Shared Predicaments: Reconsidering Research in a Global Pandemic

• In Event: Responsibility in Times of Uncertainty: Policy, Pedagogy and Research in Elementary Schools during a Global Pandemic

Proposal

How does research change when researchers are experiencing the same emergency as research participants? This paper draws on our longitudinal qualitative research with public elementary school teachers in a blue collar Midwestern suburb to argue that this time of great upheaval demands we rethink our researcher roles, responsibilities and relationality. In smudging the lines between researcher and researched, the pandemic crisis requires us to recognize our shared predicaments, leading us to reconsider our views of socially responsible research. It has upended our notions of “fieldwork”, raising critical questions about heretofore taken for granted notions, practices and norms of research. Through an examination of our approaches to interviewing teachers in crisis, this paper extends conversations around relationality, positionality and care in research methodologies (Merinyo and Willemsen, 2021; Luttrell, 2019) into the field of education in emergencies. We offer concrete examples of practices and processes that have enabled us to connect with teachers in a crisis that we were simultaneously confronting ourselves. In exploring our efforts at working with leaders in one public school district, we reveal struggles with, strategies for, and the limitations of efforts at tying research findings back to practice and policy. Finally, we acknowledge that our desire to research educators’ responses to the pandemic and support more effective educational practice and policy is also a means to manage our own uncertainty.

Author

• Laura Wangsness Willemsen, Concordia University, Saint Paul