We review differential involvement in a multi-component educational-intervention study, considering factors influencing diverse participation levels in collaborative language education research, including the impact of federal regulations around ethics. We discuss how researchers might ethically approach their often-single chance to optimize research participation by fostering collaboration across disciplinary and authority boundaries.
In one instantiation of ‘epistemological plurality’ (Ortega, 2012), research in language education ideally involves researchers, teachers, students, and policy makers in a symbiotic relationship with mutual benefits (Copland & Creese, 2016; Kirkham & Mackey, 2016). However, with their different perspectives, goals, and vocabularies, these groups can become misaligned, yielding research that lacks comprehensive coverage and reach, and worse, that alienates constituencies (Silberstein, 2016), leading to mutual mistrust with potentially long-term negative consequences for knowledge advancement. This paper describes a recent collaborative educational intervention study with varied outcomes. In a successful iteration, teachers of English, French, and Arabic in classroom and lab settings, given creative pedagogical control by administrators, partnered with a researcher and language students to explore the effects of an immersive versus non-immersive pedagogy in a study that yielded robust results across languages. In a less successful iteration, other language teachers declined to participate due to their hypothesis bias and/or perceptions of administrator views. Furthermore, in one context, a large proportion of students, strikingly from a single culture, also declined participation for reasons likely ‘unknowable’ from an ethical perspective. In parallel to these events, the American “Common Rule” protecting research subjects was revised, restricting exemption category 1 (“research in established or commonly accepted educational settings...”) and stipulating that “research must ..not …adversely impact the student’s opportunity to learn… or the assessment of educators.” While clearly a critical protection for research participants, this revision additionally burdens investigators to demonstrate compliance, which may inadvertently constrain research undertakings (Bigelow & Pettitt, 2016; Duff & Abdi, 2016). We consider factors influencing diverse levels of participation in language education research, including the impact of federal regulations. With limited opportunities to engage stakeholders, we discuss how researchers might ethically approach their often-single chance to optimize research participation by fostering collaboration across disciplinary and authority boundaries.
