Conference Agenda

In this symposium, we discuss our researching practices in coming to know and explore educational research problems concerning equity diversity and social justice within and across different cultural settings. We share our mutual relatings which have generated further understanding about our own and each other’s researching practices. We then share empirical work through the lens of practice architectures (Kemmis et al, 2014). The research questions underscoring the 4 papers presented in this symposium include:

1) What is considered to be an educational equity or social justice problem across international or cross-cultural sites?

2) What are considered acceptable forms of evidence of coming to understand educational inequity or injustice in its diverse forms in different sites?

3) How are taken-for-granted research practices enabling and/or constraining different forms of understandings about educational inequity or injustice, including the issues to be researched and/or the direction of the research project?

Building healthy connections is a key premise of the double purpose of education, that is, “to prepare people to live well in a world worth living in” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 27). However, what constitutes living well in a world worth living in is highly contested and subject to much debate. We illuminate the roles that educational researchers play in contributing to these debates, particularly in a global environment riven by heightened economic, social, and environmental precarities and volatilities. We also highlight the responsibilities we bear as researchers to produce forms of understanding, modes of action, and ways of relating to one another and the world (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 26) that foster this double purpose of education.

In this paper, we present two examples of research projects aimed at amplifying voices that are often silenced in research: those of children and/or youth from refugee backgrounds. Refugees are often excluded from research for both ethical and practical reasons: because of their assumed vulnerability as well as the challenges related to language or access. In the research projects presented, we aimed to employ methods that suited these groups of children and youth to understand their experiences in ways that they wanted to express them, and in situ. We argue that starting from, and finishing with, the point of view of the knowledge holders illustrates one means (although not exclusively so) by which to amplify their voices and knowledge to counter epistemic injustice in educational research. 45 refugee background students studying in Finnish (20) and Australian (25) primary and secondary schools participated in a modified, child-led version of critical incident procedure (Woods, 1993). In these interviews, the children drew and talked about their learning journey from the time they started school in their counties of origin and/or their transit to the present in Finland or Australia. The children were further instructed to mark on their drawings any key moments when they remember feeling that they had succeeded in something. Researchers and students then explored the drawings together, with students answering clarifying questions such as: What happened here? What were you doing? How did it make you feel? Who helped you here? What did you learn in this situation? This discussion illustrated what the children themselves saw as important in their school journeys. It also gave the researchers the possibility of teasing out some of the less visible arrangements that had enabled or constrained the children’s feelings of success. Moreover, 25 teachers and 10 educational leaders who worked in multicultural schools in Finland and Australia were invited to share their views on how they could support students from refugee backgrounds in their work. In a later stage of the same study, small groups of younger children (13 in Australia, 8 in Finland) collected videos of their educational practices. The aim of this stage of the study was to get a child’s view footage of educational practices as they happen, and to analyse this audiovisual material together with the children. The complete data collection was complemented by praxiographical observations (Bueger & Gadinger, 2014) in selected schools.

Bueger, C., & Gadinger, F. (2014). Towards praxiography: Research strategies and techniques. In International practice theory: New perspectives (pp. 76-96). London: Palgrave Pivot. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Hardy, I. (2014). Changing practices, changing education. Singapore: Springer. Woods, P. 1993. Critical events in education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 14(4), 355–371. doi:10.1080/0142569930140401

In this paper we interrogate our dialogic research practices through the theory of practice architectures, attending to the onto-epistemological base that underpins them. This is a collaborative autoethnographic study with two main layers: firstly, we share experiences of two separate educational research projects and explore how different dialogic research practices facilitate both participants and researchers to discover the phenomenon being studied; secondly, we engage in our own discovery about our research practices. Focusing on research projects in two different countries (Canada and Norway), our initial centring question for this chapter is: How do our research practices facilitate insight into participants’ real-life experiences and practices? Then turning the light on our own research practices, we ask: What onto-epistemological assumptions shape our dialogical research practices? The theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014) attends to the nexus of sayings, doings, and relatings that keep practices in place; site ontologies teach us that practices are shaped by particular locations, contexts, and moments. With this in mind, our epistemic approach has been to develop research methods that engage in site-specific conversations about aspects of education. In different ways we, as researchers or participants, personally take part in conversations for knowledge production. For us, the process of discovery is as important as the product. This was true for the initial studies—our PhD work—that we are reporting on here; it is also true for research conducted for this paper. Transparency, by giving information and time to participants and researchers to be familiar with the topicality, relevance, needs, intentions, and applicability, as driving forces for conducting the research, increases the integrity of all parties. It supports how peace methodologies have long argued that our values need to be present in our processes (Bretherton & Law, 2015; Toews & Zehr, 2003).

Bretherton, D., & Law, S. F. (Eds.). (2015). Methodologies in peace psychology: Peace research by peaceful means. Springer. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Hardy, I. (2014). Changing practices, changing education. Singapore: Springer. Toews, B., & Zehr, H. (2003). Ways of knowing for a restorative worldview. In E. G. M. Weitekamp & H.-J. Kerner (Eds.), Restorative justice in context (pp. 257–271). Willan Publishing.

This paper focuses upon how we as a research team drew upon what Wendy Brady (1992), Lester Irabinna Rigney (1999, and Karen Martin (2008) variously have described as “Indigenist” research traditions or practices. Indigenist research is a term made popular in Australian Indigenous research literature by Rigney (1999), who proposed that Indigenist research approaches would be grounded in Indigenous standpoint and knowledges, would privilege the voices of Indigenous peoples, and would be unashamedly political. We drew connections between these Indigenist research traditions, Indigenous standpoint, and cultural interface theory (Nakata, 2007a, 2007b) and tenets of critical race theory (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Milner, 2007) emerging from Black scholarship in the USA. We did this to align the theory-method coherence of a university learning and teaching project to support the praxis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, or Indigenous, pre-service teachers on their final practicums and internships prior to graduating. We employed a phenomenological approach guided by Brown and Gilligan (1992) and Van Manen (2007), shaped by core Indigenist principles of “yarning” (Bessarab & Ng'andu, 2010; Fredericks, 2007) which privileged Indigenous peoples’ narratives and voices through facilitated dialogue, particularly in assessment cycles with practicum supervising teachers. We explain our positioning as Islander and non-Indigenous researchers and how we are connected to the field of pedagogy and praxis. We explain how we saw our research roles in what Kemmis and colleagues (2014) have described as “risky times” for education—an era of neo-managerialism in schooling and university education (Wrigley, Lingard & Thompson, 2012) as well as an ongoing, colonising experience for Indigenous university students. The attention to the onto-epistemological requirements of an Indigenist approach enabled us to amplify the perspectives and voices of Indigenous students against the backdrop of Australian tertiary education where White, hegemonic social-political and cultural-discursive relations (Kemmis et al., 2014) often constrain their potential achievement on practicum in socially unjust and often racist ways. We conclude with key points for educational researchers, highlighting that research is a practice and has practice architectures with particular, hegemonic arrangements which have not transpired to serve the interests of Indigenous peoples. Honouring Indigenist standpoint and employing critical race theory in research design thus means paying particular and careful attention to the work that research practices do, on, to, and with communities, not only the seemingly uninvested, or detached, or “logical” (cf. Gordon, 2000) crafting of the praxis research problem.

Brown, L. M., & Gilligan, C. (1992). Meeting at the crossroads: Women’s psychology and girls’ development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bessarab, D., & Ng'andu, B. (2010). Yarning about yarning as a legitimate method in Indigenous research. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 3(1), 37-50. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing practices, changing education. Springer Science & Business Media. Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International journal of qualitative studies in education, 11(1), 7-24. Martin, K. (2008). Please knock before you enter. Aboriginal regulation of outsiders and the implications for researchers. Teneriffe, Australia: Post Pressed. Nakata, M. N. (2007a). Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines. Aboriginal Studies Press. Nakata, M. (2007b). The cultural interface. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 36(Suppl.), 6–13. Rigney, L. I. (1999). Internationalization of an Indigenous anticolonial cultural critique of research methodologies: A guide to Indigenist research methodology and its principles. Wicazo Sa Review, 14(2), 109-121. Van Manen, M. (2007). Phenomenology of practice. Phenomenology & Practice, (1), 11-30.

For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment of operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as ‘cultural genocide’. (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2015, p. 1) In this paper, I focus on the epistemological, ontological and axiological practice traditions that help to reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions about the management of trust funds in First Nation communities. Informing this chapter is a qualitative research study involving 11 First Nation community members in Canada who were interviewed. Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing (Martin, 2008) and the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al, 2014) are used to identify the cultural discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that enable and/or constrain practice. The findings reveal that Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing (Wilson, 2008) collide adversely with trust account decision making due to the duties and obligations guiding trust settlement agreements. The ways in which trust account practices can be transformed to ensure greater alignment with Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing are outlined.

Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing practices, changing education. Springer Science & Business Media. Martin, K. L. (2008). Please knock before you enter: Aboriginal regulation of outsiders and the implications for research. Brisbane, Australia: Post Pressed. Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (2015). Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future. Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Retrieved from https://nctr.ca/about/history-of-the-trc/trc-website/ Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Halifax & Winnipeg, Canada: Fernwood.