Perspectives on Cultivating a Qualitative Researcher's Identity

This chapter problematizes the notion of methodological rigor in qualitative research through an examination of what it means to cultivate an identity as a qualitative researcher. Through a string of narratives, each author explores texts, methods, and experiences that inspired their work as qualitative researchers and fostered their scholarly identities. Themes of writing about the self as researcher, reflexive inquiry to develop a researcher identity, writing as a tool to hone one's understanding, and the role of trauma in qualitative research are discussed.

Falling Towers: A Letter to my Child’s Teacher

Using the epistolary genre, this editorial is embedded in a fictional letter written to a teacher. The discussion is spurred by a teacher writing a mark in bold felt pen directly on a student’s drawing of the Eiffel Tower. This reflexive inquiry laments the deep wounding of the joy of learning by metrics, measurements and efficiency, while registering the imperative to change this path. Using the metaphor of the “tower” to theorize current damaging curricular practices, this editorial questions how, amidst the uncontrol and fear in a global pandemic, the challenging truths of unmarked graves, devastating climate disasters, global food insecurity, among other sufferings, teachers can imagine hope-inspired, healing-centred pedagogies and ”assertive mutuality . . . [through] co-action, interconnection . . . [and] the capacity to act and implement as opposed to the ability to control others” (Kreisberg, 1992, p. 86). The task of recognizing, naming and dismantling towers—in essence, leaving one’s home, and building new relational frames, while the world is falling—requires extraordinary hope, as shown in the articles in this issue.

Dancing with power in ‘We are the university: Students co-creating change’

Much of the student-staff partnership literature calls for increased collaboration and power sharing among staff and students. Less common are accounts by student partners themselves that take up the challenge of what partnership and power feel like as universities embrace their neoliberal trajectory - and - purport to do so on behalf of students themselves. Especially acute is the conundrum of how partnership initiatives can, and do, reproduce the very power dynamics they set out to transform. We are a group of students and staff working in curriculum partnership together at Western Sydney University. The context of our work together is the 21C project, a university-wide strategy to transform curriculum, teaching, and learning, drawing on ‘partnership pedagogy’. In this paper, we engage in a process of reflexive inquiry to interrogate a new elective unit that many of us are involved in as advocates, co-creators, as students and staff learning together, and as evaluators, called We are the university: Students co-creating change (WATU). To highlight partnership’s intricate power plays, we offer a fictionalised account to reflect our multi-voiced experiences of being involved in WATU. We have come to understand power’s simultaneity in partnership as forms of power over, as permission-giving, as sharing (or partnership), and as the power to act (agency). The account is our story of partnership’s inevitable contradictions - a collaboration that teaches us about the challenges of working together while being cautious of partnership’s transformatory claims.

The Negotiated Self: Employing Reflexive Inquiry to Explore Teacher Identity

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What silence can teach us about race and leadership

Silence is laden when it comes to race and leadership. We believe it is critical to reclaim the kind of silence that supports conscious transformation. Our contribution in this endeavor is twofold. Firstly, we distinguish between fear-based silence and sacred silence. Fear-based silence can be a running away from discomfort, a covering up of trepidation and anxiety. It can lead to collective amnesia and willful ignorance, a hoarding of status, privilege, and power, and forge deep divides between people. This is the world of masks and performativity, and at its worst harbors prejudice, hate, and destruction. Leadership tolerant of fear-based silence permits a festering of racism. Sacred silence by contrast heals and raises consciousness. For the kind of leadership required to consistently and indefatigably push for change and disruption to racism, we need a practice of sacred silence. Sacred silence cultivates the courage to look fearlessly within personal shadows and bravely at what is required to make the world a safe, secure, and just place for all. Secondly, we present four themes that emerged from our reflexive inquiry into race, leadership, and silence: listening dialogue, returning to Mother Earth wisdom, honoring potential, and practicing mindfulness in a context of collective wisdom.