Mosaed Al-shahrani
Mosaed Al-Shahrani is a PhD candidate at Victoria University, Australia. His research focuses on digital learning, educational technology, and teachers’ perceptions and use of e-learning pedagogies in Saudi primary schools. His doctoral research uses a qualitative case study approach, with particular interests in insider research, researcher positionality, reflexivity, and culturally situated educational research. He has a background in mathematics education and previously worked as a primary school teacher in Saudi Arabia.
Session
Insider research can provide valuable access to contextual knowledge, shared language and professional understanding, while also raising methodological questions about familiarity, assumptions and researcher positionality. This short video reflects on these issues through a qualitative doctoral study exploring Grade 5 teachers’ perceptions and use of e-learning pedagogies in public primary schools in Bisha, Saudi Arabia.
The study adopted an interpretivist, bounded case study approach with ethnographic and phenomenological sensitivity. Data were generated across three urban public primary schools through biographical narrative interviews with twelve Grade 5 teachers, documentary analysis, and a reflexive research journal. The researcher’s previous professional experience as a primary school teacher in the same regional context created a distinctive insider position within the research setting.
Rather than treating insider status as a fixed advantage or limitation, the study conceptualises positionality as relational and continually negotiated. Shared cultural, linguistic and professional knowledge supported access, rapport and contextual understanding. At the same time, familiarity required ongoing attention to assumptions and to the distinction between participants’ accounts and the researcher’s prior knowledge and experience.
Reflexive journalling provided an important means of documenting these methodological tensions throughout data generation and analysis. It supported critical reflection on how researcher experience, relationships and emerging interpretations shaped the research process.
The video argues that insider research is better understood as an ongoing process of positional negotiation rather than a simple insider–outsider binary. It highlights reflexivity as a practical and analytical resource for making researcher positioning visible and methodologically productive in culturally situated qualitative research.