Tutorial with Paula Nottingham: 2nd October

During my tutorial yesterday, Paula introduced the idea of ‘Insider Research’, which made me consider the impact of ethics within my practices in the inquiry module. We discussed how this could be difficult when looking into your own organisation, particularly an educational organisation due to safeguarding issues surrounding the organisation itself. We discussed how both previous students and existing students have carried out ethically sound inquiries through observation and using staff as the focus of their inquiry, as opposed to students. I had not considered this before and many of my possible inquiry questions I have started to explore focus on the use of students. This has made me consider how I could change some of my inquiries to focus on staff and not students; I feel this is something I can discuss with my employers and colleagues during the next working week as part of task 4a and 4c. 

Another idea we discussed is that sometimes your ‘practitioner research goes beyond your role’. In this case, you have to use your knowledge of when it is appropriate to keep to ethics, particularly knowing ‘when not to say things’; as an example, keeping observation notes and meeting notes private, and not sharing these on my blog. This led us to discuss whether this ‘know how’ of when to keep information private is something you learn when working in an organisation, and not from traditional university courses.

In module 1, I realised how important ethical considerations and professionalism were (see below links). I now realise that I cannot post certain parts of my research whilst planning my inquiry, in order to keep to ethical considerations, yet this is perfectly acceptable. This may affect some of my work in task 4c, as I may just have to keep these notes and recordings part of my reflective journal and not part of my professional blog.

http://jessicaplant.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/online-module-1-session.html
http://jessicaplant.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/task-1b-professional-communication_24.html