Teachers Doing Research with Their Own Students: A Blessing or a Curse?

Abstract

For teachers who conduct research with their own students in the Omani tertiary education context, having a dual role as both researcher and teacher may create power imbalances that could affect students’ decisions about research participation. Although such an asymmetric power relation raises several significant ethical questions, this issue has received little attention in Oman in the past two decades. This paper critically discusses how some ethical principles (e.g., potential benefit to research participants, informed consent, and confidentiality) are undermined by such discrepancies in teacher-student power relations. It then offers recommendations for future practices addressed to teacher-researchers and to the organizations where these people conduct their work. These recommendations are offered as guidelines for instructors who conduct research with their own students and also seek to encourage researchers to explicitly acknowledge some of the issues associated with asymmetrical power relationships in the classroom.