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Key question 3: What are our responsibilities as teachers of research methodology when addressing these issues with our students?

Mon, April 15, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Bayview B

Proposal

Our third key question moves beyond our own scholarship to thinking about how we work to ensure the transfer of sustainable research practices with students. As teachers of inquiry, we are oftentimes presented with the dilemma faced by emerging scholars and student researchers who are constrained by their own status, with less power and agency than they might feel willing to exercise. It is impossible to ask people to take risks with their research utilizing methodologies in environments that are unwilling, unaware, or even inhospitable to more democratic and pluralistic efforts. As part of our roundtable we seek to jointly develop with our attendees creative ideas addressing the following: How do students align their natural ontological and epistemological stances with the agency to select appropriate designs and tools? How do we as teachers address, let alone remove, fear that emanates from students whose ideas of decolonized methods is to conduct one structured interview to get ‘authentic’ voice? How might we help students “unlearn” some of this fear, or alternately, some of the resistance to methodologies that broaden notions of who can be involved in the production of knowledge? Finally, how do we counter colleagues who speak of “statistical methods” as the gold standard of research, and by virtue of their status, are considered to be the final word in a students’ deference to methods that might be misaligned with the true desires of students to explore a research question? These are complex questions, situated in institutional and structural hierarchies, and engaging in dialogue about the support we can and should offer our students is critical for bringing the discussion about decolonizing methodology from theory to practice.

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