Abstract
Conducting Research With Students Using Their Second Language: Methodological and Ethical Implications
Steven Singer, The College of New Jersey
Like many universities, my university encourages faculty to include students in their research. It is a valuable experience I wish I had prior to entering a doctoral program, but it comes with a set of methodological and ethical concerns. Myself and two students developed a standard semistructured interview study of 12 deaf adult who discovered their deaf identity in adulthood rather than during their school years, the typical time period that deaf people in the United States develop this cultural identity. The students, while fairly proficient in American Sign Language, were not native users of the language. Due to this and their general inexperience with research, I established a number of research protocols that involved mock experiences, ongoing check-ins with participants for research fidelity, and a triple interpretation/translation approach. Nevertheless, some questions arise, not only about conducting research in a second language, but this combined with research with a historically marginalized population of people. This presentation reviews the design of our methodology, a walk-through of our data collection and analysis, and discussion of the implications of this kind of approach to research that includes researchers or research assistants whose first language is different than that of their participants.
On Inquiring Together Artfully
Kathy Mantas, Nipissing University
Art(s)-based and art(s)-informed methods and methodologies continue to evolve. In this poster presentation, I take a retrospective look at a collaborative art(s)-informed research approach by mainly using the example of an inquiry that I conducted to study women educators’ creativity and learning through artistic processes. By looking back and engaging primarily in a crucial reflective process, I hope to better understand and illustrate how partaking in collaborative artistic processes and methods can support dialogue, encourage critical reflection, and nurture more authentic research relationships. In essence, and in this context, a collaborative and artful approach to inquiry is a way of coming to know through a more organic artistic process and by engaging with the creative process and the artful forms/data that emerge, both imaginatively and critically, and more importantly in community. This approach to data creation and collection, data analysis, data representation, and researcher positioning has the potential, I believe, to lead to a more genuine form of co-inquiry and research relationship. This poster session will also consider how a “studio-like” space can be created and how more artful methods can be facilitated in the context of a collaborative approach to art(s)-informed research. Finally, it will explore some of the complexities of taking a collaborative approach to art(s)-informed research.