Inclusive research in education: dialogue, relations and methods

ABSTRACT

Who is to be included in educational research? How might the researched be included within educational research practices? Why does it matter that educational research practices should be inclusive and not exclusionary? This article draws on Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue to critique reductive and specialist answers to these questions and, more positively, to advance a conception of inclusive research as educative practice. In Buber’s thinking there are ideas that might guide educational researchers beyond the lure of both research that is conducted on individuals, held at an exclusionary distance, and measured in accordance with established methods, and research that is for individuals identified as political allies, so their research might be conducted with the researched. Inclusive educational research should itself be educative, the article concludes, but this education provides researchers with neither easy nor definitive answers to questions relating to who their research should include, how they might be included and why their inclusion matters, since this is an education that must be lived.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusive research
• Martin Buber
• research methods
• responsibility
• dialogue

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Wayne Veck is currently a Reader in Education at Winchester University. Wayne started his teaching career as a teacher of English to students from Afghanistan and Iraq seeking refuge in the UK. He has given a keynote address at the University of Bergamo's international conference on education and refugees in Europe. The Polish Disability Forum invited him to give two keynote addresses about the implication of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Poland. He has given a keynote at an international conference on special education at Lillehammer University College, Norway. He has published widely about inclusion and exclusion in education.

Michael Hall is a lecturer in Education Studies in the Department of Education Studies and Liberal Arts at the University of Winchester. His research interests include equity and inclusion in education, widening participation in higher education, graduate employability and the policy environment for higher education. In his PhD research he is engaged with the work of Michel Foucault to explore the emergence of differing notions of graduate employability.