Researching With: Ethical and Epistemological Implications of Doing Collaborative, Change-oriented Research with Teachers and Students

In this article, we examine the ethical and epistemological implications of shifting from a strictly teacher-centered group to include students in a collaborative co-researching experience. For the past four years, we have worked collaboratively with teachers at City High School examining collections of student writing for assessment and accountability purposes. While students and their writing have been at the center of our work, our primary research partners have been the teachers at this urban, comprehensive secondary school. Interested in learning more about how students at City High perceive and use literacy, we are now engaged in a project in which students are co-researching their own literacy practices. This move implies a shift in partnerships, bringing students into this collaborative relationship and making them our primary research partners. Drawing from the literature on ethics in qualitative fieldwork, we contrast how ethical issues are constructed in the field with more regulatory constructions of “ethics.” Then, extending this further to the context of our work at City High, we consider the ethical and epistemological (validity) issues that are raised by such methodological choices. Illustrated with excerpts from student meetings and writing, this study marks a further attempt to expand “the continuing conversation” around educational research, opening the dialogue to invite the views and voices of students.