Educational Research

The paper is the story of building a design research group from scratch. As there has been some recent interest in design research as a team based activity, this article illustrates how we built the Imagination research team and how it continues to develop. This article gives us the chance to reflect on how far we have come in the last decade. Once we were a few dedicated members of staff wanting to bring design research to a small university in the north of the UK. Now we are one of the leading centers of excellence worldwide for design research. This article uses case studies from research projects and Ph.D. research to demonstrate Imagination's research philosophy-open-ended and anti-disciplinary. We celebrate the plurality of ways design research is carried out. The article highlights how we use design research to address global challenges, and how these have also shaped our teaching and further research. We end by considering the value of design research and how we, as a team, can take Imagination forward into the next decade.

This paper explores the roots and presents some forms of phenomenology starting with the origin of Husserl’s phenomenology and his notion of going back to things as they are in order to seek their essences. The paper then looks at the different perspectives, starting with the empirical phenomenology: its disciplinary linkage to psychology, its focus on the phenomenon itself, and the analysis of the structural in order to discern how structures speak. Existential phenomenology, on the other hand, sees human experiences of the world as being worth studying, where we are not only epistemological spectators in the world but are also ontologically embedded in it. Finally, Hermeneutic phenomenology acknowledges that humans have prejudices and their preconceptions from their experiences are nearly impossible to ignore. Understanding is achieved through dialogue. The hermeneutic circle refers to the interplays between our self-understanding and our understanding of the world, and entails an existential task with which each of us is confronted. The paper then focuses on the authors’ experiences during our PhD research. The paper highlights some differences in research approaches, aligned to different subtle perspectives, which offers the researcher flexibility. The aim for this paper has been to engage the networked learning community in discussing the suitability of choosing phenomenology as a research methodology. A snapshot in the exploration of the researchers decisions to use phenomenology for Technology Enhanced/Networked Learning research is presented and their reflections on their progress to discern the differences between the choices we made in developing our respective research designs. Some of the reasons behind our decisions, with the purpose of entering into dialogue with the Technology Enhanced/Networked Learning community, are presented.

This paper explores the roots and presents some forms of phenomenology starting with the origin of Husserl's phenomenology and his notion of going back to things as they are in order to seek their essences. The paper then looks at the different perspectives, ...

Online learning using communities of practice as a model for learning is fast becoming a new landscape for educational institutions. In constructing online communities of practice (CoP), the most obvious approach has been for academics to set up the CoP on a university system integrated with a formal teaching programme, located in the same place. We take the view that Place is a social construct, derived from the people that contribute to it and imbue it with meaning. Our position is that the places in which formal and informal learning occur need to be distinct and should have different feelings of ownership, governance, purpose and meaning. Providing for informal learning experiences in a place clearly owned and managed in an academic presence is counter-productive to learning that is intended to be owned by practitioners and located in their work space. We suggest that educators do not belong in communities of practice, do not belong in informal learning communities and that form...

In this paper an investigation of the outcomes of a Peer Support scheme for the students who are supported is reported. It was found that attendance at peer learning was positively and significantly correlated to academic performance. This relationship was found even when prior levels of academic performance were controlled for. However, it was also found that students who attended peer learning adopted statistically significant less meaning orientated approaches to studying over the course of the academic year. It is argued that this is an indication that the quality of the learning of these students fell.

This paper examines Oxford University students’ conceptions of the role of the tutorial in their learning. An analysis of interviews with 28 students constituted four qualitatively different conceptions of the ‘Oxford Tutorial’. These ranged from the tutorial involving the tutor explaining to the student what the student did not know, to the tutorial involving the tutor and the student in exchanging different points of view and both coming to a new understanding of the topic under discussion. These different conceptions also appeared to be related to variations in students’ views of the role of the work done in preparation for the tutorial, their view of the student’s and tutor’s roles in the tutorial, and the conception of knowledge that students adopted in relation to the tutorial. The implications of this study are discussed in terms of the relations between students’ conceptions of tutorials and their anticipated learning outcomes and its implications for contexts outside of Oxford in terms of students’ conceptions of academic tasks.

This paper focuses on examining research into teaching, learning and assessment (TLA) in higher education in terms of structure and agency. It argues that although issues of structure and agency are seen as crucial in social theory, they are very little discussed in research into TLA in higher education and that a consideration of structure and agency raises some important questions about this research and the quality of the explanations that it generates. It is therefore time to reconsider this research from the standpoint of structure and agency so that more sophisticated approaches to researching, and generating explanations of, teaching, learning and assessment in higher education can be developed.

There is a growing literature that has examined academics" approaches to, and accounts of, teaching. One aspect that has not been examined is academics" perceptions of particular teaching methods. In this study, academics" accounts of tutorials at the University of Oxford were used as an "ideal type" in order to examine whether there is variation in the ways that academics experience a single teaching method. An analysis of interviews with 20 academics constituted four qualitatively different ways in which academics described the purpose of tutorials. This paper examines whether there appeared to be systematic subject-based differences in the ways academics" described tutorials, as well as examining relations between academics" accounts of tutorials and their approaches to teaching. In doing so, the study offers insight into the different ways in which academics account for a particular teaching and learning task, which has important implications for the approach that is taken to supporting university teaching more generally

Peer learning involves a new role for the students who facilitate the learning of other students. The role of the peer facilitator, which is focused on learning through supporting the learning of other students, would appear to be more social than the traditional role of learner, which is focused on self-learning. This research used repertory grids to investigate whether taking on the more social role of the peer facilitator was related to changes in what students perceived as important in teaching and in learning. Initially, all students saw constructs relating to expectations of the self as more important in learning than those relating to interaction with others. However, in a later repertory grid, the students who acted as peer facilitators saw interaction with others as a more important element of their learning. There was no comparable change in the perceptions of what was important in learning amongst students who were not involved in peer learning or in the perceptions of what was important in teaching amongst all students. These findings are explained with reference to recent developments in the student-learning literature. Their implications are explored both in terms of helping students to develop a greater understanding of their roles as learners and in offering an additional dimension with which to explore students' learning.

In this paper, we outline how the literature on phenomenography, specifically , and the literature that adopts a "critical approach", specifically , can be brought together to help us to understand the barriers that face students and teachers in engaging in learning and teaching in higher education. Our attempt is motivated by a wish to relate the different foci of each perspective. We argue that the phenomenographic literature has been successful in suggesting theoretically informed and research-based ways in which learning environments might be structured to improve the quality of students" learning. However, it is largely silent on the extent to which barriers to learning can be due to structural inequalities outside of the learning environment. More critical approaches foreground these structural inequalities but their suggestions for teaching and learning practices are often weak. In bringing these two perspectives together, we develop a model of academic engagement that takes into account both experiential and structural influences on the quality of teaching and learning in higher education.

Research into student learning in higher education has been criticised for focusing on 'disembodied learners' and failing to examine the impact that students' identities and previous educational experiences have on their experiences of higher education. In this paper, we report on an ESRC-funded project that seeks to examine the relations between students' backgrounds and experiences of higher education in four contrasting sociology departments in England. In particular, we focus on how we are using a combination of life grids and interviews to gain a sense of students' educational trajectories and the complex relations between these trajectories and different aspects of students' lives. We examine the issues related to this methodological approach and argue that it provides a potentially productive way of examining the relations between students' educational experiences and their wider lives.

In this paper we discuss a methodology that allows focused and theorised reflections upon how researchers' embodied biographies intertwine with those of research participants' and to shape research findings. In so doing we draw upon data from a three-year multi-method UK research council funded project designed to explore quality and inequality in undergraduate degrees in four different universities (the Economic and Social Research Council [Grant Number: RES-062-23-1438]). We, the researchers, made use of life-grid methodology to capture both 96 students' biographical narratives and our own. Then a process of critical reflection (Morley, 2008) focused on how our own biographical narratives influence our interpretations of the lives and educational experiences of students in our research. This process includes our embodied reactions to different institutional contexts and physical environments during the research. The methodology forces us to consider the embodied nature of our interpretive\analytical processes and the role of different forms of knowing (Liamputtong and Rumbold, 2008b) involved in our research.