8th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference

An educational research can be explorative or transformative. The former aims to explore an educational phenomenon in order to increase the existing knowledge about it; the latter, which can be specifically defined as educative, introduces new hypothetically meaningful experiences into educational contexts and then investigates them. When an educative research involves children, it takes the form of a research “for”, and not only “with”, children, because it not only aims to acquire data from them, but also, and first of all, it aims to provide them with something good, by proposing activities designed to enhance their flourishing. Following the naturalistic epistemology (Lincoln and Guba, 1985), a privileged context to study the educational phenomena, and then to set an educative research, is the scholastic one. Our purpose for the conference is to present the design, ethics and method of a research for children in school.
This type of research is designed to have both an educative goal, i.e. to enhance children’s flourishing by involving them in positive educative activities, and a heuristic goal, i.e. to rigorously study what effectively emerges in terms of the children’s development resulting from the realized educative activities, hence the used instruments must have this double valence.
The design and realization of a research for children should be guided by the ethics of care (Mortari, 2022a), which requires the researcher to seek the benefit of the participants by making the research time a good time for them and to engage in ethically oriented behaviors that include a true listening to the children, and this requires to bracket prejudices and expectations, and to give them time to express their thoughts, and this requires to construct with them a positive relationship, based on respect and trust.
A suitable method for the researches carried out in educational contexts is the phenomenological one, which requires researchers to maintain their attention faithful to the considered phenomena (Husserl, 2012) in order to construct a descriptive theory to explain them by acting the epistemological principle of “epoché”, i.e. by bracketing all the previous knowledge about the object of study. The phenomenological method searches for the essence of the phenomena, however, in the empirical research the essence that is searched for is not the eidetic one, which is general and necessary and then shared by all the phenomena of the same type, but the essence of the concreteness, which is contingent and situated and then shared only by the phenomena analyzed in the research. According to this empirical phenomenological method (Mortari, 2022b), the process of qualitative data analysis follows successive steps of labeling and categorization, with the purpose to elaborate a theory which is grounded in the investigated phenomena, not generalizable but still useful to better understand similar educational contexts.
Examples of researches for children following the empirical phenomenological method and regarding ethical and emotional education in school will be presented.

References

• Husserl, E. (2012). Ideas. Translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson. London and New York: Routledge.
• Lincoln, Y.S. and Guba, E.G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Newbury Park (CA): Sage.
• Mortari, L. (2022a). The philosophy of care. Berlin: Springer.
• Mortari, L. (2022b). Fenomenologia empirica. Genova: Il Melangolo.

Recording link: https://acspri-org-au.zoom.us/rec/share/kl7zX6HT6bPlwSMdjyCiajLHw64xPnP09-fMoKjKQO1L8aMGwJyJs4Fws2C-5g8.8Ec3XepltHW7qMWn?startTime=1669185816000