, 814) see inclusive pedagogy as about practices that ‘respect as well as respond to human differences in ways that include learners in, rather than exclude them from, what is ordinarily available’. This, they say, happens via ‘the development of a rich learning community characterised by learning opportunities that are sufficiently made available for everyone’.

Methods educators have typically not been exposed to disability- or equality-based inclusive education literatures as cultural reference points for thinking about inclusive pedagogy, but this does not mean that they do not understand learners’ intersectional identities, aspire to include every one of their learners, or to make their practice culturally responsive. Flores Farfan, Garner, and Kawulich (2009, 211) sum up the approach of many methods educators when they identify the challenge of ‘not simply extending students’ knowledge but revitalizing and questioning it’. They conclude that methods teachers play an important role by supporting learners to develop their orientation to research by supporting critical reflection on experience. This chimes well with Hesse-Biber and Leavy’s (2010) pedagogy of engagement. Thus, while the literature is small in methods education, and even though diversity and aspects of learners may be challenging, they and what they bring to the learning situation may be valued, quietly echoing discourses in inclusive pedagogy.

In this paper we focus on our study of research methods pedagogy in which we aim to be respectful and inclusive. The study brings together a community of stakeholders to understand pedagogical practice as reliant on community knowledge, the development of which stakeholders contribute to through collaborative theory building and praxis. Applying an inclusive pedagogical perspective has led to our concern within the wider project with pedagogies that connect across the diversity of learners. To some extent we are building from Florian and Black-Hawkins’ (2011, 814) exploration of teachers’ craft knowledge ‘in terms of what they do, why and how’, including what they ‘know and believe’, especially when this takes an inclusive turn. We acknowledge the diversity of methods teachers in all this. The group includes: methods specialists employed as trainers (often in specialist organisations) to advance high level skills, experienced researchers leading university modules in the methods with which they are very comfortable, and teachers who are required to fill a staffing gap in a curriculum area with marginal status that anyone can teach (Daniel forthcoming). One focus group participant summed up this last scenario, in which content knowledge may present a challenge, commenting ‘my experience has been I have ended up teaching Methods because nobody else wants to teach it. It’s the short straw, isn’t it!’

Methods

The research design incorporates a series of connected parts. These parts and the participants involved are summarised in Table 1. We used an expert panel approach to engage with experts who were methods specialists and whose extensive teaching experience, commitment and change-making also make them pedagogic leaders (Lucas and Claxton 2013). We use the nomenclature of ‘experts’ and ‘pedagogic leaders’ while knowing that the people themselves might not position themselves as such, but to recognise their role within the study. Through interviews, followed up with an online discussion forum, we sought to elicit and advance the craft and pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman 1987) of these experts (see Lewthwaite and Nind 2016). Data were generated through individual semi-structured interviews with two panels of experts, first from the UK and second working across locations in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Australasia. Emergent themes were discussed amongst some of the panel members, thus involving them in the iterative analytic process. Seven focus groups of methods teachers (and an online forum of methods learners) checked the resonance of the themes in relation to their experiences and broadened the range of contexts represented. This helped to establish the credibility and authenticity of the key messages teased out of the data, across disciplinary, methodological and cultural contexts; it also helped to suggest useful lines for more in-depth analysis of what was ordinary as well as what was possible.

Table 1. Research methods and participants.

Phase 1		Phase 2
Expert panel
UK experts	n.8	International experts	n.13
Online learner forum	n.18	Online expert forum	n.4
Focus group 1: Teachers of qualitative methods	n.3	Focus group 4: Teachers of methods in universities	n.5
Focus group 2: Teachers of quantitative methods	n.3	Focus group 5: Teachers of methods in universities & social research organisations	n.7
Focus group 3: Teachers of narrative methods	n.8	Focus group 6: Teachers of research methods online	n.2
		Focus group 7: Teachers of research methods online	n.3
Video-stimulated dialogue
Multi-modality	n.13	Survey design	n.10
CAQDAS	n.5	Data linkage	n.7
Multi-level modelling	n.7	Ethnographic technique	n.6
Systematic review	n.7

The second part of the design combined these data on pedagogy generated at a distance from the classroom context with data generated more closely to pedagogic situations. We used video-stimulated recall, reflection and dialogue to draw out that which is hard to know in pedagogy: the ingrained, unconscious and implicit (Nind, Kilburn, and Wiles 2015). This involved focus groups of methods teachers and learners looking back together on video excerpts of a teaching event immediately afterwards. We used questioning that encouraged reflection on the decision-making behind the pedagogic actions just carried out and observed in a process that we hoped would avoid privileging anyone’s authoritative gaze or judgement on others.

We designed the research to incorporate our valuing of teachers and learners – their views and their lived realities. In keeping with the spirit of inclusive education and inclusive research, we have been deliberately involving teachers and learners in knowledge production rather than sitting in judgment on them. Moreover, as Stacey (2012) advocates, we are deliberately creating spaces to engage them in deepening the conversation(s) about pedagogy. To maintain a collaborative ethos we have also rejected methodological approaches that seek to evaluate and judge teaching, or determine the normative ‘best practices’ that can erase the nuance and diversity of learning and teaching in a given context.

Our analysis began with pre-coding to highlight the interesting bits (as discussed by Saldaña 2016), which included noting where inclusive pedagogy might be in evidence. This was followed by iterative thematic analysis involving our independent coding by hand and using NVivo (v10/11) and then joint refinement of codes and categories. We did some hypothesis coding (Saldaña 2016) to interrogate emerging theories. The dataset for this comprised the transcripts of 21 individual interviews and 14 focus group interviews plus online forum entries as outlined in Table 1. We have been working towards shared interpretations with participants and stakeholders where practicable by feeding data back into the discussions for comment. We have focused on pedagogic themes (such as challenges), on pedagogic episodes (such as when solutions are demanded), on the re-voicing or re-interpretation of these and on the cultural practices (Lofland et al. 2006) of teachers and learners in order to understand the pedagogic culture. In this paper we discuss some recurring themes, but we have used our own values base to apply the lens of inclusive pedagogy to the data rather than seeing it emerge from the analytic process as a leitmotif.

Findings

In this section we identify two core strands of data that illuminate a coming together of research methods pedagogy and inclusive pedagogy. The first strand, relates to practical solution-focused pedagogy in the form of strategies and tactics to work around challenges; the second focuses on more holistic approaches including values-based pedagogy.

Practical solution-focused pedagogy

Unsurprisingly given the nature of the research, participants were vociferous about the challenges involved in teaching and learning advanced social research methods. One of our lines of interest was what is distinctive about research methods pedagogy and the particular challenges comprised therein was a common response. Our handling of the interviews and focus group questioning routes prompted participants to share how they respond to the various challenges, though for some of the experts narrating this process across their professional life-course required little prompt. Here we summarise some of the challenges and the responses to them, relating these to inclusive pedagogy. We have distinguished between challenges surrounding the learner, the content and the teacher, though there is inevitable overlap. The challenges included here are illustrative rather than comprehensive, but participants’ words help to capture the kinds of inclusive pedagogy concerns that methods teachers face, how members of the methods education community think about them, and the strategies devised as a response. We begin with a consideration of learner ‘deficits’.

There is clearly a continuum between seeing difficulties in learning as residing in the learner – the learner’s problem and responsibility – and difficulties residing in the pedagogic interaction – the teacher’s problem and responsibility. We were sensitised us to this dynamic by long-standing engagement with the social model of disability (Oliver 1983) that challenges within-person deficit thinking, and the work of Shakespeare (2006) and others to nuance and develop this. Both kinds of thinking were even evident in single individuals. John MacInnes,¹ expert teacher of quantitative methods who advises on the national strategic response to this in the UK, saw the deficit model as ‘probably quite a good description of the kind of model I work with’. He explained, ‘in that I think there are deficits or big gaps in the kind of skill set that particularly Social Science undergraduates emerge from higher education with. Those gaps are all around the use of numbers in different contexts.’ There is a note of frustration with the students in his reflection that these students ‘haven’t thought about evidence’. Nonetheless, he recognised that the problem arose from the way ‘we’ teach them, which has far-reaching repercussions, but which the academic community can address.

While methods teachers in the study often identified deficits or weaknesses in learners (statistical anxiety, lack of preparedness), the methods learning environment offered no options for traditional deficits-based solutions of the remedial class, the special needs label or special teacher. Interestingly, without these, teachers were finding their own solutions and strategies for knowing their learners better, coping with their diversity, circumventing lack of foundational mathematics or social science education. Comber and Kamler (2004, 295) have argued that ‘disrupting deficit discourses requires serious intellectual engagement by [school] teachers over an extended period of time in ways that foster teacher agency and respect without celebrating the status quo’. Ironically that lack of pedagogic dialogue among methods teachers, and their persistent trial and error, may also have provided conducive conditions. Methods teachers may have been willing to take a deficit stance in how they talked about learner characteristics, but they were equally willing to identify how the subject matter, not just the learners, was hard to teach and their own lack of preparation for the pedagogic challenges they faced. We summarise the findings related to each in turn.

Working around learner challenges

A repeated refrain in the interviews and focus groups with methods teachers was that (even in postgraduate or specialist contexts) learners posed considerable challenge in that they simply differed too much from one another. Diversity of the learner group was frequently noted, typically: ‘you’re going to get a real range of skills’. Diversity was sometimes positioned as a hierarchy: ‘You’ve got some people who’ve got mathematical background and then all the way through to some people who might have stopped doing maths at sixteen.’ Different ‘prior knowledge or experience’ and ‘interests, in terms of research questions or specific problems’ were also recognised as interacting to place real demands on the teacher. Varied disciplinary backgrounds introduced ‘different goals’, with USA quantitative methods expert Andrew Gelman noting the ‘different methods’ and ‘different perspectives’ and the demands that these place on teachers.

A common response to learner diversity was continually finding out about learners, monitoring their engagement and adjusting as needed. In the expert interviews Johnny Saldaña, who teaches qualitative methods in the USA, was proactive: ‘I try to find themes that may cut across as many different audiences as possible’. Similarly, one teacher, prompted by video of her session, described asking ‘people to just to give us a little bit of a brief intro about themselves’ and then using this knowledge. Again reflecting on video, another teacher talked of trying to ‘keep an eye on whether people have lost the flow or have not and are still keeping up’, and another of building on swiftly getting to know the learners by using more experienced learners as a pedagogic resource in co-teaching. In the dialogue learners explicitly expressed valuing this utilisation of experience in the room.

It was the numeracy deficit as well as the diversity within learners that preoccupied some of the quantitative methods teachers. John MacInnes was explicit about this as we have shown. The pedagogic responses to such perceived weaknesses however were much more creative than the remedial type responses now discredited in schools (Corbett and Norwich 2005). John MacInnes talked about his strategy of stimulating the statistical imagination – doing ‘anything that gets students interested in data’. Similarly, Chris Wild, who has developed quantitative methods pedagogy in New Zealand, described how he would ‘first try to get people to a realisation that data can tell you something interesting’. Skills gaps pervaded mixed-methods teaching too, where John Creswell, a leader in this field in the USA, recognised the challenge of needing to ‘keep the qualitative researchers and the quantitative researchers equally involved’ and get them all ‘up to speed’. He, though, turned their diversity into an asset, seeing engagement with diverse ideas like being in ‘a candy store’, welcoming the pedagogic potential of the interdisciplinary composition of classes.

Working around subject matter challenges

Some of the content-based, subject matter challenges in research methods teaching related to the difficult language and concepts involved. These were inevitably also partly challenges associated with learner qualities. W. Paul Vogt, an expert from the USA, had developed ways of stimulating interest in statistical methods amongst students from applied disciplines such as education and social work, by beginning with being able to read the statistical literature in their fields. His approach was ‘verbal’, akin to translation:

we tried to find non-technical, verbal ways of teaching research methods, so teaching regression analysis in terms of the questions that people doing regression analysis would be trying to answer, and teaching that in a class or two, and then having people read real research output and teaching them how to read it. So essentially we’d skip the calculations in between, and talk about what it was for, when you’d use it, and how to read it

W. Paul Vogt developed ‘little glossaries of terms that would occur in the articles they would read’ as part of an enabling process, working around a barrier to learners connecting with the subject matter. The approach was becoming more long-term and carefully thought through, one of several examples of how practical strategic solutions evolved into holistic approaches.

Chris Wild identified the need to reduce the cognitive load involved in learning quantitative methods and addressed this across multiple pedagogic actions. First he used visual metaphors to provide a pedagogic hook, via specially developed software² with a short learning curve, to allow learners to maintain focus on meaning rather than operations. Chris Wild used the ‘idea of a minimal conceptual pathway, of trying to look at an idea, and trying to come up with a map … for the absolute minimum sets of concepts you need to get your head around something’. This ‘bootstrapping’ approach ‘with the smallest number of obstacles’ removes anything extraneous from the learning context to make core content accessible and keep learners focussed on ‘absolutely essential’ concepts. This is an active and ongoing process. Wild described ‘keeping on re-visiting it and trying to pare it back, pare it back, pare it back and then thinking about what’s absolutely essential here?’

A key thread in the responses to subject matter challenges was teaching with, through and about data, as this is one of the distinctive features of the pedagogic context of methods education. Working with data as curriculum content provides a challenge to both learner and teacher, spanning quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. Teaching with, through and about data is very much about reaching out to learners and connecting them to the subject matter of research methods (Lewthwaite and Nind 2016). This need to bridge connections is a pedagogic challenge that calls for creative solutions to be devised in the context of the classroom and one that is familiar within the school-based inclusive education pedagogic literature (exemplified in Nind et al. 2005). For those methods teachers who are researchers or methodologists first, and teachers of methods second, teaching with the data provides one arena where confidence in trying things out in the classroom may be higher.

While teachers in the study were largely committed to using data as a pedagogic resource, this still presented challenges for them. For example, in relation to using the students’ own data, which is pedagogically very inclusive and ‘connective’ (Corbett 2001), one qualitative methods teacher reflected, ‘you try to ground what you’re doing in what they’re doing, so that they’re thinking it through in relation to their own work, rather than just in the abstract, but that’s quite challenging to do’. She further explicated, ‘sometimes the issues about data aren’t contained within one short transcript’, ‘they often bring massively inappropriate amounts’ of data and ‘sometimes there are ethical issues in what they bring’. Reflecting on quantitative data there were the additional challenges of the students’ own data not being sufficiently organised or cleaned. Teachers worked round this by inviting learners to bring their own data, but seeing it in advance and getting the whole learner group to work with the most suitable data from the students. An alternative was the teacher using their data, ‘because you can choose the data and you can choose what kinds of challenges and messages there are in that’, enabling learners to relate that to their own work. Another alternative was to choose data from the available archived ‘wonderful datasets … that they could get their teeth into’ (Malcom Williams, UK expert panel).

Working around challenges coming from the teacher

For methods teachers, knowing where to start is a fundamental challenge. Participants in our study had methodological knowledge that they needed to communicate such that learners could understand and use it. Nonetheless, teachers still had the challenge of developing their pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman 1986), that is, of making their expert knowledge accessible to learners – teachable and learnable. Often untrained as teachers, craft knowledge needed to be built from the ground. A common response to the challenge was to bring their researcher selves into the classroom; experience had taught them how much learners appreciate hearing about their authentic experiences in the field or doing analysis, for example. Julia Brannen, UK mixed-methods specialist, spoke passionately about this: ‘people will always, and it’s a good thing that they want to, bring their own research to bear in their teaching … that is often what makes the teaching very valuable’. Similarly, Pauline Leonard, referring to her UK context, spoke of describing in vivid detail her own ethnographic experiences. Teachers incorporated other aspects of their identity too, such as from their disciplinary or professional lives; Johnny Saldaña relayed bringing his theatre/drama educator self into his research methods classroom and using that to build connections, include and engage.

Methods teachers described the various pedagogic hooks they had devised, both to reel learners in and to forge connections with the key aspects of research such as evidence or standpoint. W. Paul Vogt, for example, argued in this vein that ‘nothing works better than hands-on work on something they’re interested in’. Pedagogic hooks are discussed more in another paper (Lewthwaite and Nind 2016) but constitute a significant response to teachers’ challenges in terms of knowing where to start and how to manage their own pedagogic strengths and weaknesses.

Holistic approaches

Finding solutions to challenges in a stepwise fashion was accompanied by, or sometimes led to, more holistic responses and approaches in participants’ pedagogy. Both solution-focused and holistic responses are strategic in terms of their purposive quality in meeting a desired goal. Holistic approaches are located in ‘what teachers know as a result of their experience as teachers’ (Fenstermacher 1994) – knowledge that is practical, personal, situated, local, relational and somewhat tacit. Compared with solution-focused strategies for getting around challenges though, these approaches are more wholesale, the practitioners of them may have joined up years’ worth of strategic moves, aided by a commitment to a pedagogic principle or passion, to develop an approach that becomes coherent or holistic. Critical for this paper is that likewise inclusive pedagogic approaches can be developed incrementally or from experience. Florian and Linklater (2010, 370), for example, posit that ‘Inclusive pedagogy focuses on extending what is ordinarily available as part of the routine of classroom life as a way of responding to differences between learners rather than specifically individualizing for some’; this skills rather than de-skills the everyday teacher. The holistic approaches (like the other responses) perform this inclusive pedagogic role, but do it in response not just to diversity but to the demands of the subject matter. The holistic responses in particular are approaches that avoid a sense of add-on or specialist pedagogy, but seek something that works for everyone.

Chris Wild may have begun by chipping away at the challenge of ‘getting sociology students interested in quantitative things’, but as we have discussed above, this cohered into a primary pedagogic interest with enabling quicker speed of processing quantitative data and thinking: ‘I want the time between getting that idea and seeing something to address it to be as close to that as you could get.’ He described his concern with ‘making it easier for people to see things and then being able to see data-related things quicker’. Ultimately his pedagogic moves translated into an overall approach of ‘growing the visualisation first’, approaching ‘everything through things you can see, and, or metaphors which are often largely visual, and then backfill that with more technical things later if you need to’. The thinking here was not based on labelling some learners as visual or lacking in some way, but on finding a way through complex territory for everyone. Part of Chris Wild’s pedagogy involved ‘chunking learning into small, small parts’. Long term, his commitment to this approach included making software to show ‘what happens at each stage of the process and the relationships between them’ without the operation of the software itself becoming part of the learning challenge. Wild did not explicitly refer to being inclusive in his teaching, but there was an evident implicit desire to reach out to and connect with learners through this approach.

Many of the more holistic or coherent approaches to teaching social research methods described by participants were devised so that methods learners could not just know about methods but gain experience in them. Thus, our data show frequent references to learning-through-doing, student-centred, active or problem-based learning. This resonates with the wider literature on methods education (Kilburn, Nind, and Wiles 2014). It also resonates with some of the key messages coming from the inclusive education literature where teachers are seeking to support learners’ skills development to enable them to act competently, not as researchers as in the case of methods education, but simply as learners (Hart et al. 2004; Florian and Linklater 2010).

One holistic approach stands out as connecting inclusive pedagogy and methods pedagogy, that of foregrounding methodological standpoints. This theme was identified as very important to some of the pedagogic leader/expert participants. Particularly for Bagele Chilisa teaching in Africa, and Sharelene Hesse-Biber in the USA, understanding research standpoints was central to critically engaging with (or challenging) Western-centric (and other) dominant methods of doing – and teaching – research. Sharlene Hesse-Biber spoke of the importance of ‘knowing not only your own standpoint as a researcher but where your students can understand their own standpoint’, so that there is an openness about ‘the attitudes and values you’re brining with you to the research process today in the classroom’. This idea had resonance for some of the UK teachers, with discussion of the importance of ‘having some kind of dialogue and generating some sort of understanding of the different ways of looking [which] is always for me the kind of starting point’ (focus group 5). Methods teachers were conscious of the border-crossing experiences of learners (national, cultural, methodological) and themselves, and of the need to engage with this in their pedagogic practice as they go about ‘a process of translation’ (focus group 5) and learning to ‘critically engage’ (Amanda Coffey, UK expert panel).

The need for the kind of culturally responsive pedagogy described by Gay (2002, 2010 cited by Kim and Slapac 2015) was often articulated in terms of using learners’ previous experiences and cultural knowledge in transformative ways, sometimes to ‘culturally adapt’ methods (Creswell). More importantly though, just as Kim and Slapac (2015) emphasise in terms of border-crossing work in schools, these teachers understood about using these experiences and knowledge – together with critical engagement with their own and their teachers’ standpoints – as pedagogic resources. Hughes (2016, 263), referring to geographical rather than to methodological fieldwork, reminds us that ‘students’ world views necessarily, indeed unescapably, mediate their field experiences’. Thus, she argues that in this ‘situated cultural practice’, critical self-reflection is essential. Using standpoints (personal and political), to connect the standpoint of the methods teacher as a researcher with the standpoints of the learners, was a holistic approach that was well recognised by some. This was often how they connected their different positions/worlds.

Within participant talk, streams of critique – of the geo-political and situated cultural practice – was lucidly articulated, frequently as an integral part of student-centred teaching approaches. The necessity of acknowledging these cultural mediating factors in terms of pedagogy was particularly prominent for international experts. Bagele Chilisa, teaching in Botswana, highlighted the tension between credentialism, graduate mobility and the need to ‘satisfy … the international expectation of what a graduate student who has done research should be able to do’ alongside the pressing need for critique and the development of a new generation of social researchers in an African context where researchers are scarce. Methods teachers in the study understood, just as we have argued for pedagogies, that ‘methodologies are not neutral’ (Chilisa). In a Central American context, Cesar Cisneros-Puebla highlighted how the pedagogic legacy of Vygotsky and participative principles in Ibero-American education meant that the principles of participatory action research paradigms ‘are always there … always in our connection to the students’.

Within international classrooms, the composition of the student body required reflexive and cross-cultural practices. Manfred Max Bergman (mixed-methods expert, Switzerland) and John Creswell and Yvonna Lincoln (USA) highlighted the necessity of orientating teaching to learners’ particular contexts in terms of their expertise, discipline, background, nationality and standpoints. Manfred Max Bergman, whose student-centred practices recognised the need to equip learners with the ability to ‘juggle the politics of research’ and the ‘different power structures’ involved, relayed teaching them, ‘first of all [ … ] how political research methods actually are and secondly learning the rules of the game within your field’. John Creswell’s approach included ‘trying to work from their [learners’] cultural understanding as much as possible … trying to get into that cultural space’. Sharlene Hesse-Biber stressed the reciprocity involved in ‘knowing not only your own standpoint as a researcher, but where your students can understand their own standpoint’. This reflexivity extended to recognising the role of identity politics, noted also by other expert panel and focus group members, engaging the notion of the ‘other’ in its strongest and most politicised form. One UK methods teacher, influenced by her reading of Paulo Freire and own research with marginalised groups, spoke of her photographic methods for engaging learners in reflection on their own culture. Thus sometimes key tasks were indicative of more holistic approaches and values-based pedagogy.

Discussion

Among the participants, there were concerns with addressing barriers to learning and sometimes also socio-political imbalances within and through methods learning experiences. The data suggest methods teachers’ praxis – in a Freirean sense the critical reflection and action necessary within educational practices – have ‘the goal of creating not only a better learning environment, but also a better world’ (McLaren 2000, 3) in that the goal of creating pedagogical situations that empower (would-be) researchers to conduct ethical, worthwhile research permeates the data. Often the pedagogies valued and validated the experiences of the learners, sometimes even situating these centrally in the learning. These were not critical pedagogies as such, however, in that ‘overt links with oppression and dominant discourses’ (Keesing-Styles 2003, 10) were infrequent.

We were able to gain insights into the interconnected actions, values and beliefs of methods teachers. Unlike the situation described by Florian and Black-Hawkins (2011, 813), there was no evidence presented within this study of naturalised assumptions of ‘bell-curve thinking about ability’; references were to diversity of experience but never to more/most/less/least able learners. This may have reflected the advanced general educational competence of the people learning research methods. It also perhaps influenced pedagogic decision-making away from resorting to a simple differentiation response; methods learners worked at the teacher’s pace in whole group teaching or at an individual pace in computer workshops, for example. When thinking about the difficulties learners faced, there was some evidence of the individual pupil/learner view as opposed to the organisational paradigm discussed by Messiou (2012); this surfaced in the willingness to label learners as anxious, for example, or to identify their particular cultural understanding as having a bearing. Mostly though, teachers focused on their own agency to build craft knowledge.

Our own research methods probed teachers ‘knowing in action’ (Schon 1987, 158). Though we are relying largely in their own accounts, our teasing out of these accounts suggest that participants developed skills in connecting learners to understanding of, and competence in, research methods. They often went beyond technical expertise in their craft to become critically reflexive in developing their strategic approach (Carr and Kemmis 1986). While methods teachers (in common with other teachers, see Sellar 2009) may have needed support to articulate their pedagogies, their pedagogic approaches were sometimes reminiscent of hook’s (1994) engaged pedagogy or Corbett’s (2001) connective pedagogy. Working through data – from the teacher or the learner – provided a way of reaching out to learners and a bridge for connecting people, evidence and ideas. This was powerful pedagogical content knowledge, indicating that data represent research methods content ‘most germane to its teachability’ (Shulman 1986, 9). Chris Wild sums it up for many of the participants when he spoke of enabling learners to see the interest of data and that ‘when their spark has been ignited’ deep, holistic learning can be pursued.

The importance of standpoints for some of the teachers reflects a pedagogical commitment to engage students in inclusive ways. It was not so much recognised pedagogues or pedagogic theory that informed this work. Rather, the participating teachers had drawn most explicitly on their methodological expertise to fashion what we have come to understand as inclusive approaches in the classroom. In particular we postulate based on our study that where methods teachers orientate towards their students with student-centred practices, and engage meaningfully with socio-cultural milieu of both global and local classrooms, inclusive practices ensue. For many teachers, this is a central part of building robust methodological capacity, which itself spurs a need for multiple perspectives in the evaluation of appropriate method. John Creswell spoke of using individual student projects as an anchor in that he would then ‘link the conceptual discussion of quantitative and qualitative research to that project’. As Bagele Chilisa observes, ‘every methodology […] assumes a certain standpoint’; the perspectives of teachers and learners are imbricated in this positionality, which returns us to the argument of Kim and Slapac (2015, 22) that by exploring ‘subject positions … a process of recognizing the other within oneself takes place’. Within the methods classroom at its most inclusive, we thereby see a blurring of the roles of teacher, learner and researcher for all parties involved.

Conclusion

There are many aspects of enacted or experienced pedagogy that are hidden and hard to know (Nind, Curtin, and Hall 2016). It is unsurprising therefore that the discourse, culture and evidence base around both inclusive pedagogy and research methods pedagogy are under-developed. Neither inclusive pedagogy nor methods pedagogy is particularly well-understood in the sense of a pedagogy that can be specified and handed on to others. Both are being generated on the ground. While we have involved a particularly committed group of participants who may not be typical of less-experienced stakeholders, this paper nonetheless shows that despite a lack of articulated inclusive pedagogy there are tangible examples of inclusive pedagogy in action within the social science research methods education arena. Through systematic research involving deepening the conversation (Stacey 2012) and enhancing pedagogic dialogue, we are beginning to get to know that pedagogy a little better. We have illuminated a range of pedagogic practices devoted to reaching out to diverse learner groups, in particular utilising data and standpoints. Our study indicates that the idea of inclusive pedagogy being evident within research methods education has merit, and that this is particularly important in the complex international, socio-political context of research methods capacity-building.

Acknowledgements

We thank our participants for their contribution to the knowledge shared here, Daniel Kilburn and Rose Wiles for their research work in the first phase of this project, and Rose Wiles and Helen Kara for their comments on the draft paper. W. Paul Vogt died not long after his contribution to this study but we remember him for his generous spirit and keen interest in methods pedagogy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Melanie Nind is Professor of Education at the University of Southampton. She is Director of the Faculty Graduate School and of the Centre for Research in Inclusion. Melanie is one of the co-directors of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods where she leads research on the pedagogy of research methods learning. She is co-editor of the International Journal of Research and Method in Education. Once a special school teacher, she is best known for her work in Intensive Interaction, inclusive education and inclusive research.

Sarah Lewthwaite is a Research Fellow at the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods at the University of Southampton. Her research expertise and interests centre on the intersections between critical theory, accessibility, new technologies and student experience in higher education. In her current role, these are focussed on the learning and teaching of advanced research methods. She maintains a keen interest in inclusion, disability and social media research.

ORCID

Melanie Nind http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4070-7513

Sarah Lewthwaite http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4480-3705

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) National Centre for Research Methods [grant number ES/L/008351/1].

Notes

1. Owing to difficulties protecting their identities, with advance ethical approval and their explicit agreement, expert panellists are referred to by name.

2. iNZight for Data Analysis https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~wild/iNZight/.