Our new peer-reviewed research paper, Hard to teach: inclusive pedagogy in social science research methods education, has been published by the International Journal of Inclusive Education. The paper is Open Access (freely available online) and documents inclusive insights from our research with teachers and learners of research methods. Despite its recent release, the paper is garnering a lot of attention. Here is the full abstract:

Amidst major new initiatives in research that are beginning to address the pedagogic dimension of building capacity in social science research methods, this paper makes the first move to apply the lens of inclusive pedagogy to research methods pedagogy. The paper explores the ways in which learning social science research methods is hard and may be anxiety-provoking, which has sometimes led to a deficit discourse in which learners are positioned as ill-prepared and fearful. Learners can then be blamed for being hard to teach when an inclusive pedagogical lens would support a more asset-based discourse. Nonetheless, the authors argue that without traditional deficit-based solutions of the remedial class, special needs label or special teacher within the methods learning environment, methods teachers have developed their own responses. These pedagogic responses, elicited from the authors’ research using methods of expert interviews, focus groups and video-stimulated dialogue, address challenges associated with the learner, the learning material and the teacher’s context. The paper differentiates between practical solution-focused strategies and more holistic approaches. The authors illustrate how methods teachers reach out to diverse learners and they conclude that data and standpoints are used in inclusive teaching to make connections and to support learning.

Reference: 

Nind, Melanie & Lewthwaite, Sarah (2017) Hard to Teach: Inclusive pedagogy in social science research methods education, International Journal of Inclusive Education. DOI: 10.1080/13603116.2017.1355413