I hadn’t considered ethics, and not in the formal convention. I was aware that I might need some kind of consent form with a brief explanation of what my research project would be about for participants. However, workshop one gave me an opportunity to think about this and the participants, who they might be and how they might / could be affected by my research project, questions. The PAR definitions (Participatory Action Research) allowed me to consider my responsibilities to both the participants and to myself.
My ARP as a social justice project meant that I would need to think about who my participants would be, I had identified through my intervention on the IP unit that it would support underrepresented / marginalised groups addressing issues of inequality and or access to resources. My own positionality and intersectionality would affect who I was seeking to support in setting up the pop-up writing workshops. The inequities it would address; biases towards degree students, the assumption that all students entering a degree course can write and therefore received the same level of writing support in previous education. It would also address race, gender and socioeconomic issues affected by these assumptions as outlined in my rational.
What I hadn’t considered was the rights of those who would be involved in my project, and my responsibilities towards them. My aim was to try and map out what my responsibilities would be as a practitioner-researcher against the action research cycle. Watching Caroline Lenette’s (2024) video on Participatory Action Research allowed me to consider that research requires a lot of care. The BERA Ethical Guidelines helped to provide a list of considerations such as consent, transparency, the right to withdraw.
Creating an Ethical Action Plan allowed me to map out my responsibilities as a practitioner-researcher, see link below for (Ethics form – V1).
My tutor suggested I should provide more detail with regards to how I would work with my participants in an ethical way and make it clear on how I would achieve that. My overall aim would be to gather and collect information from discussions between students and myself ensuring students knew what the purpose of it was and what the outcome might be. The suggestion was to create a slide and handouts to illustrate these details.
My revised Ethics Action Plan outlined in more detail about providing participants with slides, handouts see above link (Ethics form – V2) . This would also include information about voluntary participation, that they could if they wanted to, decide not to take part at anytime (which could cause a few issues for me) but something I would need to take into account. My tutor feedback said that I’d thought carefully about the different kinds of information I might want to gather from participants and appropriate ways of obtaining informed consent for the information to be used. See below for slides, handouts and consent form.
My Ethical Plan was good to go …