Ensuring the Participants Participate; the Role of Ethics in Promoting Impact on Enquiry

Ensuring the participants participate:

the role of ethics in promoting impact of enquiry in the workplace.

Keith Humphreys and Peter Dove

School of Education,

The University of Northumbria

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Paper presented at the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme, First Annual Conference - University of Leicester, November 2000

Abstract

This case study focuses on the dissertations of 53 teachers who had completed small-scale research enquiries in their MA studies in Israel. They had been led by tutors from the University of Northumbria in England and Yeda College in Israel. In particular we explored the data relating to ethics, which the teachers had been specifically asked to report. The findings indicated that most of the teachers had taken a symbolic approach to the implementation of ethics and those who had gone deeper failed to identify issues which inhibited the impact of their enquiries. A review of the literature on the role of ethics and the impact of research, in the light of these findings has been explored. It has led us to the conclusion that there is an important role for ethical considerations to be taken much more seriously within schools, if there is to be a significant improvement in the quality of advanced professional practice.

1Introduction

For the purpose of our discussion we are referring to case study which is practised within an interpretive paradigm in order to improve the quality of professional practice in the workplace. The concern of this paper relates to the need to recognise the importance of ethics in the everyday development of professionals, especially those who are seeking to improve their advanced practice.

The recognition of advanced practitioners within the teacher profession, TTA (2000) is leading us to reflect upon the professional qualities that will enhance their achievement. In addition, schools are being urged to collectively evaluate their performance, Ofsted (2000) and this is leading to new emphases on specific aspects of research methodology. Various approaches to participative enquiry, Reason (1994) are used to ensure the maximum impact on teachers in the implementation of the most effective processes for teaching and learning. In Higher Education, teachers are commonly introduced to qualitative methodology within an interpretive paradigm, as a basis for their action. A criticism of such approaches is that they give the teacher access to an insufficiently focused and sometimes tokenistic awareness of research methods, Humphreys and Sousak (2000). This current small-scale enquiry is indicating that ethical considerations are poorly understood and weakly adhered to, thereby creating a void between the enquirer and the enquired, for the dissemination of findings.

This research paper is based on the ethical considerations in the dissertations of 53 teachers undertaking Masters degrees on reflective enquiry in their own workplace. It became apparent that ethical codes were being used in a positivistic way. There was little evidence that ethics were being used to cope with paradoxes arising from the complex and constantly shifting positions of staff, pupils, parents and government guidance. The basic literature on research ethics tends to focus on checklists, Bell (1998) and rarely explores ethics as an essential ingredient of effective practice. Our enquiry indicated that the teachers tended to use a list of ethical points to gain entry into their enquiry. There was little evidence that they saw ethics as the starting point for their data analysis and a key concern to encourage effective participation. Even the commonly referenced literature on collaborative enquiry Warren Little (1990), Oja and Smulyan (1989) pays little attention to the significance of ethics.

2 Review of the literature

A new role for ethics in professional development

There is no national or international definition of ethics to which all professions would subscribe. The topic is widely discussed from many perspectives. A typical definition refers to ethics as,

“ the theory of right and wrong conduct….. morals are its practice”, Billington (1988)

This type of definition justifies the production of lists of ethical codes of practice and oversimplified approaches to ethics which are commonly to be found in text books such as Robson (1993) and Hitchcock and Hughes (1997). Such lists arguably encourage a symbolic reference to ethics when related to small-scale research projects. There are more substantial definitions that broaden the scope of responsibility and reference such as,

“Ethics relate to the right conduct in the light of moral principles, such as compassion, freedom, good justice, rationality, responsibility, and virtue….character…..values to hold and how to treat oneself and ones responsibilities to others, customs, right/wrong, good/bad, and ends/means.” Terkal and Duval (1999)

This type of definition implies a broader understanding of the nature of ethics and the need to have a collaborative understanding of peer group cultures. There are some research texts that work in this wider context such as Bottery (1992) and Punch (1994). Yet surprisingly it is difficult to find significant reference to the ethics of professional development. The following frame of reference is helpful in that it implies a balance between the interpretations of different interested parties and it recognises the significance of ambiguity and conflicting values.

“Ethics is about behaviours, codes and interpretations of those behaviours and codes. It is about the way people ought to live and should live. Ethics is determined externally by groups and internally by individuals. Ethics is about right and wrong based on interpretations of those concepts and situations involved”, Strom (2000)

But in the context of this paper we are still left with a concern about the issues that should form a focal point for collaborative professional development, especially of the sort that occur amongst a collection of staff in a common workplace. Fraser (1997) recognises that ethical dilemmas and practical problems occur in practitioner research and she identifies personal values and potential for bias, the researchers role within the organisation, confidentiality and anonymity, role conflict issues and time constraints as limiting factors in developing credible educational research in the workplace. In particular she stresses that these issues are much more pertinent in regular real life work-based activity, than they are in Higher Education teacher assignments that are related to quasi small-scale research projects.

When we explore the ethics of professional development in more detail, there are two key features that emerge as premises of good practice. The first key feature relates to the importance of dialectics defined by Dean and Staples (1999) as, “the art of sophisticated reasoning, the attempt of seeking the truth by reasoning, and logical argument in critical decision making”, and this leads to the importance of confrontation of opposing views and the subsequent learning from difference. Eraut, (1984) identified that handling value issues is a complex concern and he postulated a number types of judgements that would help teachers to reflect collaboratively. If teachers are to develop new understandings then their tacit knowledge must also be challenged. The second key feature is the importance of virtue. This is defined by Frankena (1973) as “not a principle…., it is a disposition, habit quality, or trait of the person or soul, which an individual either has or seeks to have.” Barbosa de Silva (1999) extends this distinction by recognising a hierarchy of virtues that relate to an ongoing disposition towards the nature of collaborative professional development. These include primary virtues such as respectfulness, non-malevolence, benevolence and fairness. This set of virtues provides a very different starting point for enquiry based professional development, from those implied by an ethical code checklist.

Clearly we endorse the importance of the distinction between Higher Education projects and workplace based professional development, and have argued that such course related activity fails to address the concerns of real collaborative practice development, Humphreys and Sousak (2000). As a consequence the veneer of assignment related ethical practice is quickly pierced when the impact of such research approaches is applied in the melee of ongoing professional development in the workplace.

The relationship between the impact of research and professional development

As our enquiry continues and we seek to develop a shared understanding of the role of ethics in promoting the impact of enquiry on professional development, we have found it useful to explore the literature relating to the impact of research more generally. This exploration has helped us to realise that the concept of impact is complex and that assessing impact is very difficult. This complexity is perhaps reflected in the polarised views that have been reported in recent articles and reports. For example, in the press release of 31 August 2000 that accompanies the recent HEFCE Fundamental Review of Research Policy, a key aspect of impact would appear to be how frequently academics read each others articles.

“on many measures the research produced by university researchers in this country is among the best in the world. Researchers are among the most productive, and the number of times the work of UK academics is read and used by other academics (‘citation’), per million pounds spent, is the highest world-wide.”

In contrast Armstrong (2000) suggests that education research, “has been assumed to have an ‘impact’ though this has been largely a matter of faith rather than something that has been demonstrated empirically through meta-research.”. In the same article he also reports that Tooley and Derby (1998), claimed that ‘too much research is published, most of which fails to contribute or even consolidate knowledge and understanding, let alone make a significant or direct contribution to practice.

Clearly very different views on the nature of research impact exist and we admit that at this point in our enquiry, our understanding of impact is still very much in a developmental stage. However, we do tend to view impact as a relative concept, one that is dependent upon context and perception. Hillage et al (2000) suggest that “There is no simple model, and as a result the impact of research is difficult to isolate and measure.” This is a view that we are increasingly coming to share for a number of reasons that are outlined briefly below.

Firstly, we see research impact as being closely linked to research design. For example, like Burgess-Macey and Rose (1997), we would tend to the belief that action research that is not experienced as empowering by its participants is seriously flawed from an impact perspective. Burgess-Macey and Rose (op cit) also make the point that decisions about impact will be influenced by who is involved in the decision-making process. We would also suggest that decisions about impact should be related to the context in which the research is set. In the case of our teachers, there were several instances in which key players in the prevailing organisational culture, for example, the head of a school, were seen as pivotal in influencing the impact of the teachers’ enquiries.

In trying to develop our understanding of the concept of impact, we found it useful to create a simple framework that allowed us to link impact to research outputs and inputs. By research outputs we mean the reasonably tangible outcomes of research, for example the development of theory, the new knowledge gained or the new policies or practices that are introduced into the workplace. On the other hand, we see research inputs as being less tangible and less easy to define but as least as important in terms of impact of enquiry. For us the research inputs relate to the intrinsic motivation of the participant to involve themselves fully in the research. For example, involvement in an enquiry that is intended to be emancipatory is often experienced as unsettling by the research participants and requires high levels of intrinsic motivation on their part if the enquiry is to succeed. We also tend to the belief that research inputs have a moral dimension in that they relate to a commitment not only to the process of an enquiry but also to ongoing professional development.

Although we recognise that it is necessary to consider both inputs and outputs of an enquiry in considering impact, it is within the research inputs that the majority of teachers have located their ethical concerns. In the next section we explore where the teachers’ views as presented in their dissertations.

3 Analysis of the data

We were interested to know how many teachers had appreciated the significance of ethics and the extent to which that appreciation had been manifest. All of the teachers included a significant section in their dissertations that referred to ethics and more importantly we found that beyond the basic six texts used by the tutors, a further

fifty-three references were made by different teachers. We interpreted this as an indicator of wider reading. More importantly the range of references used, indicated access to a knowledge base, beyond the use of basic ethical lists of codes of practice.

We are aware that a criticism of this study could well be the self-fulfilling prophecy in that the teachers did not fully understand ethics because the eight tutors involved never really taught the topic well enough. However the tutors did give the teachers a broad frame of reference to a variety of literature, Eraut (1995), Punch (1994), Burgess (1989), and Adler and Adler (1994), as the evidence already stated has indicated.

Across the range of data that we examined over half of the teachers appeared to pay only a symbolic reference to ethics, in that they referred to basic lists of practice but did not even find their application to be problematic. Furthermore unwitting testimony indicated that, none of the teachers worried about the effect of ethics in enhancing the impact of their enquiries and also that none of the teachers saw ethics as fundamental or as a process permeating their entire study. These two broad issues emerged:

The most common focus for the teachers’ ethical concerns was gaining entry into their research settings. Procedural solutions to problems in gaining entry tended to be identified.

In describing their ethical codes or ethical problems that they encountered, the teachers tended to focus on ethical issues relating to gaining entry into their research settings, particularly those issues for which procedural or technical solutions were possible. For example, accounts of how the teachers had obtained appropriate permissions from those in authority were common, as were descriptions of how they intended to maintain participant anonymity. For example, in relation to ‘permissions’:

“I obtained permission for the research from the Head Office of the School Network and from the head teacher of my school.”

“I obtained full authorisation from the school’s head mistress, the five teachers of the English team and the co-ordinators of Mathematics, Science, Hebrew and Arabic.”

Statements about protective anonymity tended to be along the following lines.

“I promised anonymity to the subjects by refraining from mentioning their name, the name of the establishment in which the research was conducted, or any other identifying sign.”

“The name of the school used for this research will remain unknown and the names of the interviewed homeroom teachers and counsellors have been coded.”

Agreements over the clearance of data and explanations of how the teachers had clarified their research aims and methods to their research participants also seemed to loom large in the teachers’ ethical priorities and invariably, according to the teachers, could be resolved by drawing on procedural solutions. For example,

“I decided that I would specify clearly and simply to every interviewee the research process and goals for the purpose of increasing his degree of understanding and sincerity regarding the research.”

“I handled all data to the researched for revision in order to give them the opportunity to change anything they thought incorrect and to gain most possible trust.”

Whereas we have no doubt that that these kinds of ethical issue are legitimate and that the teachers were absolutely correct to draw upon procedural solutions in seeking to resolve them, we are moving to the tentative belief that this emphasis on the procedural may have militated against a deeper engagement with the value issues underpinning their ethical concerns. It may even have had a detrimental effect on the impact of their enquiries. Within the data there certainly seemed to be several instances of teachers seemingly not moving beyond the procedural, which would support this interpretation.Examples included those teachers who referred to seeking the consent of participants to use data but did not explore issues around the ownership of data. One teacher simply said:

“I obtained the consent of the pupils to participate.”

Other teachers did not seem to recognise that the participation of others in their enquiries was often problematic and merited exploration of related issues such as collaboration, power, accountability etc. For example,

“I explained to the members of the research group that their participation was not compulsory and any of them could leave at the beginning, in the middle or at the end if they wished. And indeed when one of the group expressed a wish to stop keeping a reflective diary, I agreed.”