Learning as we see it: actor-led methods for values-driven, equitable, and context-sensitive education (symposium chair)

McIntyre, Nora (2025) Learning as we see it: actor-led methods for values-driven, equitable, and context-sensitive education (symposium chair). European Conference on Educational Research (2025), , Belgrade, Serbia.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Other)

Abstract

Context and problem:

The international educational community is progressing in multiple and important ways. This trend can be seen throughout the levels of educational provision, including teaching, learning, and across the educational ecosystem.

While there was longstanding appreciation for the importance of teacher effectiveness, the importance of teacher development as a continuous, iterative, and reflection-driven process is gaining ground in both theory, research, and practice. While the last decade has seen increasing discourse around non-academic dimensions of student learning (e.g., 20th century skills for the future workforce), there is now growing recognition of foundational importance of socio-emotion and meta-cognition not only as means to achievement-focused ends, but as ends in themselves while values-driven educational objectives begin gaining attention, with the student-led educational provision becoming a normative ideal. More recently, cultural and contextual considerations have started gaining attention, with the Black Lives Matter movement, with decolonisation rightly trending as a long overdue issue for society and research investigation. These cultural, racial, and between-country divides are pervasive, and find themselves playing a primary, even central, role in educational inequities8.

There is thus an influential minority who are privileged with the resources, power, and voice that is needed in order to make meaningful change. Yet, the dominant few have for a long time done little to share power, let alone shift it, to increase educational capital where change is most needed. Rather, the bulk of their efforts have been to maintain the status quo.

Meanwhile, cultural values are beginning to gain recognition for their undeniable role in the real-world classroom. Researchers, policymakers, and educational leaders can no longer deny the inseparable nature of teaching, learning, and values-based frameworks—especially those in the Global North, where the licence to claim universality and value-free frameworks is fast losing ground.

Symposium focus:

We come together to contribute innovative research foci and approaches to address our shared concern regarding these issues.

Our symposium brings together innovative research foci that centres the most affected actors of education. Within education generally, the most affected actors are students. Around the world more widely, the most affected—and hitherto disadvantaged—actors are learners with African heritage. As we do, we actively look for opportunities and the potential emergence of divergent values and priorities.

Our symposium brings together innovative research approaches that are methodologically innovative research. We present our own methodological frameworks, too, both of which are multimodal in nature: the inquiry graphics method elicits actor responses through multimodal artefacts (Paper 1, Lackovic); the systematic consultation framework collects actor responses through multimodal data streams (Paper 3, McIntyre). We explore classic grounded theory as applied to a new area of research for that approach: namely, student motivation as revealed through walking interviews and student-led working parties (Paper 2, Salter). All three methodological approaches are actor-led to draw out meaning and experiences as defined and expressed by the actors themselves. In doing so, we aim to re-dress historical imbalances in the research process and in the way in which knowledge generation is done.

To conclude the symposium, celebrated mixed methods scholar, Prof. Anthony Onwuegbuzie will share his comments and recommendations on the three papers. In his latest work, Prof. Onwuegbuzie has been developing methodological frameworks that amplify participant voices, dismantle power imbalances, and advance inclusivity both at the methodological and the philosophical level.

Altogether, we much anticipate a ground-breaking symposium that advances the democratisation of the research process, to actively centre the most affected actors in education as co-researchers and co-creators of knowledge.