Research methods for pedagogy: seeing the hidden and hard to know

Over the last several decades pedagogy as a field of study within education has enjoyed a well-deserved elevated status accompanied by a corresponding focus on pedagogic research and associated research methods. Historically, however, pedagogy was consigned to irrelevancy and invisibility, at least in the UK and arguably in the Anglo-American world more generally. Referring specifically to the poor status of it in England relative to its more significance in continental Europe, Brian Simon (1981) lamented this state of affairs in his famous piece, ‘Why no pedagogy in England?’ Unsurprisingly this situation meant that over the years pedagogy was under-researched and under-theorized. With the deepening of our understanding of learning itself, especially through the work of such scholars as Vygotsky and Bruner and more recently that of Rogoff, Lave and Wenger thinking about pedagogy and how to research it has developed apace.

A fundamental shift from invisibility to visibility has been the recognition of the learner as agentive and intentional, of the learning context as complex with affordances and constraints, and of the sets of relations surrounding the context involving values, agendas and meanings that are variously implicit, always enmeshed, and usually hard to know. Attention to such facets as meanings, relationships, action, place, participation, communities, identities, prior experiences, opportunity to learn add up to an appreciation of pedagogy as complex, nuanced and, above all, dynamic. The scale, depth and scope of studies of pedagogy have shifted in line with this growing understanding. Obviously, research methods adopted for the exploration of any concept need to align with definitions and conceptualizations of the substantive area in question. In the case of pedagogy the range of interrelated elements is considerable and hence the research methods needed for their exploration and theorization have evolved and grown accordingly.

Adopting a sociocultural perspective, this Special Issue presents research that challenges and extends current theoretical and methodological perspectives on understanding what it means to teach and to learn. We see pedagogical research as nuanced, complex, multilayered and inclusive. We see it as focusing on relationships between values, identities, interactions and understandings embedded in rich and varied pedagogical contexts, texts and settings. This collection of articles aims to offer a rich variety of ways of thinking about pedagogical research and it seeks to exemplify some of the theoretical and methodological principles for pedagogy research which we explored in our recent publication Research Methods for Pedagogy (Nind, Curtin and Hall, 2016).

The papers presented share a variety of lenses through which understandings of pedagogy research can be explored and developed. Examples of these include teacher and student knowledge, identity and culture, place-based pedagogy and social pedagogy. A particular focus remains throughout on illustrating innovative methods necessary for exploring unseen and hard to know aspects of specified, enacted or experienced pedagogical practice. We recognize that researching pedagogy is tremendously challenging.

We begin with papers that consider ethical, practical and theoretical challenges in pedagogy research (Flewitt et al; Hayes and Comber). We then move to papers which exemplify and offer representations of complex pedagogical research with a particular focus on innovative methods for exploring the unseen and hard to know (Nind and Lewthwaite; Hanney; Kjällander and Johnson Frankenberg). Finally, we share research which extends our understanding of pedagogical texts and spaces in varied contexts (Roman and Uttamchandani; Nugent).

Ethical, practical and theoretical challenges in pedagogy research

An inter-disciplinary research team, Rosie Flewitt, Phil Jones, John Potter, Myrrh Domingo, Paul Collins, Ellie Munday and Karen Stenning, reflect back on a project they conducted with young, hard-to-reach individuals living with disadvantage where they sought to help them carry out research about their experiences and their views of disadvantage. Their approach involved working on creative activities with marginalized participants in ways that enabled them to be involved as active and empowered agents in all stages of the research process. Their mentoring research role was pivotal and in this regard the authors reflect critically on the notion of voice as fluid and dialogic, recognizing how marginalized young people may have grown accustomed to their voices being ignored. So they problematize voice in pedagogy research in a manner that highlights its ethical, methodological and theoretical challenges for the pedagogy researcher. They link their analysis of voice to ways of conceptualizing third spaces and to school cultures, where, as they note, research designs that are ‘adaptive, provisional and ambivalent’ run counter to the dominant emphasis on outcomes and performativity.

This is an article that has several key messages for those interested in participatory pedagogic research with young people who are struggling to build a sense of respect and belonging in environments that are unstable and resource-poor. As will be seen their three key principles align well with other articles in this special issue: the development of relationships with hard-to-reach young people; participants to be actively engaged in the research process as empowered agents; and, participants to be mentored and supported in research practices.

The paper by Debra Hayes and Barbara Comber challenges us to think differently about our pedagogic research practices and concerns, in this case focusing on inequality ‘as a doing’ rather than as a thing. On the grounds that research practices contribute to the production and reconfiguring of difference, these authors invite us to critically reflect on our own practices as researchers. They develop their argument in two key ways: by revisiting and re-examining longitudinal data (ethnographies of schooling) they conducted in ‘Accelerated Literacy’ classrooms some time ago in Adelaide and by considering the notion of ‘agential realism’ within the work of Karen Barad. They pose the question: what world of schooling is configured through our research practices? They challenge and avoid the conventional approach of highlighting differences in the effectiveness of how teachers teach and by implication blaming individual teachers for poor-quality teaching or valorizing the high-quality teaching of another. Their argument is the necessity to look beyond the individual teacher to yet other factors such as resources, professional development opportunities, student lifeworlds, policies and principals, etc. ‘all socio-material realities brought together in the space and time of a classroom’.

As Hayes and Comber (2018) observe: ‘Authorized pedagogies position teachers as needing to do it “the right way”; yet the embodied and discursive repertories of teachers in classrooms are always in negotiation with the affordances of the desks, texts, students, time, curriculum and so on.’ They advocate that the pedagogy researcher adopts what they call a ‘performative¹ approach’ (as opposed to a ‘representational’ approach) which pays attention to what is made to matter, to the possibilities that are opened up ‘through the material configurations of learning and teaching that their practices enact’. Among the fundamental questions these authors leave us with is this one: how might we account for assigning meaning to teachers’ pedagogical practice through our research practice?

In addressing this question we would suggest that the pedagogy researcher is challenged to grapple with the enmeshed, overlapping nature of the multiple dimensions of pedagogy outlined above and further developed in the next sections.

Exemplifying and offering representations of complex pedagogical research: exploring the unseen and hard to know

A key aim of this special issue is to share articles which exemplify and offer representations of innovative research methodologies and understand the complexities inherent in pedagogical research. A common theme across all articles is a focus on methods ‘geared to that which is discreet, elusive, endemic, obscured, intrinsic and ingrained in pedagogical practices’ (Nind, Curtin and Hall 2016, 207). This is because we believe that ‘a choice of pedagogy inevitably communicates a conception of the learning process and the learner. Pedagogy is never innocent. It is a medium that carries its own message’ (Bruner 1996, 63). This sociocultural definition of pedagogical practice necessitates the development of methodologies which pay careful attention to illuminating elements traditionally understood as unseen and hard to know. Understanding pedagogy as a non-neutral messaging system which in its specification, enactment and experience of teaching, learning, curriculum and assessment (the elements of pedagogy) calls for a multilayered and sociocultural framework for research methods invites a nuanced and innovative approach to exploring pedagogy.

Developing our sociocultural definition of pedagogy we understand it as having three interrelated dimensions as people are ‘enabled, supported or constrained in how they participate in practices and activities, and [as] their histories mediate and are brought to bear by the teacher and by the setting’ (Nind, Curtin and Hall 2016, 31). Simply put, these interrelated dimensions describe the specified, enacted and experienced features of pedagogical practice. The specified dimension of pedagogy refers to messages carried about what is assumed to be an appropriate way to teach and learn. Official curricula and policies are examples of reified specified pedagogies as they convey messages about what society claims as valuable teaching and learning. The enacted dimension of pedagogy considers messages transacted as individuals interpret, enact and embody specified pedagogy and encompasses sociocultural features such as identity, histories of participation, relationships, personal judgment and pedagogical decision-making. Finally, the experienced dimension of pedagogy makes visible the decoding, action and interaction involved in the subjective experiencing of pedagogy for everyone involved and includes a particular focus on sociocultural concepts such as activity, agency, world, positioning, power, etc.

The next set of articles presented in this special issue illustrate in different ways this sociocultural and multilayered understanding of pedagogy as specified, enacted and experienced and develop creative and innovative methodological approaches to explore the rich hidden and hard to know of pedagogical practice in a variety of contexts and settings. Developing a unique set of socioculturally oriented methods focusing on dialogue (Nind and Lewthwaite), visual research methodologies (Hanney) and a digital gaming mixed method intervention (Kjällander and Johnson Frankenberg) these articles exemplify methodologies which also address some of the ethical, practical and theoretical challenges for pedagogy research discussed in the previous section and explored by Flewitt et al and Hayes and Comber.

In their article, Melanie Nind and Sarah Lewthwaite employ a combination research methodology of expert panel, video stimulated dialogue and diary methods for building pedagogic knowledge and culture in the context of the teaching of research methods in the social sciences. Sociocultural in its approach, the paper develops dialogue as a research methodology for a range of purposes which, they suggest, recognizes ‘both the richness of context and importance of negotiated knowledge that is transformative for those engaged in methods education: teachers, learners and ourselves as researchers’. Focusing on making visible the hidden and hard to know of pedagogic content knowledge (e.g. how to formulate explanations and represent content) the authors encourage the development of research methods that teach other researchers working in particular in new and emerging teaching fields where pedagogic content knowledge and culture are underdeveloped. Placing themselves as researchers working alongside and with teachers and learners they aim to ‘find, adapt or develop research methods suited to collaboration on pedagogic knowledge production, reflecting an alongside vantage point, and generating genuine dialogue and transformation’ and allow researchers to see in different ways.

Roy Hanney explores traditionally hidden and invisible aspects of student problem-solving in project-based learning through the use of visual research methodologies, namely experimenting with map-making as a means of representing problems students had encountered through the employment of cartographic metaphors. For Hanney the use of VRM (visual research methodologies) offers opportunities for exploring the hidden and hard to know, allowing access to a back stage performance (Goffman 1990). The creative and innovative research methodology developed through this article presents map-making as a methodology which

enables researchers to ‘break out of conventional representations of experience’ (Ahlberg and Wheeldon 2012, 27) giving access to the kinds of partially formed ideas about the world that might not be easily verbalized … [as] the making of maps is a kind of thematic portrait ‘beyond the constraints of language’ and, in the making, participants are ‘granted time to reflect and engage with a different type of thinking’ (Gauntlett and Fatimah 2012, 600–601). (Hanney 2018)

Just as a map cannot be reduced to the sum of its individual parts the layered and complex representations of pedagogical thinking and practice that become the images in this study are also a product of discourse and social relations. This rich sociocultural exploration of pedagogy offers researchers insight into the possibilities of using VRM as a methodology for pedagogy research.

Susanne Kjällander and Sofia Johnson Frankenberg present an intervention study which employs a combination of video ethnography, focus groups, field notes and digital progression log data to explore how digital games and resources afford meaning-making and engagement for pedagogical practice in a pre-school setting. Careful attention is paid to a multimodal theoretical frame for analysis and meaning-making as the authors understand the complex ways in which digital resources offer both hardware and software affordances to students and teachers. The article examines affordances and constraints or ‘fits and unfits’ (Kjällander and Johnson Frankenberg 2018) across methodology, theory, technology and pedagogical practice. The authors clearly recognize and illustrate the challenges for methodology and analysis of capturing the hidden and hard to know elements of pedagogical practice. Their discussion of ‘fits and unfits’ across the article draws close attention for researchers to the complexities and nuances inherent in pedagogical research.

Extending our understanding of pedagogical texts and spaces in varied contexts

The final set of papers extend our understanding of pedagogical texts and spaces in varied contexts (Roman and Uttamchandani; Nugent). Space provides interactive scripts, shared resources and points of intersection for teachers and learners and has physical, social, temporal, experiential and virtual dimensions (Nind, Curtin and Hall 2016). The papers in this part of the special issue consider in different ways pedagogy as a space taking as central a sociocultural understanding of the relationships whereby ‘the relationship between people and their environments must be complex, and therefore any outcomes from a change in setting are likely to be produced through an involved chain of events. It is the defining and understanding of these mediating chains that is the key’ (Higgins et al. 2005, 35).

Tiffany Roman and Suraj Uttamchchandani focus on pedagogies of engagement, team learning and inquiry-based learning within Active Learning Classrooms (ALC). Taking teacher and learner interactions within ALCs as their main focus the researchers investigate dimensions of enacted pedagogies in context using VPD (video platform data). Understanding that careful attention should be given to research methods that link learning outcomes to factors within learning spaces (Brooks 2012) the authors develop this idea socioculturally, revealing the multiple and multilayered methods that are necessary to assess the relationships between learning spaces, pedagogical texts and contexts, teachers and learners. Identifying and exploring a series of interactions between learner activities, teacher activities, spatial affordances and technological affordances the authors consider methodologies which may highlight the significance of these co-occurrences for understanding enacted pedagogies in ALCs.

Clare Nugent employs a sensory ethnographic observation case study to investigate the habitual, non-verbal and situated dimensions of nature-based pedagogical practice in outdoor settings. She considers event sampling and time sampling and develops an observational methodology to suggest observation ‘windows’ as a useful methodological approach which is tenable for the researcher and powerful in its scope for rich pedagogical research. Careful attention is given to the role and responsibilities of the researcher in pedagogy research and this paper offers a personal exemplification of some of the issues researchers of pedagogy should consider. Our Special Issue concludes with this personal perspective on pedagogical research methodologies.

Conclusion

While research approaches to pedagogy are vastly more sophisticated now given various developments in understanding pedagogy itself, learning and childhood/personhood, and indeed technology, what is clear from the articles assembled for this Special Issue is that the field of pedagogic methodological research is still relatively new and merits exploration and analysis in its own right. In line with the original call for papers, those published here consider what it means to look critically at pedagogy and the implications of this looking for research methods. We believe this Special Issue offers fresh, critical perspectives to the pedagogy researcher which have the potential to benefit all participants involved in the pedagogic research process.

Notes

1 It is noteworthy that these authors use the word ‘performativity’ differently to the more conventional, neoliberal usage applied in the Flewitt et al article.