Editorial

Evaluating value(s)

Linda De George-Walker
Faculty of Education, University of Southern Queensland, Australia

Patrick Alan Danaher
Faculty of Education, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba QLD

PP: 1 - 4

Article Text

Increasing attention is being paid to the identities and subjectivities of educational researchers (Coombes, Danaher & Danaher 2004; Somekh & Lewin 2005; Stronach & MacLure 1997). Rather than being neutral ciphers and/or objective and disinterested observers, researchers are understood as vital participants in the research enterprise and as having highly developed interests in the enactment and outcomes of research projects.

A crucial corollary of this understanding is the proposition that researchers must be reflective and reflexive about their roles and responsibilities, and open and transparent about their interests and motivations, in such projects (Kleinsasser 2000; Nagata 2006; Stronach, Garratt, Pearce & Piper 2007). Effective and powerful research often entails researchers learning as much about themselves - their own ethics and politics, values and worldviews - as about the other research participants. At the same time, research that is exclusively or primarily about the researcher might not necessarily be either effective or powerful.

It is therefore vital that educational researchers evaluate values - their own as well as those of other participants - in order to maximise the intended and actual value of a research project. This complex and contentious interplay between research significance and researcher identity is the focus of this special theme issue of the International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning, entitled 'Evaluating Value(s): Issues in and Implications of Educational Research Significance and Researcher Identity'. Several intending, current and recently graduated postgraduate students deploy a variety of conceptual and methodological resources to explain and interrogate their positioning of their subjectivities in the wider site of their respective studies. The result is a diverse range of engagements with a key issue in any study: the researcher's place in ensuring the study's authenticity and relevance in relation to both the researcher and the other participants.

In engaging with this issue, the authors of the papers were asked to address one or more of the following common questions:

• How can and should educational researchers position themselves in relation to their research projects?
• Which assumptions, attitudes and values on the part of researchers have been or are likely to be revealed by the design and conduct of their research projects?
• In what ways do researchers' values intersect with, and/or are in conflict with, the claimed and actual value of their research projects?
• What are the implications of recognising researcher identities for contemporary debates about the significance and utility of educational research?

Overview

Six anonymously peer refereed articles have been selected for publication in this special theme issue (with a refereed but non-theme issue article appearing at the end of the issue). The first article, by John Hurley, takes us into the challenging and contested world of mental health nurses delivering psychological therapies in the United Kingdom. He uses his currently proposed research with some of these nurses to reflect on crucial questions about his own identity as person, nurse educator and researcher. Drawing on existential psychology, emotional intelligence and spirituality, Hurley issues the provocative invitation to educational researchers to invade their own privacy - that is, to focus on the identity of the self as a key element of maximising the authenticity of themselves and their research.

In the second article, Warren Midgley takes up this invitation by presenting a necessarily selective but very informative autoethnographic account of a previously conducted research project in Japan about students' attitudes towards addressing a foreign teacher in a conversational English class. The article uses primary text and footnotes to present at least two simultaneous and sometimes contestatory and contradictory narratives: one an overview of the project; the other a critically charged engagement with and counternarrative to important aspects of that project. The author highlights the sometimes unsettling link between his personal ethics and the mutability of researcher beliefs and values.

Dinah R Dovona-Ope uses the third article to liken a doctoral research project about female secondary students' attributes for academic achievement in Papua New Guinea to two vividly evoked images: a journey of deceptions and leaps of faith. The deceptions, such as 'You can't do it!' and 'I am safe', are interspersed with lessons, such as being part of a scholarly community and drawing strength from inner faith, derived from the author's value system. Dovona-Ope deploys concepts of achievement motivation and self-efficacy to link her journey with broader issues framing the values of contemporary educational researchers.

The fourth article, by Teresa Moore, takes up one manifestation of those values - feminist poststructuralism - and draws our attention to the multiple 'mes' attendant on the researcher's multiple subject positions. Her account of these positions is illustrated by reference to her doctoral study of the interplay between work and subjectivities for four academic women at an Australian university. In a pattern that is persistent throughout this theme issue, Moore situates her reflections on her multiple selves (researcher, wife, worker/student, woman) in the wider context of three crucial goals of feminist poststructuralist research (valuing the women, doing no harm in the field, research leading to social change).

In the fifth article, Jennifer Parker engages with similar kinds of questions when she elucidates what she calls the 'dilemma-of-dilemmas': interpreting her data in ways that challenged not only the basis of her research but also the assumptions underpinning the received opinion of the field in which her research is located. Her multi-site case study of children identified as experiencing Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder drew her into a long and sometimes disturbing journey of encounters with dominant thinking in her discipline, facilitated by rigorous engagement with several concepts such as gestalts, logic of justification and the stance of the epistemorph. Parker concludes by addressing explicitly three of the theme issue organising questions listed earlier in this text.

Mike Danaher and PA Danaher use the sixth article to examine the usefuleness of situated ethics in exploring potential ethical dilemmas in their doctoral studies, concerned respectively with wildlife preservation in Japanese environmental politics and mobile show communities in Australia. They articulate a close connection among situated ethics, research significance and researcher subjectivities in both studies. Like Parker, Danaher and Danaher close their article by engaging directly with the theme issue's organising questions.

In relation to those questions, the authors of the articles presented here have engaged with them with varying levels of explicitness and detail, but each of them has contributed something of value to the more general discussion generated by posing the questions. As with all texts, readers are likely to take from this one an equivalent diversity of ideas and insights for their own work as educational researchers. What is clear is that the emphasis on research significance and researcher identity should be maintained and extended, and also that conducting the kind of reflexivity exemplified in the articles in this theme issue is frequently uncomfortable and sometimes disorienting and disturbing. Perhaps most significantly of all, the theme issue has corroborated the importance of the interplay between a research project's eventual significance and the subjectivities of its researchers (and other participants). Evaluating value(s) is indeed simultaneously fraught with risk for, and indispensable to the effective design and implementation of, contemporary educational research.

The final article in the issue was refereed separately from the theme that links the other articles published here (although there are resonances between the article and the theme). In it Michel N Trottier makes a plea in favour of English villages in the Republic of Korea as a possible source of curricular and pedagogical innovation in teaching English as a foreign language. He engages with specific criticisms of the villages by renowned second language learning theorist Stephen Krashen as a basis for arguing the merits of the villages as potentially helping to transform English language teaching in that country. Trottier also makes some salient points about relevant criteria for evaluating the villages' effectiveness and appropriate strategies for researching their impact. The theme issue concludes with a review by Emilio A Anteliz, Phyllida Coombes and PA Danaher of Caroline Dyer's edited book The Education of Nomadic Peoples: Current Issues, Future Prospects.

Acknowledgments

The guest editors of this theme issue are grateful to the authors of the articles for allowing their work to be refereed and for presenting such a diverse set of engagements with the journal issue theme. Ms Dorothy Bramston worked painstakingly to typeset several of the articles. Dr Jeong-Bae Son uploaded the articles and published the issue with his customary prompt professionalism. The following kind souls and kindred spirits carried out the often unsung but crucial task of refereeing the articles:

• Dr Clint Arizmendi, Queensland Department of Housing, Australia
• Associate Professor Annemaree Carroll, University of Queensland, Australia
• Ms Anne Casley, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
• Ms Pauline Collins, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
• Mrs Phyllida Coombes, Independent Scholar, Australia
• Ms Donna Couzens, Griffith University, Australia
• Dr Mike Danaher, Central Queensland University, Australia
• Dr Ann Dashwood, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
• Associate Professor Don Gorman, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
• Dr Aniko Hatoss, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
• Ms Laurel Hunt, Central Queensland University, Australia
• Ms Janice Jones, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
• Dr Shelley Kinash, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
• Dr Carmen Mills, University of Queensland, Australia
• Associate Professor Shirley O'Neill, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
• Dr Jan Stenton, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
• Ms Shalene Werth, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
• Dr Kathie Young, University of Southern Queensland, Australia.

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