Sense and Sensibility: Teaching Research Methodology to Special Educators Through Journaling
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The curriculum of special education at Masaryk University includes two courses in research methodology. The objective of these courses is to impart to students the principles of scientific research and equip them with the essential skills needed for crafting a bachelor's thesis. These skills are deemed crucial to enable students to read and critically evaluate articles in their field, facilitating the application of evidence-based practices. Moreover, these skills play a vital role in countering misinformation. It is beneficial for educators and other professionals in the field of education to discern empirically based knowledge from assumptions and fallacies that run counter to verified reality (Foot-Seymour et al. 2019). However, a survey of our students revealed that they perceive methodology courses as excessively intricate and not particularly beneficial for their academic and professional pursuits. Rather than contributing to the development of their professional self-esteem, these courses seem to foster a sense of intellectual inferiority among students. Therefore, we have decided to develop new interactive methods for teaching research methodology, aiming to impart the advantages of social science analysis through an experiential approach (Gray 2004). These methods are grounded in journaling (Apgar 2022) and reverse the traditional teaching sequence. Unlike conventional approaches where learners initially delve into the principles and rules of research theoretically, our course employs journaling methods to gather data on topics relevant to participants. Subsequently, we utilize this data to illustrate the fundamental steps of analysis. Through these innovative methods, students can actively cultivate their observational and analytical skills within a brief timeframe of 90 minutes. Importantly, these techniques have proven effective even in large courses, accommodating up to 150 students in a lecture hall. The classroom operates in a decentralized manner, where the teacher serves as a platform providing students with opportunities to enhance their skills. Assignments are predominantly open-ended, allowing students the flexibility to tailor them to their individual needs, enabling the pursuit of personal or professional topics (Hall & Wall 2019) within the framework of journaling assignments. In the latter part of the course, attention shifts to common topics examined collectively, such as identifying barriers to writing an undergraduate thesis. We employ a mix of individual, paired, and small group work, affording students firsthand experience in transitioning from an individualized understanding of a problem to the utility of a transindividual, evidence-based, systemic approach. Our curriculum uniquely emphasizes aspects of research often overlooked in traditional methodology education, including creativity, positionality, and notably, emotionality (Katz 2015). We contend that addressing emotions within the context of scientific knowledge and research is crucial for overcoming the challenges associated with misinformation. Merely relying on efforts to establish truth and facts is evidently insufficient, and defining the opposition between sense and sensibility is counterproductive (Durnová 2019). |
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