In the Research Conversations podcast series, researchers and teachers come together in conversation to collectively explore different aspects of engaging with literacy research. They draw on their diverse priorities, interests and concerns as they reflect on what their encounters with research are and reimagine what they could be.
You can listen to the episode or read the transcript below to consider their different perspectives when it comes to engaging with research.
“What you don’t see”: Expanding ideas of how literacy research is interpreted
In this episode, researchers Cathy Burnett and Parinita Shetty explore how research is communicated and how some information gets lost along the way.
Research comes from a particular point of view where some things are in focus and others are left out. However, the nuances and complexities of diverse research contexts are not always evident in research communications. No one piece of research can provide the answer when it comes to children’s literacies. Instead, what research can do is provide insights, ask questions or provide alternative ways of looking or thinking about practice.
Listen to the episode here
Cathy Burnett [CB]: My name is Cathy Burnett and I’m Professor of Literacy and Education at Sheffield Hallam University and I’m currently working with Pari on the Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education project.
Parinita Shetty [PS]: Hello, my name is Parinita Shetty and I’m a postdoctoral research associate on this project.
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PS: And in this conversation, we’re going to take a closer look at the idea of research truths. How do researchers share their findings and how are these findings received and understood? What happens when statements like “the research says” or “the evidence shows” are used to make definitive claims? What’s true and what’s perceived as true and what’s the difference between the two is a little bit of what we’re hoping to explore today.
So in our project we spoke to primary school teachers in England about their experiences and encounters with literacy research. And here’s a quote from one of them that speaks to the focus of our conversation today:
“I mean, we’re working with kids. They’re like, they’re lovely, but they’re sort of, you know, I love the word messy. They’re really messy. And there’s never going to be a ‘one size fits all’ solution. And I suppose that is a problem with things like ‘one size fits all, verbal feedback for everybody!’ But actually, the intricacies of how we solve these problems are much more complex. And again, is it time? Is it that we don’t quite want to understand these intricacies? And the word that pops up in my head all the time […] is around empathy. Research for me can maybe bring about empathy for others.”
Cathy, I really loved this quote just because it says so much about all the different teacher experiences that we’ve spoken to. But specifically in this conversation, you know, it’s kind of trying to unsettle this idea of this monolithic and definitive understanding of research.
CB: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. And I think it’s really interesting to think of this from the point of view of a teacher and how a teacher might think about research. I think as researchers, we’re very keen to assert that what we have discovered or explored or described is absolutely the most precious and important insight that somebody might want to take on board. And I think why this quote is interesting to me is it highlights how important it is for the person who is engaging with research to see something that chimes or resonates or is important to them.
And I guess it highlights this idea that no one piece of research is going to provide the answer when we’re talking about working with children in classrooms in complex situations. But perhaps what research can do is it can provide an insight or ask a question or provide another way of looking at or thinking about what we’re doing. So rather than thinking of research as providing the answer for what we might do, perhaps what it does is it provides I don’t know, a conversational partner for practice.
PS: Yeah, absolutely. And also you know what this teacher said about this “one size fits all”. Most researchers I don’t think they mean to say that this is the only thing you should be doing and here is a list of answers, that are our research has, you know, it’s solved the problem of literacy research forever [laughs]. But it seems like somewhere along the way that’s what seems to be communicated. And I don’t think that’s going back to the teachers. So the teacher spoke about messiness and research is really messy, right?
CB: Oh, absolutely. And always comes from a particular point of view. There’s always something that we’re looking at and almost by definition there’s something we’re not looking at. So we might be interested in looking at I don’t know what children are writing on the page, but we might not pay so much attention to the friendships that are happening around the table as they’re producing the piece of writing – which of course could be absolutely central to what they produce. So there’s always a lens that we take which can be really useful and can pose all kinds of questions. But in taking that lens we’re focusing in on something, we’re inevitably leaving some things out.
PS: Um hmm. Yeah I don’t think any researcher would say, “mine is the be all and end all of all research” [laughs]. But how is this then the only message that seems to be reaching teachers? Well, I guess the how is a complex and messy thing in itself.
CB: It is! [laughs]
PS: But how is it influencing the kinds of research or topics that teachers are then accessing? I know we’ve done a little bit of work on this in the project, but you have a lot more experience with this through your engagements with teachers and with the field of literacy over the last few years.
CB: The more I think about it, I think there’s something really interesting going on when we think about communicating research as researchers. Because we’re always trying to think, well, how do we make this accessible? How do we make this straightforward? How do we make this something that somebody can understand who hasn’t been involved in the research themselves? And that’s, you know, a challenge that we face all the time. I just wonder if one of the things that happens as we try and solve that challenge is we produce research in ways that strips out what we might think as the sort of interesting bits – the bits that, I don’t know, perhaps bring in a sense of how we feel, how children feel or whatever. I don’t know. I’m thinking about some of the things that we’ve come across when teachers have shared with us how they’ve received research. Things they’ve shared are often like a PowerPoint slide with a set of bullet points on it.
PS: Yeah.
CB: Or a tweet or a very sort of compact form which has been really useful because it’s meant that they’ve been able to access it really easily and really quickly. But what you don’t see there are all the things that the researcher might have thought about and written about which were about … I don’t know the limitations or about some of the other things that went on within and around the research or some of the caveats that they might build in if they were going to talk to you about it face to face. And I wonder if there’s something that happens as we communicate research where some of the things sort of get lost in some way.
PS: Yeah, because the nuance and complexity isn’t really present. I mean, I’m even thinking about how we communicate to other researchers as well. Even when you’re writing about research methods for other researchers or just you know writing a research report or a journal article, there’s so many things that you leave out. All the sort of false starts, the messiness, the not knowing what to do in the beginning because you have so much data, the path that you’re choosing very specifically and, like you said in the beginning, that you’re leaving out all these other ways to explore and understand and interpret research. And yeah this sort of considerations I suppose gets completely stripped out at the end of any of these communications. Like it might be like a tweet or PowerPoint as you were saying, but even if it’s like a journal article in a journal that’s meant for practitioners, there’s so little room for these kinds of considerations.
CB: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this recently because one of the things that we’ve done is, as you know, is to log all the different bits of research that teachers have mentioned in conversations with us. And it’s been really fascinating to look at all the different things that have been mentioned and some of these are very clearly identifiable as research. A lot of them aren’t, but you can see how there is a connection with research or research has somehow fed into them. And one of the things that I’ve been doing is sort of looking at the things that crop up a lot and the things that hardly crop up at all.
And inevitably that involves some counting. So how many times, for example, is research on grammar mentioned throughout all of the mentions? And once you start counting like that, it’s very, very easy to put all of those numbers into some sort of graph or bar chart or whatever.
PS: Yeah.
CB: It makes it very easy for somebody to look at that and see the patterns in the sorts of things that are mentioned and sorts of things that aren’t. And it’s quite powerful in many ways because there are lots of topics that don’t appear at all and some that do. But then when you reflect on where those bar charts have come from, they’ve come from conversations that we’ve had with teachers where they’ve mentioned some things. There may well be other things that they chose not to mention or they forgot about or if we talked to them on another day or another occasion might have come into the conversation. Even if we’d sent them a survey, they would have answered that differently depending on when they answered it in the term or the year or the time of day or depending on what they happen to be looking at.
And so I think we have to be really, really careful with those sorts of things and what we’re saying. And when you’re inside the project, you know all that and you understand the context in which those answers were given and those responses were made. But if you’re not and you don’t understand that context, then you could interpret those relative mentions of different kinds of research really quite differently. And you could understand it as meaning something that perhaps would misrepresent really what those teachers were saying. So I think it’s very difficult. Whether you’re dealing with qualitative or quantitative research, you’re inevitably being selective and you’re taking what people have told you and you’re ordering or making sense of it in a certain way. And inevitably you leave some things out. Yeah, it’s complicated, I think. Messy.
PS: Not even people outside the context of the project interpreting it differently. Even within the project, the team comes from many different backgrounds; interdisciplinary backgrounds but also just life – experiences, politics, priorities, concerns. And that in itself also influences how we’re understanding the data. Especially when it comes to qualitative data, but even when it comes to quantitative data.
CB: Yes.
PS: The kinds of questions that you’re asking, you know, how you’re framing things, how you’re understanding things, it’s not like this exact science. Which is not to say, like you’ve spoken about this as well, that’s not to say all research is up in the air and there’s nothing – no conclusions that you make, right?
CB: Yeah I think so. I think there’s a danger in this conversation that we almost end up saying, well, research is a completely pointless activity because what do you ever find out anyway? And I don’t think that’s the case.
I do think that looking really carefully at educational practice, looking really carefully at what goes on in literacy in the wider world, what goes on in terms of children’s learning, in terms of children’s thinking. And when I say looking, I mean looking in all the different ways that we might do through describing, counting, observing, working alongside, working collaboratively with children and teachers. I think it can provide really useful insights and perspectives and understandings that can really help us interrogate what we’re doing in practice.
So I think research can play a huge role in education. But I do think it’s worth reflecting on how that research was produced and what might have been illuminated if that research had been done differently. And also being aware of the messiness in which any research is constructed. And how that plays into what is communicated and what isn’t, I guess.
And I’ve really enjoyed talking to you.
PS: Me too! I love this thinking together. I love thinking together with a person and you’ve been a great person to imagine with.
CB: [laughs] And you. Thank you.
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