Recognizing Graduate Student Researchers as Moral Actors: Negotiating Collaborative Conceptions of Care in Research

• In Event: Teaching and Learning Critical Care–Based Research Methodologies: Training the Next Generation of Qualitative School-Based Researchers

Abstract

Given that graduate students arrive to their programs with well-developed moral and ethical commitments to communities outside of the research team (Weidman & Stein, 2003), the role that graduate students’ own positionalities play on research teams is material to the ways knowledge is produced within the academy. Yet the dominant apprenticeship understanding of graduate student education (Sedlacek, Benjamin, Schlosser, & Sheu, 2008) often neglects how power dynamics constrain graduate students, since faculty members serve as gatekeepers to the academy, wielding considerable influence over their graduate students’ career and research trajectories (Johnson, Jensen, Sera, & Cimbora, 2018; Lee, 2008).
In session, I will explore some of the challenges we encountered, as graduate student researchers (GSRs), in caring for youth on a qualitative research team which did not discuss understandings of care prior to working with the youth in the school-based study. As GSRs from marginalized communities, each with significant K-12 teaching experience, we reflect on how identity and power impacted our conceptualizations of care. Our experiences working with marginalized youth in the same school-based qualitative research project revealed discordance between how members of the research team thought of and enacted care. Our collective conception of care resonates with Sellar (2009) who writes about the embodied, affective enactment of our moral and ethical stances towards the youth with whom we are researching. As such, care for youth is drawn from our internal values and expectations (Laletas & Reupert, 2016) and grounded in our identities (Velasquez, West, Graham, & Osguthorpe, 2013).
We argue that it is particularly important for GSRs to understand what moral/ethical/equity commitments they are bringing to a team, grapple with what compromises they are and are not willing to make for the sake of research, and how the power dynamics they encounter doing research might bind their senses of agency. We make these arguments because we believe that how GSRs conceive of care impacts the way that young people are cared for in research, regardless of how our liminality may position us on- and off-site. Furthermore, we believe that research teams will more effectively care for youth in research by proactively developing a collective, inclusive, working definition of care. Therefore, ignoring our moral and ethical commitments as critical educators to interrupt all that threatens the humanity of young people with whom we research, to us, might be regarded as (un)care.

Author

• Errol C. Saunders, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author