Text from the paper in Research Intelligence, Issue 102, Pages 24-25. For a Senior
Common Room Educational Conversation at the University of Bath with Pip Bruce
Ferguson on the 21st April 2008.
Increasing Inclusion in Educational
Research: Reflections
from New Zealand
Pip Bruce Ferguson
It is good to be able to share some reflections about developments
in educational research over the twenty-five years in which I have been
involved in research endeavours.
In this brief paper, I want to note the changes that have
occurred in how research is carried out, funded, presented and assessed in the
time I have been a practitioner-researcher, and the attempts that I have observed
to include more diverse perspectives and presentation styles in research. I
want to suggest that these changes are indicative of an epistemological
transformation in what counts as educational knowledge. The bulk of my
reflections are based on practice in New Zealand, but towards the end of the
discussion I expand this to consider work done elsewhere.
When I first started working in New Zealand polytechnics
in the early 1980s the research conducted was largely positivistic. Educational
research was marked mostly by the gathering of institutional data by university
academics using their own frameworks to develop theories which were then taught
to the practitioners, rather than being developed in conjunction with them. This
is obviously a sweeping generalisation, but did
represent how things were done in educational research at the time.
I encountered action research in the late 1980s, when it
was still considered to be a fringe approach. Bob Dick from Australia commented
that in his university, action research was still considered rather suspect at
that time. Bob's 'arlist' discussion group was of
immense help to me in learning more about this approach, as has been the work
of Jack Whitehead and his colleagues at the University of Bath, and Jean McNiff. My PhD studies, completed in 1999, used a
combination of action research and Foucauldian
analysis to help with the development of a research culture in the polytechnic.
In 2003 I moved on to work in a Maori university,Te W
We were greatly assisted in this process by the Tertiary
Education Commission's adoption of a very broad definition of research which,
for the first time, counted creative and performing arts research as research,
not as 'similar to' research processes. At the Wananga, along with more
traditional business and environmental research, there was a huge amount of
creative and performing arts research, incorporated in such outputs as carving,
flax weaving and composition of songs and plays, many of which were very
innovative and contributed to the expansion of knowledge in their areas.
However, despite the TEC's attempts to assess this
knowledge appropriately by designating a 'Maori Knowledge and Development'
(MKD) panel, other aspects of the PBRF led to staff nominating their research
to the Performing Arts panel, for example, rather than MKD, in order to attract
the most funding possible for their institution. There were several other ways
in which Maori
research and researchers were disadvantaged in the PBRF assessment process.
Notwithstanding glitches of this nature, Te Wananga o Aotearoa, despite having had government funding for
research for only three
Page 24
years came out sixteenth equal with the Waikato Institute
of Technology (Wintec) out of 23 full participants in
the process. Wintec had had research funding for the
past eleven years, so TWoA's success was no mean
feat.
I was appointed to a Sector Reference Group, a small
number of researchers from around the country who met to look at feedback from
participants and other interested parties after the first round of the PBRF,
and to make recommendations to TEC on the next round. To their credit, TEC has seemed
very open to these recommendations. A partial round was held in 2006, with the
results only recently released. What was obvious to me through this exercise
was the contestation that still occurs over 'what counts as research', with
some people having difficulty with the notion of a carving as a piece of
research. Many years ago I was privileged to be at an action research
conference on the marae (Maori meeting house and surrounding
area) at Waiariki Polytechnic in Rotorua.
A kaumatua (esteemed elder) came in to our group in the
evening and spoke for two and a half hours about the history and personalities,
the tribal conflicts and colonisation of the area,
using only the carvings in the room as his 'notes'. That experience brought
strikingly home to me how carvings can be research. The stories of his people –
also their philosophies and spiritual beliefs – were all incorporated in
the representations in wood that surrounded us. Given the resistance that is
still evident from some contributors to the PBRF process about the inclusion of
song, dance, carving and weaving as forms of research that can be critically assessed
and which can bring research funding, it is to the credit of New Zealand's TEC
that the definition of research they adopted permitted this inclusion, even if
some of their processes subsequently made its assessment and appropriate
funding difficult.
So far, my reflections have concentrated largely on the New
Zealand context. However, for some years I have been involved in discussions
through a group that operates out of the University of Bath, in conjunction with
Dr. Jack Whitehead, and latterly also with the British Educational Research
Association's online practitioner research group. In both those groups it has
been encouraging to see similar attempts to include alternative cultural
perspectives into 'what counts as research'. Most recently, the discussion has
considered the African concept of ubuntu.
A just-completed thesis, that of Eden Charles from the University
of Bath, gained him his doctorate and the following comments from his examiners
(posted on the BERA discussion group): "We found the thesis to be an important,
discerning and highly original piece of work, containing much publishable
material about the new approaches necessary to address and alleviate oppressive
practices of all kinds, especially those associated with colonialism and
post-colonialism." I believe it is a really positive and healthy move in educational
research when approaches such as action research, incorporating critique from
an African perspective such as Charles has used, are now readily accredited by
the academy.
It is also encouraging that research embodied in forms
other than the purely written is also being recognised.
I have been exploring this issue for some years, receiving early support and
suggestions from researchers in Australia and the U.S. who cited thesis outputs
including CD-roms and performance cafˇs. Recently, a
colleague in New Zealand gained her Masterate using a
combination of thesis and DVD to demonstrate her reflective practice in dance. It
takes courage and open-mindedness for people accustomed to and trained in 'traditional'
research processes to consider and even embrace alternative ways of
researching, and of presenting that research. But it will validate forms of
research that can convey knowledge not easily encapsulated just within pages of
written text and work to overcome those whose knowledge and skills have been,
in the past, inappropriately excluded.
References
Bright, D. (2005) Light Reflections: A Grief Embodied.
Thesis for M. Sports and Leisure Studies, University
of Waikato, Hamilton, N.Z
Charles, E. (2007) How Can I Bring Ubuntu
as a Living Standard of Judgement Into the Academy? Moving
Beyond Decolonisation Through Societal Reidentification and Guiltless Recognition. PhD Thesis,
University of Bath, June 2007.
Thanks to Jack Whitehead for some formative comments on this
paper.
Page 25.
(Note from Jack – you can access Eden Charles'
thesis from http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/edenphd.shtml . Apologies to Pip for not being able to put the umlaut on the a in Maori and in other Maori words
)