Identifying Ethical Issues in Self-Study Proposals

Abstract

The origins of this chapter lie in persistent reports of difficulties that proposals for practitioner research in education encounter with institutional review boards (IRB) and the frustration of teacher researchers at the inappropriateness of the ethical protocols for their genre of research. The discussion is restricted to what is defined as insider research and to the ethical issues associated with IRB processes. The chapter analyses the ethical issues in different forms of practitioner research in education and contrasts these with those that are important in the bio-medical domain in which many standard protocols originate. The starting point for this analysis is the ethical parameters that already exist in the workplace of teachers and teacher educators. These provide a basis for a discussion of consent issues that facilitates decisions about what should and should not be part of the consent process. The discussion considers separately the ethics associated with the intervention, data collection and data reporting phases of practitioner research. In most cases, the ethical problems and dilemmas are associated with the last of these. The chapter concludes with a set of questions designed to provide a framework for decision-making in this area. This handbook is a result of increasing interest in and recognition of the importance of the kinds of wisdom that can come from self-studies by teachers and teacher educators. These sorts of studies have had to battle for their place in the sunny fields of legitimised research. Debate continues as to whether or not they should and could be regarded as belonging to one or more separate and distinctive genres of research and, if so, what cannons would be used to