Who is in my classroom and why does it matter for teaching research methods?

By Professor Helena Gillespie, University of East Anglia, UK
Dr. Gillespie is the author of the new book, Researching Equality and Social Justice. If you want to learn more, you can use the code MSPACEQ323 for a 20% discount on a purchase of the book, through September 2023.

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Why identity matters

Identity has never been a more important topic, or a more controversial one. From issue of gender identity to the discourses around race relations  we are finding a way to live in a society with new definitions of personal identity.  In universities and colleges, student identity matters to teachers, to our regulators and to students themselves.

While this guide was designed for education students, it is relevant across disciplines!

• For teachers, getting to know our students, knowing what they have in common and what makes their life experience different is of crucial importance to building good relationships in classrooms. As teachers, it is sometimes tempting to look at a group of students and hark back to our own university days, imagining the students in our classrooms are having the same experience. However, with the number of students in UK Higher education having doubled in the last 30 years and comparable growth around the world, classrooms are more diverse than before. In the UK, ‘first in family’ students are now dominant in universities. What are the implications for teaching?

In England, the regulator universities, The Office for Students identified that there are equality risks for students with particular characteristics may be less likely to get offers from some providers, especially where entry is competitive. If these measures are to make a real difference to equality of opportunity, universities urgently need to develop a shared understanding of how to create more equity in partnership with their students.

In my experience, identity is of crucial importance to students, with many, but not all students, joining universities and colleges at time when they are beginning to explore and define their adult selves in terms of sexuality, gender, race and culture, the words that are used around identity have never been so important. This is the starting point for my recently published book. In my experience of supporting students through research projects and dissertations, many of them choose to study topics related to equality and social justice, on disability and learning, on financial support for students and on race equality to name a few examples. These projects are often influenced by student’s own direct life experiences. For this reason it is perhaps not surprising that students are often motivated and curious about equality and social justice issues and the book aims to harness this motivation to enable students to create meaningful and high quality research projects on these topics.

Why understanding identity matters in research

In the book, I look at different aspects of student characteristics from socio-economic status and the myriad of ways that is defined in education, to mental health conditions and other disabilities. Supporting students to understand equality and social justice topics clearly and objectively is important to effective student research projects. In addition, helping students find, collect and use high quality evidence is key in the area of equality and social justice, for three main reasons:

• For understanding theory – helping students clarify the scope and issues of their topic using literature is vital to an effective research project

• For good data – both primary and secondary data collection needs to be based on clearly understood and appropriate terms

• For impact – for students who research equality and social justice, they want their projects to make an impact, this means it needs to be situated within the established discourse on the topic

As teachers in universities and colleges, I believe that our primary job is to help students think, but not to make them think like us. In supporting students to understand why definitions and concepts around identity matter, we can help them feel both challenged and empowered as researchers.

If you are teaching in a university or college, it might feel like researching equality and social justice topics is difficult, especially if this is not your main academic discipline. But developing your own skills and confidence in understanding student identity and characteristics will help you improve your own teaching of these sort of topics.

If you are a student, understanding your own identity and how that relates to others is vitally important to becoming a good researcher, and this isn’t limited to autoethnographic approaches. Understanding your own ideas and by implication your bias is important to an ethical approach.

So whoever you are, however you identify, developing skills in researching equality and social justice matters.  

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