(Re)engaging in Research: From Research Participants to Co-Researchers

• In Event: Ethnographic Research for Repair, Liberation, and Community Empowerment in Early Childhood Settings

Abstract

The dominance of positivism in the field of research and schooling contexts has resulted in a preference for quantitative research methods and glamorized objectivity, neutrality, and efficiency (Giroux, 2003; Guba & Lincoln, 1994). This ontological stance constrains not only what counts as knowledge but also who is eligible to construct knowledge (Smith, 2021). Detachment between researchers and participants in positivist research inevitably creates a power imbalance between them. People who suffered the most harm from this research are participants from multiply-marginalized communities as they have been positioned as passive subjects from whom data is collected. For example, Indigenous communities have experienced trauma and violence enacted on them through research that has extracted their knowledge for the sole benefit of the researcher (Rigney, 1999). By presenting two qualitative studies where participants from multiply-marginalized communities actively contributed to constructing knowledge, this presentation offers a possibility to rethink the approach toward participants in educational research.
Researcher reflexivity guides our presentation as a theoretical perspective. Researcher’s “interpretations and analyses, and how we choose to present our findings, together with whom we make our findings available to, are all constitutive of reflexive research. Reflexivity in research is thus a process of critical reflection both on the kind of knowledge produced from research and how that knowledge is generated” (Guilleman & Gillam, 2004, p.274). The goal of our presentation is to examine time and distance in relationships to disrupt extractive and unilateral researcher/researched dynamics through reciprocity, respect and relationality (Wilson, 2018).
Study 1 shares examples from a video-cued ethnographic study with Indigenous children, their teachers, families, and community in the United States. Study 2 used narrative inquiry and video-cued ethnography to understand the lived experiences of mothers of color with children with dis/abiliteis in relation to inclusive education. The data we present in this presentation includes anecdotes, interview transcripts, and reflections.
The findings are drawn from both studies where the researchers critically reflected on the process and progression of one’s relationships with research participants and the positioning of participants in each study. Building trust with participants required a considerable amount of time for both researchers, exceeding initial plans. Also, balancing distance between researchers and participants was constantly negotiated throughout the research process - observation, participation, communication, and interview. Time and distance posited uncertainty and were perceived as obstacles at the beginning of research. However, we soon realized that these factors facilitated deeper connections with the participants and shifted the way we position participants in the process of knowledge construction.
The field of qualitative research “would benefit from more “messy” examples, examples that may not always be successful, examples that do not seek a comfortable, transcendent end-point”(Pillow, 2003, p.193). Our findings contribute to the field by highlighting that positioning participants as co-researchers and co-constructors of knowledge is a “messy” but important process in rebuilding reciprocity, respect, and relationality.

Authors

• Monica Alonzo, University of Texas at Austin

• Sunmin Lee, Texas State University