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‘To diary or not to diary’? – lessons learned from the SRHE workshop ‘Using Diary Method in Social Research’

by Panagiota (Peny) Sotiropoulou

At the beginning of February 2024, I attended the in-person workshop on Using Diary Method in Social Research, organised by the SRHE and facilitated by Dr Emily Henderson, Dr Zoe Baker and Dr Ahmad Akkad.

Figure 1: Dr Zoe Baker presenting a group task during the workshop

As a reflective, life-long learner, I think there is no bigger satisfaction than sharing lessons learned from attending professional development opportunities like this with a wider audience. So, in this blog, I will present my main takeaways from the day and how I adapted what I learned to fit the diary method in a recent collaborative research proposal submitted for funding.

Using diary as a research method – my main takeaway messages from attending the workshop

  1. Using diary as a method for social research is perceived as a bit mysterious, “somewhat off the beaten path” (Hyers, 2018:vi), as it is still an underused method, without a big body of literature surrounding it. For this reason, researchers should be prepared to receive some initial hesitation from potential participants and be familiar with relevant existing studies that have used this method, to support and argue in favour of their choice.
  2. There is a difference between unsolicited (those pre-existing the research) and solicited diaries (those created for the purpose of the research). However, only the latter type of diary is relevant to researchers who are interested in incorporating diary entries in their research design to explore current topics.
  3. Simpler forms of diaries (e.g. paper templates or online documents) seem to work better than specialist diary apps in terms of facilitating participant engagement and retention.
  4. Two of the main advantages of the diary method are that it can provide access to settings that are hard for the researcher to enter (e.g. school classrooms) and that it provides the participants with the space, time and agency to think and decide what they want to share with the researcher, unlike an interview setting, for example, where participants have to react on the spot.
  5. Diaries are a good way to research marginalised groups and sensitive topics and provide a perfect way to explore lived, micro-level experiences.
  6. The success of a diary study is inextricably linked to the provision of clear instructions on when entries should be made and what participants should cover in those. In terms of the timing of entries, the main distinction is between interval-based (regular records kept over specific time intervals) and event-based sampling (records made every time the participant experiences something that qualifies as an event for the purpose of the research).
  7. The diary requirements should be in balance with participants’ availability, so that the diary does not become an onerous task.
  8. Diary studies come with a relatively high administrative burden, as researchers are required to sustain communications with their participants throughout the project to retain them and to monitor that their engagement is appropriate.
  9. Participation in diary studies might result in increased reactivity/self-awareness for participants (i.e. participants realise their circumstances better after keeping a diary). This might be either positive or negative, depending on whether or not participants take steps towards positive change.

And now what? Adapting diary methods to my research practice

At the time of the workshop I was involved in developing a collaborative research bid to examine the lived experiences of minority ethnic staff and students in Welsh higher education institutions (HEIs). My participation in the workshop consolidated my thinking that including diary elements in this project would be a perfect fit, for several reasons:

  1. Diaries would put the voices of minority ethnic staff and students at the forefront. By providing them with the space to create their own narratives, participants would be empowered to use their diaries to produce authentic and honest representations of their lived experiences.
  2. Diaries would allow participants to record their experiences in real time, providing detailed and context-rich data. This immediacy could capture nuances that might be missed by standalone interviews or surveys.
  3. The flexibility of diaries in terms of format (e.g. allowing for the inclusion of both written and audiovisual elements) and the ease with which they can be tailored to be submitted online would enable participants to adapt their diaries to what best suits their preferences and availability.
  4. Diary entries can complement other research methods, such as interviews and focus groups, to provide holistic exploration of lived experiences, with the latter acting as debrief opportunities to further explore the former.

As this bid came in response to a public tender there was a strict budget, a defined timeline and some specific methodologies requested that needed to be met for our proposal to be competitive. Diary methods were not amongst those requested and the time required for managing participants in such studies as well as analysing relevant findings made the inclusion of a pure diary study unsuitable for this specific bid. However, recognising the unique potential that incorporating diary elements would bring in exploring everyday experiences of minority ethnic staff and students, we decided to adopt participant-led multimedia-elicitation as a viable alternative.

Specifically, we thought that we would ask participants to use Padlet to capture multimedia depictions of their lived experiences accompanied by a short, explanatory commentary for their choice, with staff and students having separate Padlets to populate. We were particularly keen to allow for multimedia posts, so that we could capture more appropriately the various textures and facets comprising staff and students’ lived experience in HEIs (Metcalfe, 2016) (e.g. the sound of a spoken language -or the lack thereof- the places of inclusion/exclusion, as well as abstract concepts like ‘friendship’ etc).

Padlet perfectly served this purpose, as the platform affords for a variety of post types, such as audio recordings, website links, photos, songs. Padlet also allows for the creation of online peer communities, as it provides participants with the opportunity to interact with each other’s content. This further boosted our thinking to use the co-created Padlets of our participants as the basis for a subsequent online focus group discussion with them. This would enable us to better understand the meaning of the multimedia included as well as the interactions developed on the Padlets, as a means to shed more light on how these represent the lived experiences of minority ethnic staff and students.

Our choice was inspired by Keenan (2023), who reflects upon the diarying aspects of photo-elicitation, highlighting how this method is under-used in higher education and yet optimal for unravelling lived experiences. This is because it allows participants to be both creators and interpreters of the data, engaging them “in acts of diarying – both in terms of recording and reflexively interpreting everyday life” (Keenan 2023: 93).

Conclusions

Had I not attended the SRHE workshop, my understanding of the benefits of the diary method and its appropriateness for exploring lived experiences of marginalised communities in higher education would not have been so well-informed. It was learning from this workshop that prompted me to incorporate diary elements in the research bid on exploring minority ethnic staff and students’ lived experiences in higher education. Although the bid outcome is not yet published, I have already had a personal win, being able to include a new methodology in my practice.

So, many thanks to the SRHE for organising the session, to the facilitators for pitching it at such a perfect level, to my fellow participants, who were fully engaged and enriched the session even more by sharing their experiences, thoughts, and practices, and, last but not least, to my manager, who is always so supportive of me expanding my methodology repertoire and pursuing development opportunities. And here is my final lesson learned; do not hesitate to engage in professional development activities, as they are both educational and inspirational!

Dr Panagiota (Peny) Sotiropoulou is a mixed-methods researcher at Advance HE’s Insights Team. Her main interests lie in EDI considerations in HE, with a special focus on issues related to race and ethnicity. Her areas of specialisation involve mixed-methods research designs, impact and theory-based evaluations. Peny has extensive experience in programme evaluation, leading on Advance HE’s internal programme evaluations, in addition to those embedded to bespoke consultancy projects (read some of her recent work here). Peny has been involved with a wide array of projects, ranging from reviewing barriers to doctoral funding to institutional reporting and complaints processes. She has also been heavily involved in the production and dissemination of Advance HE’s annual Equality in Higher Education: Statistical Reports, as she loves to engage in outreach activities promoting EDI considerations to various audiences.

Get in contact with her on Twitter/X (@penpenwise) or LinkedIn.


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Promoting students’ interest through culturally sensitive curricula in higher education

by Kathleen M Quinlan

Around the world, there is a move toward making curricula more culturally sensitive, diversified, or decolonized. However, the impact of such curricula on students is not yet well understood. My colleagues and I sought to research effects of cultural sensitivity on students’ interest in their subjects, focusing primarily on students in professional education programs across 7 participating institutions. We presented this research at the 2023 SRHE conference. The full paper was published this month in Higher Education. We report briefly on the findings and significance of that study. 

This new presentation and publication builds on Dave SP Thomas’ PhD thesis, which we presented at the 2021 SRHE conference and later published in Studies in Higher Education. The initial study conceived and tested a ground-breaking survey instrument, the Culturally Sensitive Curricula Scales (CSCS), that enables students to rate the cultural sensitivity of their curricula. By cultural sensitivity of curricula, we mean curricula in which attitudes, teaching methods and practice, teaching materials, curriculum, and theories relate to, affirm and respect diverse cultures, identities, histories, and contexts. The CSCS survey has paved the way for understanding the extent to which students perceive their curricula as representing diversity, whether people of diverse ethnicities are portrayed in stereotyped or negative ways, the extent to which students are encouraged to challenge power and their experience of inclusivity in classroom interactions.  

In the original study, we found that Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic students in a single English university tended to see their curriculum as less culturally sensitive than their White peers. We also found that more culturally sensitive curricula may help boost Black, Asian and minority ethnic students’ interest in the subject. Colleagues in NERUPI, the Network for Evaluating and Researching University Participation Interventions, were intrigued by the initial study as many of them were seeking to create more diversified, decolonised or culturally sensitive curricula.  

Seven NERUPI member universities took part in the current, follow-up study on which we reported at the 2023 SRHE conference. In this project, we revised the CSCS survey, expanded the participant pool to a wider range of institutions and programmes of study, and controlled a key potential confounding variable.  

Revising the Culturally Sensitive Curricula Scales (CSCS-R) clearly enhanced them, making them more definitive, thorough and reliable. Thus, the CSCS-R is a stronger instrument for use in researching and evaluating students’ experiences of the cultural sensitivity of their curricula.  

After surveying nearly 300 second year students in this NERUPI study, we again found that minoritised students perceived the curriculum as less culturally sensitive than White peers. This finding was robust across programmes and universities, suggesting that it is a widespread issue across the higher education sector in England, not a feature of a single university. Most of the participating universities were still in the early stages of curricular reform. The CSCS study was intended to raise staff awareness of these experience gaps amongst their students to support the creation of more culturally sensitive curricula.  

We also found Black students tended to rate their curricula as less sensitive than Asian students. These wider ‘experience gaps’ for Black students than Asian students are consistent with wider achievement gaps (‘degree awarding gaps’) for Black students.  

Finally, we found that when students rate their curricula as more culturally sensitive, they also tend to have higher interest in their programme, even when controlling for ethnicity and quality of teaching overall. Thus, culturally sensitive curricula appear to be good for all students, not just minoritised students. Surveyed students were primarily studying pro-social professions (eg psychology, education, nursing, social work) where they are preparing for professional roles that serve a diverse clientele and society. These students may be particularly interested by curricula that positively reflect the plurality of the professions to which they aspire and a more just society.  

In sum, this study contributes to understanding how teachers can design instruction that both supports students’ interest and reflects an increasingly diverse society. The study​,​ then, may help educators create more interesting and engaging curricula, while also addressing issues of diversity, equality, and inclusivity within HE. 

Kathleen M Quinlan PhD PFHEA is Professor of Higher Education and Director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Kent, UK. She researches learning, teaching, assessment, and student engagement in higher education, specialising in understanding how curriculum and instruction can be designed to support students’ interest.  


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Doctoral progress reviews: managing KPIs or developing researchers?

by Tim Clark

All doctoral students in the UK are expected to navigate periodic, typically annual, progress reviews as part of their studies (QAA, 2020). Depending on the stage, and the individual institutional regulations, these often play a role in determining confirmation of doctoral status and/or continuation of studies. Given that there were just over 100,000 doctoral students registered in the UK in 2021 (HESA, 2022), it could therefore be argued that the progress review is a relatively prominent, and potentially high stakes, example of higher education assessment.  However, despite this potential significance, guidance relating to doctoral progress reviews is fairly sparse, institutional processes and terminology reflect considerable variations in approach, empirical research to inform design is extremely limited (Dowle, 2023) and perhaps most importantly, the purpose of these reviews is often unclear or contested.

At the heart of this lack of clarity appears to be a tension surrounding the frequent positioning of progress reviews as primarily institutional tools for managing key performance indicators relating to continuation and completion, as opposed to primarily pedagogical tools for supporting individual students learning (Smith McGloin, 2021). Interestingly however, there is currently very little research regarding effectiveness or practice in relation to either of these aspects. Yet, there is growing evidence to support an argument that this lack of clarity regarding purpose may frequently represent a key limitation in terms of engagement and value (Smith McGloin, 2021, Sillence, 2023; Dowle, 2023). As Bartlett and Eacersall (2019) highlight, the common question is ‘why do I have to do this?’

As a relatively new doctoral supervisor and examiner, with a research interest in doctoral pedagogy, in the context of these tensions, I sought to use a pedagogical lens to explore a small group of doctoral students’ experiences of navigating their progress review. My intention for this blog is to share some learning from this work, with a more detailed recent paper reporting on the study also available here (Clark, 2023). 

Methods and Approach

This research took place in one post-1992 UK university, where progress assessment consisted of submission of a written report, followed by an oral examination or review (depending on the stage). These progress assessments are undertaken by academic staff with appropriate expertise, who are independent of the supervision team. This was a small-scale study, involving six doctoral students, who were all studying within the humanities or social sciences. Students were interviewed using a semi-structured narrative ‘event-focused’ (Jackman et al, 2022) approach, to generate a rich narrative relating to their experience of navigating through the progress review as a learning event.

In line with the pedagogical focus, the concept of ‘assessment for learning’ was adopted as a theoretical framework (Wiliam, 2011). Narratives were then analysed using an iterative ‘visit and revisit’ (Srivastava and Hopwood, 2009) approach. This involved initially developing short vignettes to consider students’ individual experiences before moving between the research question, data and theoretical framework to consider key themes and ideas.

Findings

The study identified that the students understood their doctoral progress reviews as having significant potential for supporting their learning and development, but that specific aspects of the process were understood to be particularly important. Three key understandings arose from this: firstly, that the oral ‘dialogic’ component of the assessment was seen as most valuable in developing thinking, secondly, that progress reviews offered the potential to reframe and disrupt existing thinking relating to their studies, and finally, that progress reviews have the potential to play an important role in developing a sense of autonomy, permission and motivation.

In terms of design and practice, the value of the dialogic aspect of the assessment was seen as being in its potential to extend thinking through the assessor, as a methodological and disciplinary ‘expert’, introducing invitational, coaching format, questions to provoke reflection and provide opportunities to justify and explore research decisions. When this approach was taken, students recalled moments where they were able to make ‘breakthroughs’ in their thinking or where they later realised that the discussion was significant in shaping their future research decisions. Alongside this, a respectful and supportive approach was viewed as important in enhancing psychological safety and creating a sense of ownership and permission in relation to their work:

“I think having that almost like mentoring, which is like a mini mentoring or mini coaching session, in these examination spots is just really helpful”

“I’m pootling along and it’s going okay and now this bombshell’s just dropped, but it was helpful because, yeah, absolutely it completely shifted it.”

“It’s my study… as long as I can justify academically and back it up. Why I’ve chosen to do what I’ve done then that’s okay.” 

Implications

Clearly this is a small-scale study, with a relatively narrow disciplinary focus, however its value is intended to lie in its potential to provoke consideration of progress reviews as tools for teaching, learning and researcher development, rather than to assert any generalisable understanding for practice.

This consideration may include questions which are relevant for research leaders, supervisors and assessors/examiners, and for doctoral students. Most notably: is there a shared understanding of the purpose of doctoral progress reviews and why we ‘have’ to do it? And how does this purpose inform design, practice and related training within our institutions?

Within this study it was evident that in this context the role of dialogic assessment was significant, and given the additional resource required to protect or introduce such an approach, this may be an aspect which warrants further exploration and investigation to support decision making. In addition, it also framed the perceived value of the careful construction of questions, which invite and encourage reflection and learning, as opposed to seeking solely to ‘test’ this.

Dr Timothy Clark is Director of Research and Enterprise for the School of Education at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His research focuses on aspects of doctoral pedagogy and researcher development.


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Inclusive research agendas: what’s excluded?

by Jess Pilgrim-Brown

University discourse, policy, and practice has focused increasingly on access, widening participation and inclusion over the course of the last thirty years (Heath et al, 2013). In particular, understanding access, participation and inclusion for those who align with the different protected characteristics (as defined by the Equality Act 2010) has been of interest to academic research, given various political movements to widen access to higher education. There is a wealth of research in the space of equity, equality, and inclusion which has started to prise open the daily lived experiences of those who hold one or more of the protected characteristics as being part of their identity. Both in the tradition of UK academia, but also from research conducted in the US, we – as a research community – have begun to recognise the institutional and systemic structures which lead to sexism, microaggressions, blatant overt racism, disabilities and health inequalities, issues of access, pastoral burden and caring responsibilities. These facets can lead to extreme workloads, extreme discomfort, bullying and sometimes harassment routinely endured by members of both the academic community and the student body. Of course, research which seeks to make inequalities more transparent has also focused on social class background, which does not feature as one of the nine characteristics outlined by the Equality Act 2010. Here, research has predominantly focused on the experiences of working-class students, academics (and on one occasion, parents) but as yet, in the UK, the remit of who is included here is limited (Crew, 2020; 2021a; 2021b).

There are groups which exist outside the current research narrative which are less considered within the wider body of experiential evidence within the academy (Moreau & Wheeler, 2023; Caldwell, 2022). The ambition to promote access to these voices formed the basis of the rationale for my doctoral thesis research ‘Doing the heavy lifting: the experiences of working-class professional services and administrative staff in Russell Group universities’, completed in 2023. The study featured 13 participants who self-identified as working-class and worked in professional services and administrative roles in UK Russell Group universities. Using a novel approach it combined narrative inquiry (to understand historical personal biography and context) with more traditional semi-structured interviews, to understand the phenomena of existing in contemporary university spaces (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000).

As I discussed both in a presentation at SRHE’s annual conference and within my doctoral thesis research, there are distinct limitations within the academic research body which have isolated the experiences of students and academics with particular protected characteristics, often at the expense of intersectionality or of the representation of other stakeholders who have critical value within university spaces. I addressed the ways in which administrative staff and professional services staff are included within academic research, as a representation of their human capital, roles and responsibilities, the ‘minions of management’ that Dopson & McNay discuss leads to an absence of voice and authority. These accounts focus on the actions performed within the university space rather than the experience these individuals have of that space, and how these experiences reflect the wider institutional culture at play (Caldwell, 2022). This understanding of other people within higher education research as being inextricably connected with role rather than identity and experience is something which was also exemplified by Marie-Pierre Moreau and Lucie Wheeler (2023) in their recent SRHE conference presentation on the current status of academic research literature with ancillary workers in higher education in the UK. Finding little UK-based research, Moreau & Wheeler concluded that the everyday experiences of ancillary workers had thus far, to their knowledge, failed to have been included in the wider narrative about institutional culture and lived experience in UK HEIs. 

In a previous blog post for SRHE, Michael Shattock discussed the centralisation of UK higher education away from regional responsibility and governance. Similarly, the degree to which the internal systems of university administration is centralised, or not, has the potential to facilitate or negate healthy working relationships and partnerships, fostered by governance structures. It is particularly pertinent that the brokers of the relationships which are formed from levels of centralisation are the professional services and administrative staff who facilitate the function and process of legislation, administration and research management and the teaching, research, and technical expertise of those working on academic contractual pathways. And yet, like the ancillary workers who provide critical support to the daily function of the university in the most literal form, the experiential perspectives of these huge groups of university employees are left largely outside of the scope of academic research.

Organisational culture literature dictates that culture is predominantly dictated by three elements: assumptions, values and artefacts (Schein, 2004). Where assumptions are a mental model used by managers to make sense of the environment, values are the socially constructed principles that guide behaviour; these are reflected through speech, approaches and spoken goals. Artefacts are the ‘visible and tangible layer’, in the case of the university, the statues and buildings (Harris, 1998; Joseph & Kibera, 2019). In understanding the possibilities for development and promotion, career trajectories, workload, working environments and relationships between people in higher education it might be possible to make some small-scale assumptions about how much these institutions are indeed changing towards becoming more inclusive or how far removing cultural icons of oppressions, such as statues, is a purely performative act.

By collecting first-hand experiential evidence around the assumptions and values of an institution, the nature of organisational culture might be possible to discern (Harris, 1998). I fail fundamentally to understand how research culture initiatives, which, in their broadest sense tackle the measurement and progression of positive research cultures in universities in the UK, can make any progress on the status and environment of our institutions without having legitimate, robust, empirical evidence driving policy and practice. And that empirical evidence needs to include the perspectives, insights, and opinions of everyone who is a direct stakeholder within the organisation. By omitting large swathes of those who directly affect and are directly affected by that organisation we omit the opportunity to make credible, inclusive, necessary progress both in policy, but also in the implementation of practice. The absence of these voices is an academic failure which, in its current form, fails to address the full spectrum of the political economy of UK universities. It is only in doing more work in this area that progress in equalities agendas can fully be realised.

Dr Jess Pilgrim-Brown is a sociologist and researcher in education. She focuses on issues relating to social class, gender and wider social inequalities. Her thesis research ‘Doing the heavy lifting, the experiences of working-class professional services and administrative staff in Russell Group universities’ was the first of its kind in the UK. Her research interests span sociological theory, innovative methods in qualitative research designs and research ethics. She is a current Research Associate at the University of Bristol and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford.


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Fair use or copyright infringement? What academic researchers need to know about ChatGPT prompts

by Anita Toh

As scholarly research into and using generative AI tools like ChatGPT becomes more prevalent, it is crucial for researchers to understand the intersections of copyright, fair use, and use of generative AI in research. While there is much discussion about the copyrightability of generative AI outputs and the legality of generative AI companies’ use of copyrighted material as training data (Lucchi, 2023), there has been relatively little discussion about copyright in relation to user prompts. In this post, I share an interesting discovery about the use of copyrighted material in ChatGPT prompts.

Imagine a situation where a researcher wishes to conduct a content analysis on specific YouTube videos for academic research. Does the researcher need to obtain permission from YouTube or the content creators to use these videos?

As per YouTube’s guidelines, researchers do not require explicit copyright permission if they are using the content for “commentary, criticism, research, teaching, or news reporting,”as these activities fall under the umbrella of fair use (Fair Use on YouTube – YouTube Help, 2023).

What about this scenario? A researcher wants to compare the types of questions posed by investors on the reality television series, Shark Tank, with questions generated by ChatGPT as it roleplays an angel investor. The researcher plans to prompt ChatGPT with a summary of each Shark Tank pitch and ask ChatGPT to roleplay as an angel investor and ask questions. In this case, would the researcher need to obtain permission from Shark Tank or its production company, Sony Pictures Television?

In my exploration, I discovered that it is indeed crucial to obtain permission from Sony Pictures Television. ChatGPT’s terms of service emphasise that users should “refrain from using the service in a manner that infringes upon third-party rights. This explicitly means the input should be devoid of copyrighted content unless sanctioned by the respective author or rights holder” (Fiten & Jacobs, 2023).

I therefore initiated communication with Sony Pictures Television, seeking approval to incorporate Shark Tank videos in my research. However, my request was declined by Sony Pictures Television in California, citing “business and legal reasons”. Undeterred, I approached Sony Pictures Singapore, only to receive a reaffirmation that Sony cannot endorse my proposed use of their copyrighted content “at the present moment”. They emphasised that any use of their copyrighted content must strictly align with the Fair Use doctrine.

This evokes the question: Why doesn’t the proposed research align with fair use? My initial understanding is that the fair use doctrine allows re-users to use copyrighted material without permission from the right holders for news reporting, criticism, review, educational and research purposes (Copyright Act 2021 Factsheet, 2022).

In the absence of further responses from Sony Pictures Television, I searched the web for answers.

Two findings emerged which could shed light on Sony’s reservations:

  • ChatGPT’s terms highlight that “user inputs, besides generating corresponding outputs, also serve to augment the service by refining the AI model” (Fiten & Jacobs, 2023; OpenAI Terms of Use, 2023).
  • OpenAI is currently facing legal action from various authors and artists alleging copyright infringement (Milmo, 2023). They contend that OpenAI had utilized their copyrighted content to train ChatGPT without their consent. Adding to this, the New York Times is also contemplating legal action against OpenAI for the same reason (Allyn, 2023).

These revelations point to a potential rationale behind Sony Pictures Television’s reluctance: while use of their copyrighted content for academic research might be considered fair use, introducing this content into ChatGPT could infringe upon the non-commercial stipulations (What Is Fair Use?, 2016) inherent in the fair use doctrine.

In conclusion, the landscape of copyright laws and fair use in relation to generative AI tools is still evolving. While previously researchers could rely on the fair use doctrine for the use of copyrighted material in their research work, the availability of generative AI tools now introduces an additional layer of complexity. This is particularly pertinent when the AI itself might store or use data to refine its own algorithms, which could potentially be considered a violation of the non-commercial use clause in the fair use doctrine. Sony Pictures Television’s reluctance to grant permission for the use of their copyrighted content in association with ChatGPT reflects the caution that content creators and rights holders are exercising in this new frontier. For researchers, this highlights the importance of understanding the terms of use of both the AI tool and the copyrighted material prior to beginning a research project.

Anita Toh is a lecturer at the Centre for English Language Communication (CELC) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She teaches academic and professional communication skills to undergraduate computing and engineering students.


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Writing a Book Proposal

by Rachel Brooks and Sarah O’Shea

Professor Rachel Brooks and Professor Sarah O’Shea (editors of the SRHE/Routledge Book series) recently ran a Professional Development Programme event on ‘Writing a Book Proposal’. Sarah and Rachel offered their insights as authors and editors, discussing some questions frequently asked by those thinking of putting a book proposal together; they also include some advice from a publisher’s perspective offered by our colleagues at Routledge. This summary has been compiled and edited by Sinead Murphy, SRHE Manager, Conferences and Events.

Publishing a book is a significant undertaking – so why do it? Writing a book is a means for researchers to provide an in-depth and coherent account of their work, that often isn’t possible in shorter articles or other formats. Books are accepted in social sciences (including higher education research) as appropriate outputs, and provide opportunities to reach a larger, sometimes international, audience for your work.

Before embarking on such a project, it is important to consider the different options available for disseminating your research, and the advantages and limitations of each. Firstly, you may wish to weigh up the distinctions between edited books and monographs:

  • The labour of producing a co-edited book is distributed across a group authors and editors, and the format can facilitate a greater range and diversity of perspectives around a single topic or theme. At the same time, co-edited volumes demand a lot of time and project management from the editor(s), who must also ensure the overall quality of the finished product.
  • Monographs, on the other hand, are generally sole-authored or sometimes involve a small author team, such that the writing can be well-integrated, with ideas and arguments explored in significant depth. A sole-authored book involves a great deal of time, energy, and labour, but is an excellent addition to your CV.

Some of the most innovative books in the field of higher education research are based on doctoral research. However, turning your PhD thesis into a book often requires a substantial amount of work, and there are some specific considerations worth bearing in mind during this process:

  • Thesis chapters do not automatically translate to book chapters – restructuring, rewriting, revision, and addition is often required. Books typically do not, for example, tend to feature the same level of detail around methodological decisions and process as is found in a doctoral thesis. You may also need to ‘slice’ your thesis and explore a specific area or theme more deeply.
  • Consider any overlaps with previously published journal articles. Some publishers may be concerned about what will be novel or original about your book if you have already published extensively from your PhD research, while for others this may not be a significant issue. It’s therefore worth discussing this topic with your target publisher at an early stage, to establish what kind of changes or developments may be expected for a book proposal to be successful.
  • Discuss your publication plans (and/or draft proposal) with your current or former supervisor, or other experienced academics in your department or field. The transition from publishing works in progress and journal articles to publishing books can seem like a big leap, but supervisors – who know your work very well – are generally happy to discuss and advise on this process.

With your initial preparation complete, you may feel ready to approach a publisher. What are the next logical steps?

  • Research your publishing options, and consider not only what would best suit your field and specific topic, but also your motivation for writing the book. Are you, for instance, trying to apply for a job or promotion? If so, which publisher is highly regarded in your field?
  • Once you have decided on your publisher of choice, consider sending an informal e-mail to the editor(s). Your e-mail should provide a brief overview of your idea or focus and seek to gauge some feedback on whether this would appeal to the series – the response you receive can help you to quickly establish whether a publisher is the right fit for your work.
  • Check the different publication options offered – is a paperback option available? Hard copies can be prohibitive in terms of cost to the prospective reader, and so a paperback option could be a key selling point down the track. Are there options for open access – and if so, what are the fees and charges? Some contracts or research projects include funding for these costs.

Once you have conducted this initial research, a publisher may invite you to write a proposal – this is a formal expression of what you hope your book will contain, which provides the basis for the publisher (and others) to make a final decision regarding a potential book contract.

Usually there is a form or template available on the publisher’s website or which they can send you, which must be carefully followed. These forms vary across publisher, so it is important to access this early in your process to tailor your proposal to what the publisher is asking for. While completing this form:

  • Consult examples of successful proposals – colleagues in your department or wider network will often be happy to share.
  • Provide details of your writing or editing experience – this is an opportunity to outline what you have already published from your PhD.
  • The proposed timeline for someone drawing on their finished thesis will be much shorter than that of someone starting from scratch with a new research project. It is important to be realistic about how much writing you have done already, and your existing commitments. A typical timeline may be around one year from the date on which the book contract is signed, but this varies greatly depending on individual circumstances.
  • Many publishers prescribe a minimum and maximum length for the finished book (normally around 80,000 words) but this varies between publishers, and there is increasing variety in length.
  • A book proposal should also include a concise overview expressing the unique selling point of your book, a chapter-by-chapter summary, a list of competing titles in the same area as your proposed book (and what makes your book distinct from these) and the potential market for your book (academics, students, researchers, others?). Some of this can be more challenging with edited collections if you are planning a call for proposals, but both publishers and peer reviewers need to see what you are planning to include to assess the proposal fully.

Some further writing advice from a publisher’s perspective offered by Routledge, but widely applicable across many academic publishers, is:

  • Take your time writing

It is obvious to those assessing a proposal if it has been rushed. Use the proposal as an opportunity to best advertise yourself, your author voice, and your ideas. Ensure you answer all questions on the template provided by the publisher or series editor fully – missing out on questions can imply to the publisher that your idea is not fully developed.

  • Be clear and accessible in your language

While the editor you submit your proposal to at the publisher will work within your subject area, eg education, they are unlikely to be an expert in your specific topic. Make sure you spell out acronyms or technical terms the first time you use them and reference the work you are building upon.

  • Think about the market/intended audience for the book

Publishers need to know that there is a clear route to market for your book, in addition to its academic merit. Make sure you express who you think your reader will be and how they are going to use your book. What are the key objectives of your book, and why is it needed? Making this clear in your proposal shows that you are serious about writing a book and that you have a good awareness of your key market and what else has published in the area.

  • Recommend potential reviewers

The publisher may ask you to recommend peer reviewers as part of the proposal stage, generally requesting that they are at a different institution to you and spanning a range of locations if you are aiming at an international audience. Routledge does not guarantee to contact all of these people – and their peer review process is anonymised so you won’t know this for definite – but they provide another indication of who you are writing for. This can help the publisher search for other potential reviewers and ensure your book is correctly positioned within their publishing programme.

  • Supply abstracts, table of contents, and a description of the book wherever possible

At the formal proposal stage, you should have a good idea of what the book will be about. Supplying this material can be more difficult when it comes to edited collections particularly if you are planning a call for proposals, but the publisher needs to see what you intend to include to assess the proposal fully – as do peer reviewers.

If you are considering proposing a book for inclusion in the SRHE/Routledge Book Series Research in Higher Education, please contact Rachel Brooks (r.brooks@surrey.ac.uk), Sarah O’Shea (sarah.oshea@curtin.edu.au) or Clare Loughlin-Chow (SRHE Director, clare.loughlin-chow@srhe.ac.uk).

Professor Rachel Brooks is Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at the University of Surrey, UK. As well as being co-editor of the Routledge/SRHE book series, she is editor-in-chief of Sociology and an executive editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education. She has published widely in the sociology of higher education. Recent books include Student Migrants and Contemporary Educational Mobilities (with Johanna Waters); Reimagining the Higher Education Student (with Sarah O’Shea) and Sharing Care (with Paul Hodkinson).

Professor Sarah O’ Shea is a national and international recognised educator and researcher, who applies sociological perspectives to the study of higher education equity. Sarah has also held numerous university leadership positions, which have directly informed changes across the Australian higher education sector, particularly in the field of educational equity. She is a prolific writer, with over 80 publications including books, book chapters, scholarly journal articles, media articles and commissioned reports produced in the last decade.


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The health of higher education studies – cause for optimism?

By Rachel Brooks

How healthy is the area of higher education studies? When we look at the extant literature, there seems to be cause for concern. Scholars have noted: the frequent absence of theory and short-term focus of such research; the proximity of researchers to policy-makers which, it is argued, can make critical distance hard to achieve; and the fragmentation of the field. Higher education research has also been critiqued for occupying a relatively marginal place within the wider discipline of educational research. Nevertheless, I suggest that an analysis of recent data paints a rather different, and more optimistic, picture.

Indeed, there is mounting evidence that higher education research is an increasingly vibrant area of enquiry. In relation to research funding, for example, data from the UKRI’s Gateway to Research on the number of grants awarded from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (Figure 1) indicate that, since the turn of the century, higher education-focussed projects have regularly been funded, albeit still not to the same extent as those that are schools-orientated. The grants from these bodies are relatively large (for the arts, humanities and social sciences), and are typically expected to make a theoretical, not only empirical, contribution.

Figure 1. Number of ESRC and AHRC grants awarded by ESRC and AHRC, with higher education or school in title, 2006-2022, by date of award*

Source: UKRI Gateway to Research database

*The data show only the date of the award, not the years over which the award was spent.

NB Data are available from 2004, but no education grants are recorded for either 2004 or 2005.

Vibrancy within the field of educational studies is also evidenced in data from the most recent national research assessment exercise in the UK (REF2021). As the exercise allowed researchers to be much more selective about the work they submitted for assessment than in previous exercises (ie they were required to submit a minimum of one research output and, across submissions as a whole, an average of 2.5 such outputs per full-time member of staff, compared with a minimum of four submissions per staff member in REF2014), the work submitted is clearly only a relatively small proportion of the overall research conducted within the area. Nevertheless, the data do facilitate comparative judgements over time, as well as giving a good sense about what is considered, by both individuals and institutions, to be high quality work within education. As Table 1 shows, the percentage of outputs submitted to the Education unit of assessment for REF2021 that focussed on higher education, at 14 per cent, was markedly higher than the corresponding proportion in the previous exercise, at nine per cent. A similar increase was evident in relation to the impact case studies submitted for both exercises, with the number of higher education-focussed impact case studies increasing from 15 per cent of all those submitted to the Education unit of assessment in REF2014 to 21 per cent in REF2021 (see Table 2). The increased vibrancy of higher education scholarship was also noted within the final report for the Education unit of assessment, which explicitly remarked on the growth in this area since REF 2014.   

Table 1. Submission to REF2021 Education sub-panel: outputs

 Total number of outputsHE-focussed outputsPercentage
REF201455195029
REF2021527273014

Source: REF2021 database; REF2014 analysis from Cotton et al 2018

Table 2. Submission to REF2021 Education sub-panel: impact case studies (ICS)

 Total number of ICSHE-focussed ICSPercentage
REF20142143215
REF20212264721

Source: REF2021 database; REF2014 analysis from Cotton et al 2018

The third source of evidence for the vibrancy of higher education within educational research is individual journals. The British Journal of Sociology of Education is a well-established international journal, based in the UK, which publishes work across many areas of education from pre-school to adult education and workplace learning. A comparison of the content of articles published in this journal since the turn of the century indicates that the proportion of work focussed on higher education has seen a steady growth, with a particularly large number of articles published over the most recent period (see Figure 2). Alongside this, new higher education journals have emerged over recent years. Policy Reviews in Higher Education, for example, was launched in 2017, with the remit of publishing articles that engage explicitly with topical policy questions and significant areas of higher education policy development.

Figure 2. Percentage of articles focussing on higher education published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, by issue number: 20 (1999) to 43 (2023)

Source: British Journal of Sociology of Education website

Evidence from these three sources – research funding bodies, the UK’s national research assessment exercise, and education journals – indicates that higher education research now occupies an important place within the wider educational research landscape, and has grown in vibrancy over the past ten to twenty years. Moreover, it appears to have successfully addressed some of the weaknesses identified by scholars a decade or so ago, which were outlined above. The success of higher education researchers in securing grants from prestigious funding bodies suggests that they are no longer dependent on the short-term grants from policy organisations, enabling the exploration of issues in more depth across longer timescales. All three sources of evidence discussed above also indicate that the ‘absence of theory’ is no longer an accurate characterisation of the field. As noted above, UKRI grants typically require grant-holders to make a theoretical contribution, as well as an empirical one, through their work, while a robust conceptual framework is obviously important to work published in high status journals (such as the British Journal of Sociology of Education) and likely to be a consideration for work selected for submission to REF2021, given the relatively low number of submissions required per individual.

The vibrancy of higher education research can be explained by factors at a variety of levels. First, despite the points above about the ‘critical distance’ between researchers and policymakers, it seems very likely that much higher education research is related to the wider national policy context in the UK (and other parts of the world), in which politicians and policymakers have shown a high level of interest in the higher education sector, and taken up an increasingly interventionalist stance. Researchers are likely to be, in part, responding to this political prioritisation. The ongoing massification of higher education in the UK, with around 50 per cent of each cohort going on to degree-level study, may also have driven research activity in this area – with researchers cognisant of the importance of the sector to many people’s lives. As scholars have noted previously, higher education research is also encouraged at the institutional level – not only through the work of academic development units (or similar) – but also through the funding made available by universities to their academic staff to better understand their student populations and/or to pursue pedagogical research, with the aim of improving processes of teaching and learning. Often these are bound up quite closely with the wider policy environment: a desire to use research to improve ‘the student experience’ may be underpinned by market imperatives – for example, to improve an institution’s performance in the National Student Survey. Increased support from professional organisations (such as the SRHE and the network of Early Career Higher Education Researchers) is likely to have also played a role in the stimulation of higher education research. Finally, the ease and low cost of access to research participants (ie students and higher education staff) may also have driven enquiry in this area, in a context where research funding has become extremely competitive. While there are many reasons to be concerned about the focus of researchers’ gaze (ie the state of UK higher education itself), the current vibrancy of higher education studies is, in many ways, to be celebrated.

This blogpost is based on an article that has recently been published in the British Journal of Educational Studies.

Professor Rachel Brooks is Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at the University of Surrey, UK. As well as being co-editor of the Routledge/SRHE book series, she is editor-in-chief of Sociology and an executive editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education. She has published widely in the sociology of higher education. Recent books include Student Migrants and Contemporary Educational Mobilities (with Johanna Waters); Reimagining the Higher Education Student (with Sarah O’Shea) and Sharing Care (with Paul Hodkinson).


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Reflecting on a second virtual conference…and looking ahead

by Camille Kandiko Howson

I had the honour of being asked to give some closing remarks at the Society for Research into Higher Education’s Annual Conference this year, alongside Prof Chris Millward and the SRHE team. ‘Mobilities in Higher Education’ was the theme of the Society’s second virtual conference. First some reflections.

Mobilities in higher education refer to the movement of students, faculty, and staff within and across national borders for the purpose of pursuing education and research opportunities. This phenomenon has increased significantly in recent years, driven by factors such as globalization, advances in technology, and the growing demand for a highly skilled workforce.

The impact of mobilities on higher education institutions (HEIs) is complex and multifaceted. On the one hand, mobilities can bring benefits such as diversity and internationalization, enhanced research and teaching capabilities, and increased funding and partnerships. On the other hand, mobilities can also pose challenges such as language and cultural barriers, issues with accreditation and recognition of qualifications, and unequal access and participation.

To address these challenges and maximize the benefits of mobilities, HEIs need to develop strategies and policies that support the mobility of students, faculty, and staff. This includes providing adequate support services, facilitating credit transfer and recognition of qualifications, and promoting intercultural competence and global citizenship.

In conclusion, mobilities in higher education are a crucial aspect of the contemporary global education landscape. HEIs need to carefully consider the opportunities and challenges posed by mobilities and develop strategies to support and enhance this phenomenon.

I’ll pause here, because I did not write the previous four paragraphs. I put the title into the ChatGPT open AI chatbot and it spit out the abstract above instantly. This tool launched during the conference week, exciting many delegates and kicking off worries about the future of assessment and feedback in higher education. The possibilities also reminded me why we like to meet up as a community -virtually and physically – to share what is happening and how we can actively shape the future. The conference theme was widely adopted across presentations, showing our desire to come together to learn, teach and research higher education. Now on to my (human) thoughts.

Last year in summarising the conference I highlighted the following:

  • the focus on belonging
  • the increased internationalisation of the programme
  • lack of research on policy in HE in England

The second and third of these themes seemed strong again, and in addition I would note the dominance of the conference theme of ‘Mobilities’ (irony not lost for an on-line conference!). The pandemic has not stopped academics collaborating across institutions. I also noticed powerful research and focus on researchers in conflict-afflicted regions. There was also increased interest in international students – across UG, PGT and PRG levels. Topics included notions of quality and murmurings of geopolitical influences for international students.

Some other themes of note were researchers drawing on contemporary theories (eg the ‘Ideal Student’ research by Billy Wong and Tiffany Chui), moving beyond a Bordieusian dominance. In this vein, I was pleased to see the strength of research involving liaising with target student groups, as partners, in steering groups and in evaluating research.

In credit to the SRHE team, there were great links between papers in sessions, with many feeling more like symposia than separate research papers. It was also amazing to see so many outputs from SRHE-funded research projects being presented.

Reflecting on some of the specific sessions I was able to attend, in Session 2d I was intrigued by the term ‘studiability’: the ability to complete courses on time and with appropriate workload. This is not addressed much in the UK and it would be interesting to see more on this. Another paper explored the recursive relationship between public policy degrees and the jobs graduates go on to do. There were different histories and trajectories across countries – always fascinating insights from comparative research.

A theme across a number of sessions came out in 3b exploring racialised impostor phenomenon, and the importance of role models for students. Similarly, in 11f the impostor phenomenon and explorations of race and gender arose, alongside the importance of students (and others) in self-identifying themselves versus being categorised in identity research. Session 12a had a focus on care leavers, care experienced students and those with caring responsibilities and the challenges working across institutions and social services. This topic was explored in a number of sessions – which is really important in an under-researched area.

These sessions really highlighted the passion researchers have and the change people want to see from their research. And to mention what I did not see much of, there was a lack of research on climate change and cost of living – maybe these current issues have not caught up with the pace of research, or maybe they do not fit well with current research paradigms.

I also did a word cloud analysis of the programme. Interestingly, ‘Students’ trumps ‘Research’ but ‘Academics’ beat ‘Learning’. Make of that what you will. Closing on the theme of mobilities, the top three cities listed in the programme were London, Manchester and Birmingham, and the second most common country in the programme was Australia.

As was mentioned throughout the conference, many of us missed getting together in person. We hope to manage that in some form next year, continuing to build our connections (physical and virtual). And to finish, I asked the ChatGPT bot for the theme for next conference and it suggested: “Innovation, equity and the future of higher education.” Another one to go in the mix, and further (human) ideas welcome.

SRHE member Dr Camille Kandiko Howson is Associate Professor of Education in the Centre for Higher Education Research and Scholarship at Imperial College London. Follow Camille on Twitter @cbkandiko


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Research co-creation may be the key to impact

by Finley Lawson

I have been using a design-based implementation approach to co-creating educational research since 2019 at Canterbury Christ Church University, where a cross-institutional team of teachers, researchers, and school senior leaders grapples with where and how to provide opportunities for students to become ‘epistemically insightful’ (equipped with an understanding of the nature of knowledge within disciplines and across disciplinary boundaries). Previous research by the Centre discovered that pressures within schools dampen students’ expressed curiosity in questions about the nature of reality and human personhood and limit the development of their epistemic insight into how science, religion and the wider humanities relate. We developed the Epistemic Insight Initiative to understand the kinds of interventions, tools, and pedagogies that would address the current challenges posed by a compartmentalised curriculum. The challenge we faced was how we could transform whole-school curriculum practice without removing teacher agency. We wanted to ensure that the intervention(s) met the needs and experiences of each school community, without becoming so contextualised that that the findings and approaches couldn’t be generalised to have wider applicability (and ultimately impact).

Part of our role as universities is to produce (and facilitate the production of) knowledge. As the REF puts it we should be “illustrating the benefits research delivers beyond academia, including how it brings tangible changes to aspects of society and life, and the public value it delivers”. Yet within educational research there is a perceived disjunct between the research undertaken by universities (or professional research organisations) and the research used and undertaken by teachers and practitioners in schools and other educational settings. This is highlighted in practitioner-focused literature where evidence-informed practice is often divided between desk based ‘research’ by teachers as separate from ‘academic research’ conducted by universities or research organisations – a model which emphasises the teachers’ role as a consumer rather than creator of research (Nelson and Sharples, 2017). This divide can also border on a dismissal of teachers’ ability to engage with academic research, by insisting for example that we shouldn’t “expect teachers to learn to read research” and our role as researchers should be to create “teacher-friendly research”, with the implication that this is somehow ‘less than’ academic research (Miller et al, 2010). Why is this divide important for SRHE? We are after all focused on higher education so, apart from a call to consider broader dissemination avenues for our research, why does it matter?

My answer is impact. Not solely, or even primarily, in terms of a ‘REF-able’ impact, but because we know that education research has the power to transform students’ experiences of learning and thus broaden their aspirations for higher education. Whilst there is a wealth of literature on the importance of research engagement within initial teacher education and professional development (for example see Hine, 2013; Hagger and Mcintyre, 2000; Murray et al, 2009), the question of how to ensure that the research ecosystem is reciprocal (i.e. that teachers/practitioners are viewed as knowledge producers not just consumers) is still relatively under discussed. A research ecosystem can be seen as analogous to a natural ecosystem where knowledge is transferred between stakeholders in a process that leads to the emergence of systemic change. The current challenge is to ensure that knowledge flows from teachers/practitioners into the system; Pandey and Pattnaik (2015) discuss this within a university and Godfrey and Brown (2019) within a school but there is less research on bringing these “micro-systems” together into a mutually enriching “macro-system” (although research by Connelly et al (2021) in the Irish context is promising). Educational research is about improving the opportunities and outcomes for those in education. For this to happen the change/intervention must continue to be implemented beyond an individual project, and often within the constraints of existing curricula and assessment frameworks. This means that teachers and educators need to be seen not as a resource for ‘local expertise’ but as a crucial part of the research ecosystem.

The establishment and development of a co-creation relationship across a diverse group of primary and secondary schools has taken about three years and has been led by both teachers and school senior leaders. The linchpin for these relationships has been a shared recognition of the challenges identified within the previous research, and an interest in examining how school students can be better equipped to navigate disciplinary and curricula boundaries. This shared goal means that the school and research centre aims are aligned and therefore the core data collected can be standardised across the schools, but with the addition of contextualised questions that address the specific questions of each school. These local questions alongside school-level data for the core questions are shared with the school to support their practice and development plans. As a research centre we analyse data from across the partner schools, with the advantage that, as the research addresses shared concerns, teacher engagement with the research is high. This ensures a 95% plus response rate across multiple data collection points for each cohort. Teachers and school leaders receive training on the philosophical framework underpinning the research and the learning tools but work in collaboration with the centre to develop lessons and curricula that meet the aims of the research. As researchers we act in a quality assurance role during the intervention development, which means that the teachers are at the forefront of shaping the intervention for their students and within their institutional constraints. This close collaboration means that we address two of the key features required in building research in schools (a) “a willingness to embed the research activity into existing school systems” and (b) “access to sources of expertise and advice” (Sanders et al, 2009). In one school this saw a movement from 10 teachers being involved in the initial curriculum design (plus delivery by 7 members of the senior team) to, in the second year, the entire professional development programme being restructured around research-engaged Professional Learning Communities, where staff undertook their own action-research projects.  Now, in the third year, all staff including support staff are in mixed research teams as part of their professional development.

Sharp et al identify a range of benefits to schools in being research engaged, including teacher retention, raised standards and school development. The biggest impact we have noticed, shared by our partner schools, has been the combined impacts on teacher development/practice and their epistemic agency to investigate the educational questions that matter to them, empowered by an ethos that acknowledges that not every intervention will succeed. 80% of participating teachers in one school agreed that it has improved their understanding of disciplinary methods of their own discipline in relation to one they don’t teach. Across the schools, teachers have changed practice within their teaching and have been empowered to signpost students better to links with other subjects. As researchers, we have seen our work embedded in ways and places that we could not have envisioned and seen a genuine interest from schools to engage in research that required the time and expertise of sometimes the whole staff body (particularly in primary schools). This kind of impact with whole year groups, even whole schools, taking part in research-engaged curriculum interventions and redevelopment would not be possible were we using a ‘traditional’ research model that excluded co-creation. The power of co-creation is that these ‘interventions’, if they can still be called that, will continue far beyond the directly funded projects that started them, because those involved have ownership of what is taking place.

Our role now, outside the continued partnership, is to understand how we, in HE, can use our position to amplify practitioner voices, to share this practitioner research widely within the research landscape. We are still looking for the best way to support those teachers to share their research-engaged practice into teacher education directly (through knowledge exchange opportunities with students on QTS programmes) and with educational researchers. In placing practitioner research within the research landscape, we truly recognise its value within the research ecosystem and can share how generalised interventions/findings can be implemented in practice, in schools or other settings every day. We must ensure that our HE practice includes acting as a knowledge broker, supporting, and enabling the production of knowledge by the communities which HE serves and feeding that back into the wider research environment.

Finley Lawson is the Lead Research Fellow for Outreach and Schools’ Partnership, at the LASAR (Learning about Science and Religion) Research Centre at Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent. His recently-submitted PhD examines the implication of scientific metaphysics for incarnational theology (Christ, Creation, and The World of Science: Beyond Paradox). He is interested in the dialogue between STEM, Religion, and the wider humanities, and how this can be fostered in school curricula. Finley is the Lead Researcher on the OfS-funded Inspiring Minds Project. The co-created research with schools discussed here has been funded by the Templeton World Charitable Foundation and forms part of the wider Epistemic Insight Initiative. As a centre we would like to thank all the schools who have been actively involved in our research but in particular the staff and students at Astor School, Bromstone Primary School, and Wilmington Grammar School for Girls, who have been case study schools during the project and have been involved in publicly sharing their work and experiences.

Email: finley.lawson@canterbury.ac.uk; Twitter: @FinnatCCCU


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Research with international students: reflecting on an SRHE 2022 symposium

by Jenna Mittelmeier, Sylvie Lomer, and Kalyani Unkule

We were pleased to lead a symposium of international authors at the 2022 SRHE conference, focusing on Research with International Students: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations. This was an early session linked for our upcoming open access book of the same name, which we aim to publish in late 2023. This book, as well as our research resource website which led to it, focuses on developing critical considerations for researchers who focus their work on international students and their experiences in higher education.

Research with international students is a significant and growing area of research about higher education. This coincides with and derives from the exponential growth in international student numbers worldwide, making more visible an interest in their lived academic and social experiences. This is also an area that continues to attract newer researchers, particularly doctoral and student researchers who may have a vested interest in this topic as current or former international students themselves, and practitioner researchers who teach and support international students in their professional roles. Research on this topic is interdisciplinary (as with most other higher education research topics), attracting researchers from disciplines including education, sociology, psychology, human geography, business, and beyond.

Despite this growing interest, we note that there have been limited conversations about developing research with international students as a distinct interdisciplinary subfield. Similarly, there have been limited methodological guidance and considerations for how research might critically approach the wide-ranging topics that are being researched in this area. We have written previously about how these omissions perpetuate problems for this subfield and, ultimately, diminish the potential impact of research.

The most significant problem with research in this area is that it tends to frame international students through a deficit lens, depicting them as lower quality students who ‘lack’ skills necessary for success. This is seen through the large numbers of studies which attempt to ‘fix’ or ‘integrate’ international students into expected norms of study in their host institutions, making assumptions about their perceived lack of skills in areas such as critical thinking, language, or writing. International students are also often depicted through research as only experiencing challenges or problems, frequently described as vulnerable rather than capable, managing, or coping. At the same time, research tends to homogenise international students as a collective group or deduce their diversity only to nationality and macro-level cultures. These are among other conceptual concerns we have previously highlighted, which are rooted in limited criticality and nuance through research.

With these issues in mind, our aim in the symposium, as well as through our website and book, was to start a conversation about how research with international students might be designed better, more critically, and more ethically. In particular, we considered the nexus between conceptual criticality and practical methodological designs which can reposition and encourage new discourses about international students. Each of the four presentations highlighted how, within the book, we encourage researchers to develop stronger research designs in the future.

The first paper in the symposium was by Kalyani Unkule, whose presentation represented chapters in our upcoming book where authors re-conceptualise an idea or term that is often taken for granted in research with international students. Here, we argue for the ways that certain ideas within this research topic are often assumed to have a shared, collective meaning, which actually might be more nuanced or complex. Kalyani reflected on the meaning of the word ‘global’ and the tendency for binaries of local and global to limit our thinking in research and practice about international higher education. This is an important critique about the ways that ‘home’ and ‘international’ are seen as opposing binaries in research with international students, ultimately limiting the conceptual nuance of where students’ experiences and histories might intersect these two areas and be more ‘glocal’ in nature.

The second paper was by Tang Heng, whose presentation represented chapters which highlight problematic discourses that shape and frame research with international students. Her chapter focuses on stereotyping and how stereotypes about international students, often through methodological nationalism, are endemic in the ways that research is developed and designed. Tang focused particularly on how theoretical frameworks can perpetuate or relate to stereotyping, but in the book we also focus on other problematic threads through research on this topic: othering, dehumanisation, coloniality, and deficit narratives, among others. This highlights the issues that hold the research subfield back and represent areas for more critical development and reflection in future research.

This was followed by a paper from Vijay Ramjattan, whose presentation represented chapters in the book which show how common stereotypes and discourses about international students might be shifted away from individual deficiencies towards recognition of structural inequalities. Vijay’s presentation focused on deficit framings of language, where international students are often positioned as ‘lacking’ linguistic skills. However, this might be shifted instead to focus on structural oppression of multilingualism and multiple Englishes within institutions. This gives us one example of how researchers can conceptually move away from issues like biases, stereotyping, and deficit narratives by centring the structural roots that cause them.

Finally, the presentation by Samridhi Gupta and Thuy-Anh Nguyen shifted the focus towards practical research designs, demonstrating the section in our book which focuses on how research design choices can purposefully resist existing problems in knowledge creation with (rather than on or about) international students. Their presentation focused on co-designing research with international students, giving practical examples of two research methods which can be designed with students as partners. This demonstrates the ways that methodological choices are fundamentally intertwined with conceptual criticality, highlighting how the method we choose can resist and deconstruct the existing problems set out by previous presenters.

Together, our symposium aimed to open up new reflections and considerations for the historical trajectory of research with international students, considering new ways forward for the research subfield. Both the symposium and our upcoming book aims not to give answers for how to move that path forward, though, but rather to open up questions for individual researchers and the research community more broadly about where we might like to go from here. We ask, then: what should the epistemic space of research with international students look like?

More research resources on this topic can be found at https://researchintlstudents.com/. ‘Research with international students: Critical conceptual and methodological considerations’ will be published open access by Routledge, aiming for late 2023.

Jenna Mittelmeier is Senior Lecturer in International Education at the University of Manchester, in the Manchester Institute of Education (MIE). Her research expertise focuses on the experiences and treatment of international students within the broader internationalisation of higher education.

Sylvie Lomer is Senior Lecturer in Policy and Practice at the University of Manchester, in the Manchester Institute of Education (MIE). Her previous research focused on policies on international students in the UK, and now focuses more broadly on internationalisation in policy and practice in higher education, with a critical approach to pedagogy and policy enactment. 

Kalyani Unkule is Associate Professor at OP Jindal Global University in India. Her research complements her practice in intercultural dialogue and impact-driven projects in higher education internationalisation and spiritual learning.