(Teaching) Methodology Matters: Radical Pedagogy and Positionality in the Qualitative Inquiry Classroom

• In Event: Reclaiming Positionality as Methodological Praxis for Truth-Telling in Education Research

Abstract

Purpose
In “Dear Science” Katherine McKittrick (2021) writes “Academic disciplines make knowledge into categories and subcategories; methodology and method make discipline and knowledge about categories” (p. 35). In other words, how we research matters for what we know and how we shape our fields. This paper builds on McKittrick’s assertion to offer: how we teach (qualitative) methodology makes discipline and knowledge. How we teach methodology matters.

Theory
bell hooks’ radical (1994, 2013) pedagogy emphasizes vulnerability, self-reflection, and care. A radical pedagogy insists that “everyone's presence is acknowledged… everyone influences the classroom dynamic” (p. 8). More specifically hooks’ radical pedagogy offers a deconstruction of the ways in which white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism are solidified and reinforced in the academy. hooks urges us to think about the ways our embodied and everyday practices matter in shaping the classroom space and consider our positionalities not as static identifiers that locate us as separate from the other, but rather as relational starting positions from which we come to know one another.

Literature
As the field of qualitative inquiry has cohered in the last several decades, qualitative methodologists have developed a scholarship around both the doing of qualitative methodology as well as scholarship on how to teach qualitative methodology. Particularly in the past decade, there has been a wide range of scholarship focusing on the question of how to teach qualitative inquiry including special issues (e.g. Ulmer et al, 2020; Roulston & Bhattacharya, 2018) and full-length texts (e.g. Kuby & Christ, 2020; Swaminathan & Mulvihill, 2018).
Throughout this literature, it is broadly acknowledged that positionality is an important concept to discuss in qualitative inquiry classrooms and generally assumed that instructors of qualitative inquiry must be reflexive themselves. However, what is not explicitly discussed is how the positionality of the instructor matters in teaching qualitative research, or examples of or strategies for teachers of qualitative inquiry to inquire into their positionality in and through teaching.

Methods & Data
Drawing on hooks (1994) and McKittrick (2021), this paper embraces “the ethics and methodologies of encounter, anecdotes, conversations and storytelling” to invoke “radical vulnerability” (Nagar, 2014, p. 13, as cited in McKittrick, 2021). More specifically, this paper zigzags between exploring how positionality is (not) discussed in the literature on teaching qualitative methodology, and reflections, encounters, and stories of teaching qualitative methodology that center positionality from the perspective of the paper author.
Scholarly Significance & Results
The lack of discussion around the role of instructor positionality in the qualitative inquiry classroom matters as we seek to, as Sara Ahmed writes “not reproduce what we inherit” (p. 182). The field of qualitative inquiry has been critiqued for its role in reproducing white and western ways of knowledge production, silencing scholars of color (Spates & Gichiru, 2015; Summerville et al., 2021). Therefore, considering how we teach – or stated differently how we train future methodologists is integral for how we imagine a more just educational future.

Author

• Maureen Alice Flint, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author