Focus Groups as Sites for Reflection and Dialogue between Research, Practice, and Educational Administration

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 7:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Co-Constructing Knowledge between Research and School Practice: Qualitative Approaches in Two German Research Projects

Abstract

Objectives
This contribution presents the design of focus groups in a German research, development, and transfer project and reflects on their methodological implementation. We aim to discuss opportunities, challenges, and limitations of participatory-oriented focus groups. The study examines how knowledge is co-constructed through participatory, immersive research approaches and what opportunities, structural limitations, and power relations shape these processes. We analyze participatory focus groups as a potential rupture with hegemonic paradigms in educational research.

Perspective
For over 30 years, researchers have employed focus groups in international educational research to evaluate feasibility and implementation or anticipate effectiveness (Gil Flores & Granado Alonso 1995). Scholars emphasize the importance of analyzing both consensus and dissent within groups (Morgan 1997; Barbour 2007). Our project builds on a co-constructive understanding of educational research (Coburn &Penuel 2016) that conceptualizes participation as collaboration between different but equal fields of expertise (Bryk 2015). This proclaimed paradigm shift challenges traditional models of knowledge production and transfer. New epistemological questions arise regarding knowledge genesis, inclusion and exclusion processes, and persistent power relations in participatory research contexts.

Methods
We focus on the methodological design of focus groups as well as the results and their significance for research, development, and transfer. We understand these dialogical and reflexive research situations as iterative and dynamic processes. We pay particular attention to analyzing exclusion processes and the danger of implicit notions of seamless knowledge transfer within the scientific system.

Data sources
Transcripts from various focus groups (with teachers and school administrators as well as with researchers and educational administration personnel) serve as the data foundation. We conduct analysis through qualitative content analysis pursuing two goals: to generate data for formative evaluation and for scientific insights about participatory forms of knowledge production. We discuss and interpret hypotheses and results in iterative processes with practitioners and other stakeholders.

Results
This contribution presents initial empirical results on the relationship between science and practice. Our findings reveal a broad understanding of what practitioners subsume under research from a practice perspective. This creates a tension-filled relationship between science and practice with concrete expectations on both sides. Our in-depth problem-oriented analysis clarifies contradictions between participatory aspirations and actual implementation possibilities: different temporal dimensions in research and school, different 'language styles' and task priorities, as well as approaches to and processing of knowledge. Finally, we reflect on how governance and professionalization processes use results for teachers and researchers and what limitations exist in avoiding one-sided interpretive authority.

Significance
The presentation contributes to methodological discussions about participatory educational research and its transformative potential for practice and science. It demonstrates pathways for research-informed further professionalization of teachers and contributes to the advancement of science-theoretical discourses by sharpening the problem-oriented examination of power relations and inclusion/exclusion processes while avoiding uncritical idealization of participatory research. As a model project, the research approach has the potential to serve as an example for further transformation processes.

Authors

• Anne Bödicker, Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe

• Gabriele Maria Weigand, University of Education Karlsruhe