Palgrave Studies in Eduation Research Methods PDF

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
EDUCATION RESEARCH METHODS
Karen McArdle
FREEDOM
RESEARCH IN
EDUCATION
Becoming an Autonomous
Researcher
Palgrave Studies in Education Research Methods
Series Editors
Patrick Danaher
University of Southern Queensland
Toowoomba, QLD, Australia
Fred Dervin
The University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland
Caroline Dyer
School of Politics and International Studies
University of Leeds
Leeds, UK
Máirín Kenny
Wexford, Ireland
Bobby Harreveld
School of Education and the Arts
Central Queensland University
Rockhampton, QLD, Australia
Michael Singh
Centre for Educational Research
Western Sydney University
Penrith, NSW, Australia
This series explores contemporary manifestations of the fundamental
paradox that lies at the heart of education: that education contributes to
the creation of economic and social divisions and the perpetuation of
sociocultural marginalisation, while also providing opportunities for
individual empowerment and social transformation. In exploring this
paradox, the series investigates potential alternatives to current educa-
tional provision and speculates on more enabling and inclusive educa-
tional futures for individuals, communities, nations and the planet.
Specific developments and innovation in teaching and learning, educa-
tional policy-making and education research are analysed against the
backdrop of these broader developments and issues.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15092
“There is a crisis of credibility in today’s world … Prof. McArdle skilfully exposes the cause of
our current malaise as being a lack of attention to values. It is who we are as researchers and
our moral intention which determine the quality and worth of what we do. Her antidote is a
rigorous and vigilant reflexive stance which frees us to call into question all scientific norms,
holding them to the standard of how they can in any given context help us promote social
justice and equality in the lives of those we research.”
—Prof. Michael T. Wright, LICSW, MS, Catholic University of Applied Social Sciences Berlin,
Germany and International Collaboration for Participatory Health Research
“Freedom Research in Education challenges the reader to embrace the tensions and assumptions
inherent yet often invisible in current orthodoxies in educational research. It emphasises courage,
confidence, creativity and a sense of moral purpose in making explicit and transparent the essence
of researcher ‘Values’, i.e. morality, ethics, values and virtues—which lie at the core of research.
Freedom Research identifies the responsibilities of developing autonomous researchers and
co-researchers who, through alternative approaches in research purpose and design, provide
transparency, openness and robustness. This book invites the reader to think deeply about self
and personal beliefs and about how they influence and are influenced by research communi-
ties. It raises awkward questions in an open and accessible way. It is a thought-provoking read
which will not only trigger debate, critique and discussion but contributes to reshaping the
educational research trajectory. I strongly recommend this book for beginner as well as more
experienced researchers.”
—Prof. Do Coyle, Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange,
Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh
Karen McArdle
Freedom Research
in Education
Becoming an Autonomous
Researcher
Karen McArdle
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen, UK
Palgrave Studies in Education Research Methods

ISBN 978-3-319-69649-2 ISBN 978-3-319-69650-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69650-8
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Acknowledgements
A number of people have assisted through reading this text in draft form.
I wish to thank Janeen Leith and Mary McAteer for their helpful com-
ments on very early drafts. Above all I wish to thank Alison Hurrell for
her continuing insightful critique and intelligent reading. All my stu-
dents over the years have taught me what is interpreted, I hope accurately,
in this book, in particular I wish to thank students of the MRes at the
University of Aberdeen who helped me to formulate and develop my
ideas.
v
Contents
1 Introducing Freedom Research 1
2 The Social Context of Research and Inquiry 13
3 Freedom from Orthodoxy 23
4 Identity and the Freedom Researcher 45
5 Creativity in Freedom Research 67
6 Educational Values and the Link to Methodology 83
7 Creating Meaning and Communication 103
8 Ethical Education and Research 127
vii
viii Contents
9 Validity and Freedom Research 145
10 Conclusion and Reflexivity 157
Index 171
Introduction
Freedom Research seeks to challenge, and to encourage others to chal-

lenge, ideas that have become orthodox in the research community. Many
individuals, research groups, communities and educational journal edito-
rial boards are open to creativity, but the link to ethics, values and virtues
is missing—a morality that needs to govern the creative research in order
to ensure honesty, truth and authenticity.
The crisis of validity that has been apparent for many years in qualita-
tive research seeks a certainty that cannot and perhaps should not be
achieved, but we need benchmarks for our research methodological and
ethical choices. Freedom Research seeks to fill that void through proffer-
ing an approach to research that is fully aware of the assumptions and
values that underpin the research. So, nothing or very little is implicit or
hidden from the researcher or from those who would be influenced by
the findings, thus taking us closer to the truth about education.
The book is for those who have some experience of research to under-
stand the key processes and to be familiar with common discourses of
research theory and practice. It also is for those in the field of education
as researchers in higher education or in professional practice. Becoming
an autonomous researcher suggests a confidence and maturity of position
in relation to research. This book seeks to present a new approach to
research, which will generate not only new confidence and trust, but also
research that is more authentic and closer to the truth. The book should
ix
x Introduction
also be of interest to those who review or write for journals, supervise

postgraduate students or are on editorial boards, as Freedom Research
demands different ways of conducting research, supporting students and
writing our research texts.
The book takes the reader on a journey through the research process
that is often understood, in the research community with which I am
familiar, as a sequential process. This journey, however, is usually iterative
and non-sequential and at worst predictable, but in this text, for ease of
understanding, the journey is presented as a sequence of chapters. This
journey seeks to make explicit and to assist the reader to understand the
ways in which one’s own values, or in a broader sense, morality, underpin
and influence the choices and assumptions one makes in research. The
book seeks to give the educational researcher confidence to become
autonomous in bucking the trends of orthodoxy and to become more
vigorous and creative in his/her research. It also seeks to give the reader a
justification for this type of different but robust research.
The words morality, values, ethics and virtues are used in this book. I
am using the term ‘Values’ to embrace the constellation of morality, eth-
ics, values and virtues. Where this refers to values alone it is written as
‘values.’ It is not a simple matter to give discrete definitions as these are
contested terms, but I have sought to provide some clarity in this intro-
duction by defining the terms simply to assist the reader to travel the
journey I wish him/her to take in the main text. I have to apologise to the
educational philosopher who may read this book. I am not a philosopher
myself and do not seek to contribute to the understanding of these ideas,
but I am an educational researcher and wish to use these interrelated
concepts to underpin my contention that ideas of morality have been
given insufficient status in educational research in particular and, indeed,
social science research in general. As previously discussed, I have chosen
to use the word ‘Values’ to communicate the combination of ethics, val-
ues and virtues when used collectively and the word ‘morality’ to embrace
the discipline of considering our ethics, values and virtues as individuals
and as a community of researchers. Morals, as Driver (2007) explains,
comprise those things one ‘ought’ to do. Moral norms with which this
book is concerned primarily, as Driver explains, link to interactions with
others in ways that have significance to their well-being. If we do
Introduction
xi
s omething that could harm or benefit others, Driver explains, then argu-
ably this is a moral matter.
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that
involves systematising, defending and recommending concepts of right
and wrong. Ethics studies moral behaviour and how one should act.
Typically ethics refers to something formal such as ethical guidelines,
whereas morality refers to everyday conduct (Brinkmann and Kvale
2015). Ethics are rules of conduct that people adopt when they act in
social contexts. Ethical behaviour is underpinned by systems of universal
moral values that are characteristic of a particular social group, society or
culture (Ransome 2013). Ethics seeks to resolve questions dealing with
human morality—concepts such as good and evil. Moral philosophy
considers how human lives should be lived and is fundamental to the
thesis that underpins this book as I am dealing with what is ‘right’ in the
research in education world. I do not intend to provide prescriptions of
how one should live or educate; rather I am going to assert principles that
will guide approaches to and choices about research and education. I
wish the reader to be thinking about social norms and whether these do
indeed or should apply in a particular context. Examples of social norms
in a Western context include the promotion of inclusive schools as dis-
tinct from special schools for pupils with what are commonly termed
‘additional support needs’.
Philosophers tend to focus on the four categories of ethics below
(derived from Vardy and Vardy 2012), but they are interlinked. Meta-
ethics addresses the assumptions, principles and concepts on which ethics
discussions rely. Normative ethics focuses on moral concepts which gov-
ern our actions. Applied ethics considers particular issues and dilemmas
(p. xiii). This book concerns all these dimensions, but is particularly
linked to normative ethics, which is concerned with standards for right
conduct and moral evaluation (Driver 2007). Descriptive ethics, also
known as comparative ethics, is the study of people’s beliefs about moral-
ity. Freedom Research is eclectic in its approach to ethics and seeks to use
the best parts of many approaches in a holistic way.
Thinking of meta-ethics, traditionally, people have accepted that
claims about the good, bad, right and wrong should correspond to an
objective ‘truth.’ I shall not engage with the history of philosophy here;
xii Introduction
rather I wish to remind the reader that thinking about what is right and
what is wrong in a research context involves making judgements and one
has set implicit standards of what right and wrong actually mean in doing
so in a particular context. So, if one says it is right to consult representa-
tives of a particular population such as pupils about the research pro-
posed prior to doing it, then one is making judgements about the
‘rightness’ of involving participants in the research, the ‘rightness’ of col-
laboration in research and the ‘rightness’ of getting as close to the truth as
possible by ensuring the population have given their perspective on the
research questions. Implicit in choice of what to do in a research context
are ethical choices about what is good and bad or right and wrong.
Implicit in this, if we follow Plato, is an understanding of what the ulti-
mate right or wrong would theoretically look like.
Freedom Research follows an approach that could be known as
postmodern ethics, in which there are no ethical realities; rather individu-
als should engage with the notions of ‘rightness’ without prescribing par-
ticular actions as the world is inherently complex, multi-layered and
changing all the time. Individual ethical examples rather than meta-
narratives are important for understanding what is right. Rightness is
always, in my opinion, contextualised. This does not mean I am without
ethical standards to which I subscribe, or normative ethics. Simply, I am
aware that it is necessary to review these standards constantly and with
integrity to values.
Values can be defined as broad preferences concerning appropriate
courses of action or outcomes. Values have the interesting capacity of
both expressing underlying belief and providing motivation to act in par-
ticular ways (Ransome 2013). Values are rarely left in a state of abstrac-
tion. As such, values reflect a person’s sense of right and wrong in the
context of what ought to be but differ from meta-ethical concerns in that
they are linked to closely held beliefs about the way the world should be,
not principles of what may be argued is good or right. Early philosophical
investigations sought to understand good and evil and the concept of ‘the
good.’ Ethics is about the rules we use to help us decide what is right or
wrong; values are about those things we deem to be important (Knowles
and Lander 2012). Ethics is about knowing how to react in circumstances
and value is about knowing what the rules need to be about.
Introduction
xiii
Value theory encompasses a range of approaches to understanding

how, why and to what degree people value things—whether the thing is
a person, idea, object or indeed anything else. This complexity is appar-
ent in the current agenda of seeking to inspire well-being in schools,
where the notion of well-being is poorly defined or understood. Values
tend to influence attitudes and behaviour. Increasingly values have been
seen to be at least culturally relative and what might be wrong for one
person is right for another (Vardy and Vardy 2012). An example of this
relates to research I was conducting on resilience where I learned from a
colleague that resilience in the Western world tends to mean that we
value those who pick themselves up once they have been knocked down,
whereas in some Asian communities resilience is valued in that people are
not able to be knocked down in the first place.
Values affect our work in many ways in a research context. One’s values
determine what one chooses to research and who one chooses to include
in the research, and, arguably, values are a dimension of the choice of
research approach. If one believes ethically that research should make a
difference to people’s lives and education then the approach may be
emancipatory and the researcher may value or prefer methods of research
that are inclusive, participatory and collaborative.
Virtue may be defined as moral excellence. A virtue is a positive char-
acter trait or quality deemed to be morally good. In conducting a research
project with colleagues on what makes teachers, or indeed other profes-
sionals, good at what they do, we found ourselves as researchers, instead
of looking at values, looking at virtues. Virtues are a very old-fashioned
and less frequently mentioned term than values in literature concerning
research choices. We, in our research, proposed that virtues for our pur-
poses were values in action. We concluded that what makes a good teacher
was a confluence of virtues, such as for example, patience, tolerance,
humility and a nurturing approach, but that each teacher was different.
We had not identified a list of virtues that a good teacher had to have. It
was not so much the virtues themselves but the way that they came
together, the confluence, in the individual (McArdle et al. 2013). Aristotle
argues that moral value is located primarily within a person in a certain
set of character traits known as the virtues (Birmingham 2004). Phronesis
has been defined as a practical intelligence, a practical wisdom or p
rudence
xiv Introduction
which involves knowing how to apply general principles in particular

situations—a virtue of the mind. Phronesis, according to this definition,
is something that I seek to recommend in this book. I propose that a
confluence of virtues is intrinsic to the character of not only the good
teacher but also the good researcher:
Virtue-centred ethics hold that moral value is centred within a person who is
performing moral actions rather than within the actions themselves, a subtle yet
important distinction. Actions are related to virtue, but they are secondary to
and derive from virtue as indications and natural outgrowths of a virtuous
character. (Birmingham 2004, p. 316)
Pring (2004) distinguishes between moral virtues and intellectual vir-

tues. Moral virtues include, he suggests, courage, perseverance, honesty,
caring for others, welfare and concern for others. Intellectual virtues refer
to truthfulness, openness of mind, concern for accuracy, interest in clarity
of communication and impartiality:
By virtue I mean the disposition, deep and enduring, which motivates a person
to pursue a course of action, despite difficulties and challenges, which the person
conceived to be good and appropriate. Any list of virtues, therefore, embodies
the values which prevail in a social or cultural tradition. (p. 184)
The ideas of ethics, values and virtues are closely linked and interwo-
ven. In this book, I have chosen to use the word ‘Values,’ as indicated
earlier, to embrace these concepts.
There is arguably a hierarchy of Values in that axiology, the study of
the significance of values, determines our principal assumptions and
understandings of moral choices. Values, as distinct from ethics, govern
how these moral choices are reflected in our beliefs or attitudes. Virtues
are one’s values in action reflected through personal qualities in the
research such as honesty, conscientiousness or trustworthiness. Here I am
using the term axiology specifically to refer to the underpinning beliefs
one might have about ‘worth’ and, accordingly, about value. The diagram
below shows the hierarchy I use to explore my own beliefs. Some col-
leagues have argued that axiology should be at the bottom of the diagram
Introduction
xv
as it refers to underpinning deeply held concepts of worth or value. I

choose to put it at the top as I see it at the most conceptual of my ideas
about worth flowing down to the more practical considerations of
method.
Axiology
Ontology
Epistemology
Methodology
Methods
Implementation
This hierarchy should not be seen in any way as chronological in a

research design context but is a means of separating linked layers of ideas;
the ideas themselves will be Values that are overlapping and interweaving.
The hierarchy places the most conceptual ideas, the axiology, at the top
and the more practical domains for Values at the bottom. All of the linked
layers must come into play for the researcher to be able to challenge con-
ventions and to, indeed, be a good, adventurous, free, yes, and autono-
mous, researcher.
A means must be found of bringing this hierarchy of overlapping val-
ues to play explicitly in the research. In all the research the reader has
done or plans to do, he/she will have made implicit Value choices, pos-
sibly following social norms and conventions or following his/her own
unspoken beliefs or the ideas of others from the reading. What the
researcher believes, however, can be biased and wrong, so what I am invit-
ing the reader to do is to step outside these conventions and to be explicit
about Values so that there is freedom to produce high-quality and ethical
research.
The book does follow the research process, but is not a ‘how to do it’
text. Rather it explicates the way towards autonomy in research and
explains how Freedom Research leads to this autonomy.
xvi Introduction
Chapter 1 of this book provides an introduction to the argument that

Freedom Research is justified as a freedom from the commonplace con-
ventions of research, while also guaranteeing the rigour and robustness of
educational research and introduces the key principles of Freedom
Research. Chapter 2 explores the social construction of the community
of researchers and the tacit strictures of this for the educational researcher,
highlighting the limited context in which research conventionally takes
place. Chapter 3 explores key concepts that underpin Freedom Research.
These are Freedom and Autonomy. The reader is invited to explore his/her
own values as part of an understanding of Freedom Research.
Chapter 4 explores the identity of the Freedom Researcher and the
link of identity to theory and paradigm choices. It does not seek to
explain or elucidate the different choices of paradigms; rather it seeks to
link the choice to Values. Theory is discussed from the perspective of the
value placed on it in the research process and elaborates on the link to our
personal and professional educational beliefs. Chapter 4 also introduces
research design principles. Chapter 5 explores selected definitions of cre-
ativity and the link to Freedom Research. Creativity is seen as being a
core advantage of the Freedom Research process.
Methodology and methods from a values perspective is the core of
Chap. 6. Definitions of childhood and education are discussed from the
perspective that these are crucial to one’s choice of methodology. The role
of power and values is discussed in relation to methodological choices,
and practical implementation is characterised as craft. Chapter 7 con-
cerns constructing meaning and communication. Hermeneutics is intro-
duced and so are the links to analysis and interpretation. Written
communication and argument are considered with the link to validity.
Many books relegate research ethics to the Methodology chapter(s).
Freedom Research is founded on Values which embrace ethics, and ethics
therefore underpins every chapter in this book just as it underpins every
dimension of the research process. Chapter 8 describes the eclectic
approach to ethics adopted by Freedom Research and its more multi-
layered approach to ethical choices.
Chapter 9 focuses on troublesome validity and provides a validity stan-
dard for Freedom Research. Chapter 10 concludes the text with discus-
sion of liberty and the Freedom Researcher, and the means for the
Introduction
xvii
researcher, supervisor or senior staff member to facilitate Freedom

Research. The final remarks are a reflexive account of the strengths and
limitations of the book by the author as reflexivity is crucial to any discus-
sion which is values based.
References
Aristotle. (1999). Nicomachean Ethics (T. Irwin, Trans.). Indianapolis,

IN: Hackett.
Birmingham. (2004). Phronesis; A Model for Pedagogical Reflection.
Journal of Teacher Education, 55(4), 313–324.
Brinkmann, S., & Kvale, S. (2015). Interviews: Learning the Craft of
Qualitative Research Interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Driver, J. (2007). Ethics: The Fundamentals. Carlton: Blackwell.
Knowles, G., & Lander, V. (2012). Thinking Through Ethics and Values in
Primary Education. London: Sage.
McArdle, K., & Hurrell, A. (2013). What Makes Teachers Good at What
They Do? The Axiological Model. In J. McNiff (Ed.), Values and
Virtues. Tewkesbury: September Publishing.
Pring, R. (2004). Philosophy of Education: Aims, Theory, Common Sense
and Research. London: Continuum.
Ransome, P. (2013). Ethics and Values in Social Research. Hampshire:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Vardy, C., & Vardy, P. (2012). Ethics Matters. London: SCM Press.
1
Introducing Freedom Research
This book concerns ‘Freedom Research,’ which is a term used to describe

research that is free from orthodoxy, which adapts, or which knowingly
critiques, accepted conventions about the ways in which research should
be conducted. ‘Freedom Research’ is the name given to a form of educa-
tional research that seeks to be vigorous, rigorous, robust, authentic,
imaginative, creative and above all ethical.
Freedom Research is a new conceptual understanding of research
underpinned by an argument that the conventions of traditional
approaches to research in education may be confidence sapping and con-
straining to both the early career and the mature educational researcher.
The purpose of this book is to explain how you can be free from conven-
tions and approach research with greater freedom to be innovative and
creative. This first chapter seeks to explore the concept of Freedom
Research and to explain what can replace the orthodoxy of research con-
ventions. Freedom is itself not a neutral term. It is a term that few will
object to, in that we all wish to be free and would choose freedom, per-
haps, for ourselves and others in many contexts, but in each context, the
word will have different meanings and implications. Concepts of free-
dom are cultural and it is not a matter of all or nothing; you can be free
© The Author(s) 2018 1

K. McArdle, Freedom Research in Education, Palgrave Studies in Education Research
Methods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69650-8_1
2 K. McArdle
to a greater or lesser extent and in some respects and not others. This
book seeks to convince you that freedom in our practice of research is not
just possible but highly desirable in a world in which research conven-
tions, I suggest, restrict and limit.
Two moral dimensions are considered in this book: external and inter-
nal morality. External morality concerns itself with those values we hold
as a community of researchers that assist us to avoid the atrocities done in
the name of research in past times and also to have ethical standards in
our research. Internal morality concerns those values one holds dear to
oneself, which underpin the choices we make in a research context. These
are interlinked and only separated for ease of consideration in this book.
It is my contention that Freedom Research, by addressing these two
forms of morality, has the potential to free us from socially imposed and
out-of-date constraints on our research choices; it liberates us from sti-
fling orthodoxies and provides us with a rigour and robustness that pre-
vents us from sliding into knowing that is unsubstantiated or
non-evidential.
One’s values contribute to the kind of researcher one is or hopes to be.
The concept of identity of the researcher, to which I shall return, is impor-
tant to the choices made in our research. Who one is, determines the kind
of researcher one will be. Knowledge of who one is can facilitate auton-
omy in research. Definitions of freedom frequently refer to physical ease
or constraint, such as freedom from bondage, or grace of movement and
frankness of manner. Isaiah Berlin argued in the 1950s that there are two
types of freedom or liberty: negative and positive freedom. Negative free-
dom is freedom from interference. Warburton (2001) describes it in a
negative manner. ‘You restrict my freedom when you restrict the number
of choices I can make about my life’ (p. 5). Warburton cites Berlin (1969):
The extent of a man’ s [sic] negative liberty is, as it were, a function of what
doors are open to him; upon what prospects they open; and how they are
open. (p. xlviii)
It is important to note that negative freedom involves doors being

open, not a choice on whether to go through them. Negative freedom is
freedom from barriers in a given context. Negative freedom embraces the
Introducing Freedom Research 3
absence of discriminatory practices, for example, in an educational

context, such as inclusive practice for disabled children in mainstream
education. Positive freedom is, as Warburton describes, the freedom to
do something rather than freedom from interference:
The ‘positive’ sense of the word liberty derives from the wish on the part of
the individual to be his [sic] own master. I wish my life and decisions to
depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be
instrument of my own, not of other men’s acts of will. (p. 131)
Positive freedom is the freedom from self-inhibition or is the ability to

make a desired choice. In an educational context, positive freedom might
be the choice by adults who are nervous or uncertain of education after a
bad school experience to engage trustingly in adult educational opportu-
nities. In this book the barriers or conventions that keep doors of oppor-
tunity closed will be discussed. I also seek to convince the researcher to
step through the doorway by pushing convention aside. These concepts
of freedom are not without their critics, but they do provide a useful
means of considering freedom and are, I would propose, frequently inter-
linked. Freedom is defined here as a state of mind that recognises positive
and negative freedoms and seeks to manage these in order to be free from
the constraints of orthodoxy.
It is my contention that the conventions of research close doors that
otherwise might be open (negative freedom), and that the people choose
not to go through them (positive freedom) for a range of reasons linked
to orthodoxy, such as fear and anxiety, conformism or untroubled accep-
tance of the social norms. I define orthodoxy as received or established
doctrines. I am not implying that there is a single methodological ortho-
doxy in educational research; indeed educational research is varied and
multifaceted, but the research process has embedded in it implicit under-
standings of what is acceptable and what is desirable in a research con-
text, which serve to marginalise and complicate the creative, the innovative
and the different. I do not intend here to describe the social history of the
Enlightenment that led to the initiation and development of many of the
conventions of research. Rather, I intend to outline in this book my
reaction to the conventions that have been and are apparent to me in the
course of my life in the research community.
4 K. McArdle
Orthodoxy
Orthodoxy is a complicated concept and is used here to embrace those
ideas that conform to established standards. Examples might include the
orthodox or established methods of sampling that have a name such as
convenience or snowballing or random, the desirability in educational
research of triangulation or accepted off-the-shelf methods for collecting
data. Furthermore there are conventions or the established view of what
is proper behaviour, such as the choice of one and only one, preferably a
named paradigm for postgraduate research; completing ethical consent
forms; and presenting data as analysed post rather than during data col-
lection. Orthodoxy can be useful in that it provides for accepted means
of doing research that do not require lengthy explanation; for example we
do not need to describe or justify triangulation necessarily for it to be
generally accepted as a good thing.
It is not, however, sufficient to declare oneself to be free from conven-
tions; one needs to ensure that the freedom chosen is responsible and has
the benefit of others or ‘beneficence,’ or a desire to ‘do good,’ as its objec-
tive. One example of beneficence is the desire to improve pupil learning.
Hence, our freedom needs to be underpinned by a moral stance or ethics,
values and virtues. In this book overall, I seek to show how the autono-
mous researcher can work in a research context with individual freedom
from stifling conventions. I seek furthermore to show how this freedom
may apply at each stage of the research process, and how one can learn to
become autonomous. The conventions to which I refer are mainly, but
not exclusively, the conventions of the natural sciences, which I would
argue are entirely appropriate to my ontological understanding of the
nature of our physical environment in that I believe there is an observable
physical reality. They limit, however, the conception of and implementa-
tion of research in the social sciences and this field of educational research,
where there is the complexity of individuals’ own perceptions of reality
that are frequently being described. The conventions or adaptations of
them have become social norms in our research community and, there-
fore, lend (and have lent) themselves to critique by many people over the
course of this and the last century.
There can be subtle and hidden norms which limit freedom in a

research community in what I think are insidious and damaging ways to
the pursuit of knowledge and knowing. For example, the overt as well as
subtle valuing of only research that is written in journal articles by higher
education institutions in many countries limits the expression of our
findings to a defined length, academic voice, learned tone and text
medium. I had a student, for example, who found this limiting for her
PhD, which was about a dialogical model of teaching, and she felt it to
be more appropriate to write a text full of font changes and sizes and
orientations of text on the page to communicate the complexity of what
she had studied. A more subtle example of unwritten laws came to my
attention recently at a conference, where an autoethnographer, who had
described herself as the ‘human instrument of inquiry,’ was criticised for
being insufficiently ‘objective’ in her reflective practice. This was a criti-
cism that came from an expectation that we can and should always be
objective in educational research or, indeed, that objectivity is both pos-
sible and desirable. May (2003) is helpful in discussing objectivity in this
context:
Particular ideas of neutrality, such as the maintenance of objectivity

through positioning the researcher as nothing but a passive instrument of
data collection are now exposed as falsehoods that seek to mask the realities
of the research process. The knower (as researcher) is now implicated in the
construction of the known (the dynamics and content of society and social
relations). (p. 2)
I shall explore these conventions further through this book, as they are
multiple, multi-layered and, I suggest, incessant and limiting.
I think it is important to assert at this early stage that I am not throw-
ing the baby out with the bath water. Conventions can be useful as a
shortcut to avoid having to really think about why we do things. They
can also be a shorthand for useful practices. It is crucial, I suggest, to have
criteria of quality, of reliability and of the validity of research, but these
need to be more sophisticated and exacting than mere conventions or
covert social norms and I shall come back to validity later in the book, in
Chap. 8. I am not underestimating the value of literature that has sought
6 K. McArdle
over many years to assert the quality criteria we should use for qualitative
research. I am simply pointing to the overt and covert social norms that
limit us in many ways in the pursuit of knowledge. I am aware that my
point of view will be contentious, as I am debunking some of the cultur-
ally accepted norms of a research community. I defend my right to say
this through reference to John Stuart Mill (1895), who asserted my right
to be eccentric and outspoken and free from a constrained life. He
asserted that interference was limiting. His ‘harm principle’ proposed
that only views which cause harm should be suppressed, and this links to
my own philosophy that all is possible if it leads towards beneficence.
Some will see my critique of these social norms as a threat to the founda-
tions of rigour and robustness of research; on the contrary, I see my cri-
tique as being a means of enhancing and supporting rigour and robustness
through an increased sophistication in the judgements that are made
about research conceptualisation, design and implementation.
Morality, Ethics, Values and Virtues

Freedom Research to me implies an absence of constraints but, because
an individual’s freedom may affect others, also implies a need for the
principle of beneficence. We cannot have freedom at the expense of oth-
ers. Furthermore, I think freedom demands adherence to certain values.
This book will explore the importance of these values. Freedom demands
courage and intelligence. Courage, because, in this context, it inevitably
means challenging those who would limit freedom for whatever reason;
and intelligence, because of the need to critique, justify and explain
beyond the accepted social norms. It may assist the reader to remember
John Stuart Mill again, who said that all silencing of discussion is an
assumption of infallibility (Mill 1895 in Collini Ed. 1989). To silence the
alternatives to social norms is to assume that the norms are perfect and,
indeed, infallible—a contention with which few would choose to agree.
It is too easy to critique through deconstruction of an ideology or,
indeed, a single idea. I do not seek to deconstruct research. When I see
deconstruction of text in a research context, for example, I often think of
a wall that can be pulled apart brick by brick. Once you have done this
you are left with a pile of rubble, which, even with the best will in the
world, cannot be reconstructed into a wall of the same quality. The bricks
are cracked and broken, and the mortar is fragmented. Instead, I think we
need to consider construction of a new boundary; perhaps a fence instead.
This is what I am doing in this book. I am seeking to build a new bound-
ary to replace the wall, which is not only in disrepair but was constructed
from the wrong kind of bricks for its purpose in the first place. The new
materials for the boundary are morality, ethics, values and virtues, which
underpin the judgements we make as researchers and which liberate us
from thinking in terms of boundaries that are not always helpful to
creativity, insight and the real-life problems we encounter in our research.
Values are what guarantee rigour and robustness in our research.
My argument, on which this book is founded, is that one can do any-
thing in research if one’s morality, ethics, values and virtues are intact, to
protect the quality and intent of the research. One can be creative, imagi-
native and innovative if Values are intact. This is a dangerously all-
embracing statement, but one that I hope to defend. I put this point of
view forward at a conference and was challenged rightly enough about
who should determine which system of ethics, values and virtues is the
‘correct’ one and who was I to decide which choices were correct and
virtuous? The book will explore the arguments relating to ‘goodness’ or
‘doing good,’ though this is not the main thesis of this text, as the author
is not a philosopher; rather, she is a researcher in education. This discus-
sion concludes that benchmarking that which is beneficial in an educa-
tional context is crucial to avoiding the extremes of unethical research.
I provide examples of such a benchmark in terms of definitions of educa-
tion. My argument is that there should be explicit educational values that
underpin what we do to guide us, and to ensure authenticity in our
research actions, throughout the course of the research process. To be an
autonomous researcher, we need to be clear about our values. We only
need to think about research undertaken to support genocide and other
atrocities of thought and action to reject certain sets of values as being
inappropriate for research in our research culture, but there needs to be
some framework or benchmark applied to our deliberations about values.
A code of research ethics or values, I contend, can be based on universal
assumptions about human rights. What makes values universal is not their
8 K. McArdle
origin from one culture or point of origin, but the profound mutuality of
experience that characterises human life (Ransome 2013).
Freedom Research is not committed to one set of values beyond the
benchmark that prevents atrocity; rather, it is a matter of being clear and
explicit about the values that underpin choices at all stage of the research
process so that the reader of the research can judge the authenticity, hon-
esty and quality of the processes and choices made. These values are
already implicit in existing research; Freedom Research requires that they
are made explicit.
I am using the term ‘Values’ to embrace the constellation of morality,
ethics, values and virtues. Where this refers to values alone, it is written
as ‘values.’ I choose the term Values rather than the term ‘ethics’ because
Values has more currency in the educational domain and is therefore
more accessible to the educator. I have provided extended definitions of
the terms morality ethics, values and virtues in the introduction to this
book. The definitions of these terms and the ideas that underpin them do
overlap. Morality refers to practical behaviour concerning what is ‘right’
and ‘wrong.’ Virtues are our personal qualities, which relate to our beliefs
about other people. Ethics is perhaps the study of what is right and
wrong, but is used in research in other ways, so I have chosen the word
‘values,’ as this is used in common parlance for deeply held beliefs, which
I suggest are also common to morality, ethics and virtues. I have provided
more extended definitions of these concepts in the Introduction.
Whose Values?
Now the question posed earlier about whose Values are the ones that
should apply in a research context needs to be tackled? I have already sug-
gested that Values are cultural and asked how one decides whose Values
are acceptable? I have already argued that ethics are multi-layered, com-
plex and changing over time. I am not a philosopher by background nor
do I seek here to come up with a definitive statement of the ‘correct’
Values to be held by the researcher. My argument is that there should be
values that underpin what we do and that these values should be made
explicit to guide what we do, to underpin it and to ensure authenticity in
our actions. To be an autonomous researcher we need to be clear about

our Values. A code of research Values, I contend, can be based on univer-
sal assumptions about human rights.
The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United
Nations General Assembly asserts the ‘inherent dignity and inalienable
rights of all members of the human family.’ Furthermore, I am drawn to
Brinkmann (2010), who quotes Dewey as saying, all sciences are moral
sciences insofar as they enable us to understand and improve the condi-
tions and agencies through which human beings live. Research is an
inherently beneficent approach to epistemology. Denzin and Giardina
(2010) chart a radical path for a future in which they call for an ethical
model in which the researcher is responsible not to a removed discipline
or institution, but to those he/she studies. The reader will see that this is
crucial to the model of the autonomous researcher that I seek to describe
in this book. Erickson (2010) takes this further in discussing qualitative
research:
Now I want to say that at its best, qualitative social research advances
human rights and affirms human dignity by seeking and telling the truth
about what particular people do in their everyday lives and about what
their actions mean to them. (p. 113)
Educational research, if it adheres to this principle, is inherently benef-

icent in that it seeks ultimately to know how people learn and how we
can improve this, which in turn is evaluative and involves critical judge-
ments. A further benchmark, in both qualitative and quantitative
research, is that, if one seeks to improve education, then one needs to be
cognisant of inclusion and social justice, which are inherent in a valuing
of human rights. So there is a benchmark that is used to judge the appro-
priateness of Value judgements I make about my own research and the
research of my students. Brooks et al. (2014) discuss the notion that
many principles of ethical research are based on Western values and that
there are other values. It is proposed that the research community in the
field of education is largely based on Western Values. Our core Values are
drawn from this strong collective thesis and one’s own strong individual
thesis, and one’s actions need to be governed by a manifestation of the
10 K. McArdle
attempt to reconcile these two sets of values (Ransome 2013). I have

chosen to make this explicit, but the remainder of this book is designed
to assist the researcher to reach his/her own judgements about Values in
the hierarchy so that his/her work can be on the one hand ethical, cre-
ative, innovative and autonomous, but, on the other hand, can also be
rigorous and robust. The book now turns to the principles that underpin
Freedom Research before exploring the research process in more detail
and the link between this rigour, robustness and these Values.
Principles of Freedom Research:
1. Research as a discipline is created and maintained by a community of

researchers in a cultural context and is socially constructed.
2. This social construction of research as a discipline implies that there
are boundaries and doxa (rules or habits) that limit us.
3. Limits to freedom need to be challenged to ensure that freedom for
innovation is possible. This includes opening doors and choosing to
walk through the doors.
4. Challenging the status quo ensures that all the possible means of gen-
erating knowledge are open to the researcher.
5. To ensure the quality of knowledge is maintained and ethical princi-
ples are adhered to the researcher needs to be clear and explicit about
his/her Values, which underpin all research choices.
6. The quality of the knowledge generated should be assessed according
to the quality of the Value choices made and articulated by the
researcher.
7. Freedom Research opens up the choices we can make in research prac-
tice by critiquing from a Values perspective the boundaries of a socially
constructed discipline.
That research is socially constructed is in my opinion without doubt in

that it is contended and argued about frequently in academic literature.
The rules and boundaries have become apparent to me in the course of
supervising many students and practitioners who struggle to understand
and work within them. A common discourse in research thinking is that
there are accepted means of generating knowledge. I suggest that this is

limiting and constraining to the researcher and to the ideas being explored
in educational research. The quality of knowledge must be maintained
for it to be close to the truth and to the ethical principles that underpin
what I consider to be the purpose of research, which is to create a better
society and world to live in. The way of maintaining this quality is to
assess in the peer research community the Values that have underpinned
the educational research. These principles critique the boundaries of
accepted forms of research and facilitate creative opportunities for the
researcher.
References
Brinkmann, S. (2010). Psychology as a Moral Science: Perspectives on Normativity.
London: Springer Books.
Brooks, R., te Riele, K., & Maguire, M. (2014). Ethics and Education Research.
London: Sage.
Denzin, N. K., & Giardina, M. D. (Eds.). (2010). Qualitative Inquiry and
Human Rights. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Erickson, F. (2010). Affirming Human Dignity in Qualitative Inquiry: Walking
the Walk. In N. K. Denzin & M. D. Giardina (Eds.), Qualitative Inquiry and
May, T. (2003). Qualitative Research in Action. London: Sage.
Mill, J. S. (1895 [1989]). On Liberty (S. Collini, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ransome, P. (2013). Ethics and Values in Social Research. Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Warburton, N. (2001). Freedom: An introduction with readings. London: Routledge.
2
The Social Context of Research
and Inquiry
Social Construction
Social construction is the process by which society categorises social
characteristics, which are embedded in history, culture and tradition. It
is a theory of knowledge in the discipline of sociology that examines
the development of jointly shared understandings of the world that
form the basis for assumptions about reality. It is important to this
argument that social status and power are inherent in the assumptions
about reality.
Social Epistemology
Research and inquiry are based on assumptions about knowledge and
what kinds of knowledge should be valued. In a traditional account
knowledge is acquired when your beliefs are true and when a justification
criterion is satisfied (O’Brien 2017). This is however critiqued by many
commentators. O’Brien cites Williamson who argues that this premise is

14 K. McArdle
based on two assumptions that can be criticised. The first is that the con-
cept of knowledge can be divided into constituent concepts, and second
is that the thinker is in a hybrid state partly constituted by his/her state
of mind and partly by the nature of the world. O’Brien describes the
Wittgensteinian approach to knowledge, which sees it as a concept like
‘game,’ which is a concept with many variations but without one com-
mon feature. There are ‘family traits’ but no one common feature.
Knowledge is very difficult to define.
Exactly what is considered to constitute knowledge in the research
community is socially constructed. For example, the traditional ways in
which knowledge is communicated in the external environment of the
research community are orthodoxies, which are founded on a limited
view of what constitutes knowledge in my experience. There is a funda-
mental assumption that underpins research, that it should contribute to
a body of knowledge and that it should therefore be public and shared.
I share this view. The ways in which this is frequently achieved are founded
on assumptions that knowledge may best be communicated in a confer-
ence, seminar or lecture environment, where knowledge is propositional
and may be extracted from the researcher through a talk, which is then
followed by questions. This, I propose, equates to the Freirean ‘banking’
principle of learning in terms of knowledge exchange and assumes that
the knowledge is transferable in this way.
The second traditional means of communicating knowledge is through
peer-reviewed publications. Once again there are underpinning assump-
tions about the ways in which knowledge should be communicated and
what constitutes knowledge, not least the assumption that knowledge is
best communicated through writing, often in a preferred style. These two
ways of communicating might well be useful, but beg the question of
what is being missed in terms of human knowledge and what is being
missed in terms of our learning from the work of others through this
process. There are often workshops at conferences and dialogical forms of
learning are increasingly being used in my experience, but the balance is
always strongly in favour of propositional knowledge. I suggest that this
balance leads to a devaluing of other ways of knowing and a marginalisa-
tion of those who choose to communicate differently and is a barrier to
The Social Context of Research and Inquiry 15
the participation of practitioners, such as teachers, teaching assistants and

community workers, for example. Wright (2017) takes this further and
suggests that the traditions of knowing are founded on Western ideas of
how the world is and should be and ignore the more connected forms of
thinking and communicating of other cultures, where community
knowledge is more significant than that of any individual. He proposes,
for example, more collective authorship so that authorship is not just the
domain of the academic writer, the need for more emphasis on feeling
thoughts and a wish to include the spiritual dimension in research. I wish
to emphasise here that there are many ways of knowing such as by
memory, by perception, morally, spiritually, by intuition, aesthetically, by
authority and experts, by acquaintance and by common sense, to name
but a few.
The subject of knowledge that is admissible also needs, in my opinion,
to be widened. Concepts of academic freedom of thought and expression
are, I suggest, laudable but there is a concealed hierarchy of value placed
on thinking and pressure to avoid controversy in many academic institu-
tions. I have encountered unwarranted prejudice in higher education
against the practice of those who subscribe to the thinking of Rudolf
Steiner; my experience is that good work is being done, particularly with
children with autism but it has been dismissed in its entirety because of
the belief by some of those who practice this work in reincarnation. A
belief in reincarnation has not in my opinion adversely affected the work
in a Rudolf Steiner school that I have evaluated any more than more tra-
ditional Christian belief. Similarly, this concealed hierarchy of value
places more value in my experience on highly theoretical work as opposed
to the more practical accounts of research undertaken by teachers and
other practitioners. Theory is valued over practice in some academic
circles in the evaluation of articles.
The means of finding out are problematical. Perception is often
thought of as a means to know things through observation in particular.
This however can be critiqued by reference once again to the thinking of
Rudolf Steiner, who considered that we have more than five senses. I tend
to agree as he thought that the sensation of warmth, for example, was an
additional sense and I find this to be arguable and convincing. Using the
16 K. McArdle
senses to observe reality is contestable in that realities look different to

different people. This brief foray into epistemology is intended to expose
the reader to the notion that there are contested ways of knowing and, as
follows, that the means of finding out can also be contested.
The Community of Researchers

It is intended now to describe the community of researchers and their
activities as socially constructed and inherently oppressive to those who
do not follow the dominant discourses. It is plain to see that the com-
munity of researchers has power dynamics at its heart. It is a class of
people often from more privileged backgrounds, which is protected by
entrance qualifications of both formal and informal types—degrees,
and acceptance and conformity to rules of behaviour, with consequences
of exclusion to those who do not conform. There are many safe and
happy communities of researchers, but I am equally aware of communi-
ties of teachers and higher education staff who feel excluded from the
communities because they lack the confidence to join and because the
community excludes through a complex and sophisticated pattern of
social norms and behaviours. These norms and behaviours include, but
not exclusively, a developed and reinforced sense that the members of
the community are highly (perhaps more) intelligent, that they are
more knowledgeable about education and that they are more confident
and worthwhile. These social norms are reinforced by higher education
institutions in that those who generate knowledge in the accepted
ways, through research, are more likely to be promoted and so are more
senior; they get the opportunity to travel and to discuss educational
ideas and are valued in many other ways above those with a more
practical knowledge.
For students in some communities of researchers, those who conform
to accepted and orthodox ways of writing are valued and assessed more
highly. For some, referring to the ‘old faithfuls’ such as Vygotsky and
Piaget is required, where more radical thinkers are excluded. Similarly,
the persuasion to adopt ‘accepted’ forms of inquiry rather that the less
safe, idiosyncratic approach is a symptom of this subtle and sophisticated

approach to research.
There are many other examples of the social construction of research
and inquiry as a discipline and a means of knowing and of what we
know. Feminist writers have helped with this understanding. Driver
(2007) cites the example of Kohlberg’s well-known stages of moral
development in children. It is presented as a hierarchy of development.
Stage 3 of the six-stage hierarchy is ‘social systems and conscience
maintenance’—subordinate one’s own desires or personal relationships
for the sake of group norms or for maintaining group rules. Stage 6, a
higher stage, is ‘universal ethical principles’—adhering to principles
with universal validity. If this is the case then many women and girls and
I would also add people from other cultures will get stuck forever at
Stage 3. Women and men arguably have different ways of looking at
morals, it is proposed, and it is not helpful to think of it as a lower form
of development.
Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony, which has relevance
here, to describe how domination and control are maintained not only
through coercion but through voluntary consent (Bell 2016) as this, in
my opinion, is true of the dominant discourses of research and inquiry,
which may limit the researcher. The discourses of research and inquiry
are produced and maintained by millions of people acting within
accepted rules and according to prescribed practices. This hegemony
can induce acceptance and belonging. Through hegemony, argues Bell,
‘roles and rules, institutional norms, historical accounts, and social
practices of dominant groups come to be accepted as the natural order’
(2016, p. 11).
There is in my opinion a dominant discourse about what is and is
not acceptable as a way of knowing and also of finding out. Facts are
valued over opinions and quantitative studies are valued by policy mak-
ers over more qualitative processes, in the simplest form. This is how-
ever, as Bell (2016) expressed it, translated into accepted prescribed
practices, which limit us if we internalise this socialisation, which
becomes part of our stereotypes, our beliefs, and circulates through our
language. As Bell puts it, an unjust status quo comes to be accepted
18 K. McArdle
and replicated by those who benefit from it and also by those who suf-
fer from oppressive norms. If this seems like strong language, then I
need only to reflect on the experiences of students who have been
oppressed by the norms of the research community. One example is a
student who wished to study in her own African country using unstruc-
tured interviews to work with a hard-to-reach population, who was
told that this would only generate ramblings and she needed to do a
questionnaire to generate solid statistics, which could be extrapolated
to other (more relevant?) populations. The student was only interested
in HER population and had a local knowledge of how best to manage
the generation of data.
There are also benefits in maintaining the dominant discourse. One is
less likely to be challenged, which makes for an easier life than if one
deviates from the norm. As suggested earlier in this chapter, acceptance
and belonging are important advantages of conformism. People can be
marginalised by deviating from the norms, and so this challenging of the
norm demands confidence on the part of the researcher and demands a
community of backers for those who choose to take an alternative route.
Those who are advantaged by any system have an important role to play
to assist others who may find themselves marginalised. Eagleton (2016)
describes culture and the social unconscious, which is ‘the invisible
colour of everyday life, the taken-for-granted of our workaday existence,
too close to the eyeball to be fully objectified’ (p. 50). Working everyday
in a research context, it is too easy to become unconscious of the
power and oppressive dynamics of the research culture in which one is
immersed. I was at a PhD viva recently where there was a degree of relish
at having identified the perceived shortcomings of a thesis, which could
not be defended by the student. This was inadmissible human behav-
iour in my thinking as well as being a dynamic of power in the research
community.
Research in a school context is also susceptible to the power dynamics
that accompany being part of the research community. At a recent con-
ference, one teacher talked about her fear of ‘setting herself above’ the
other teachers in her school and the negative regard from colleagues that
this would induce because she was doing some classroom-based research.
The implicit fear was that she would be seen to be participating in activi-
ties above her station. Head teachers have an important role to play in
facilitating research in the school.
What to Do About the Social Unconscious?

There are many examples of ways in which the research community is
socially constructed and we all may participate in this power system to
greater or lesser extents. So what can be done to minimise the effects of
this social unconscious? We can be critically conscious, which is an inten-
tion of this text. Freire (1970), in a highly influential text, Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, discusses conscientisation. This is a means of working to man-
age oppression. I consider the dominant discourses of research to be
oppressive in the normalised behaviour the discourse requires. Bell (2016)
describes this goal in the context of group oppression as:
to develop awareness or mindfulness of the social and political factors that

create oppression to analyze the patters that sustain oppression and the
interests it serves, and to take action to work democratically with others to
reimagine and remake the world in the interest of all. (p. 16)
One of the purposes of this book is to counter the dominant discourses

through making the researcher aware of what is the social unconscious
and encouraging him/her to be aware of the power discourses that are
linked to research and inquiry. This is not however sufficient and one
needs to hear the voice of those at the margins who choose to write in a
non-academically accepted format, who choose methodologies that are
unusual and not off-the-shelf, who know their sample population differ-
ently from the norm of working with strangers and who choose to reject
objectivity in favour of a planned and careful subjectivity.
Adams (2016) discusses social identity models and the process by
which oppression may be rejected. I have adapted this to my own context
of oppression of research norms. This process is the means by which the
researcher becomes autonomous. Freedom Research seeks to promote
autonomy for the researcher through the development of an awareness of
20 K. McArdle
the discourses of orthodoxy and how they may be challenged and to give
courage to the researcher, who seeks to challenge. Adams’ process is
intended to be liberating from the different dimensions of this social
constructionism:
1 . acceptance and internalising the dominant ideology and values;

2. questioning, rejecting and resisting the dominant ideology;
3. exploring, redefining and developing a new sense of identity;
4. integrating and internalising the new identity along with commitment
to making possible this opportunity for others.
I wish to draw attention to points (2)–(4). The first point in Adams’

model is interesting in that internalising the dominant ideology in a
research context is a process of learning that can take many years and has
both explicit and implicit barriers to acceptance. Examples include not
least the need for higher education acceptance and a need to learn what
is considered to be rigorous, valid and robust. Questioning and resisting
the dominant ideology is germane to Freedom Research, where new
methods and thinking are valued. Exploring a new sense of identity is
necessarily a little uncomfortable at first as one is seeking to identify one-
self in a new way, which involves a process or transition and perhaps see-
ing new ways of being. Belonging and acceptance are important, and
finding others who think this way can support this need. Integrating and
living with the new identity come with experience and trust in the pro-
cess. Commitment to making possible this change for others is crucial to
develop a community of belonging and acceptance.
The inequality linked to the power and social status dynamics of the
research culture can occur at multiple levels. The individual can have
internalised understandings of the research culture, which can make him/
her feel unworthy or insignificant in the research community. Institutional
mores can affect the individual; the School or the University may mirror
dominant discourses and norms to the detriment of those who choose to
be different. At cultural and societal levels norms and values govern
expectations, attitudes and behaviours; one only needs to look at newspa-
pers or listen to the news on television to see the kinds of knowing or
inquiry that are valued by society and its powerful institutions. All these
levels interact and combine to produce a very strong cultural tradition,

which is an often seemingly intangible heritage of social behaviour.
It is time for a continuing reconsideration of the norms of the research
community. Here it was only possible to outline a few examples. It is a
feature of society, in my opinion, that institutions move more slowly than
society demands, and that history can linger with us long after it has
served its time. Accordingly, through Freedom Research a new paradigm
of thinking about inquiry is being sought to liberate the researcher from
traditional thought to allow new thought to develop in a context of
maintaining the quality of inquiry but liberating it through diversity.
References
Adams, M. (2016). Pedagogical Foundations for Social Justice Education. In
M. Adams, L. A. Bell, D. J. Goodman, & J. Y. Khyati (Eds.), Teaching for
Diversity and Social Justice. New York: Routledge.
Bell, L. A. (2016). Theoretical Foundations for Social Justice Education. In
M. Adams, L. A. Bell, D. J. Goodman, & J. Y. Khyati (Eds.), Teaching for
Diversity and Social Justice. New York: Routledge.
Driver, J. (2007). Ethics: The Fundamentals. Carlton, VIC: Blackwell.
Eagleton, T. (2016). Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury.
O’Brien, D. (2017). An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Wright, M. (2017). Keynote Address. Collaborative Action Research Network
(CARN) Conference, October 22, Crete.
3
Freedom from Orthodoxy
Clarifying Views
Freedom Research seeks to liberate the researcher from orthodoxy through
a reliance on Values that are made explicit and justified to the reader of
the research. It is crucial that the researcher is aware of his/her own Values
to assist with the conduct of research that is cogent, robust and justified,
and also creative and imaginative and fundamentally of high quality. I
have chosen largely to avoid using the term morality in this book in place
of Values, but morality is central to our beliefs that will impact on the
quality and ethical integrity of research. I mentioned in the previous
chapter that the terms morality, ethics, values and virtues are interrelated.
Historically, the term ethics has been used to discuss the development of
moral philosophy. Here I continue to use the term Values as Ethics car-
ries particular connotations in a research context, except where I wish to
differentiate between the terms.
In this chapter, autonomy is discussed as one of the objectives of this
book and its links to social and virtue epistemology.

24 K. McArdle
Freedom
Malik (2014) in The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics
provides an accessible and interesting journey through the history of free
will leading to moral judgements. It is not the place of this book to repeat
this history, but it is necessary to consider and justify the position taken
in relationship to the philosophy of freedom. What is freedom as a human
experience, asks Fromm (1960) in a book very much of its time that
looks at individual psychology. Is Freedom only the absence of external
pressure or is it also the presence of something? The presence of what? My
answer to this question in the research context is that freedom is the pres-
ence of autonomy to make value choices and the ability to convince self
and the audience of the research of the value and honesty of what has
been chosen.
Malik (2014) suggests, and I agree, that morality is inseparable from
choice in the modern world but this has not always been the case.
Freedom of choice too has not always been possible. The history of moral-
ity or free will is germane to my discussion of Freedom Research. I am of
the opinion that individuals can make free choices about Values; this has
however not always been the case. Two dimensions of the history of
Values will be discussed. The first is the relationship between the indi-
vidual and the community in terms of ‘goodness’ or virtue and the sec-
ond is the relationship of value choices or ethical choices to context.
The emergence of philosophy as distinct from poetry and mythology
led us through the Presocratics to Socrates who established that morality
should have an objective existence independent of either Gods or humans.
This leads to the thinking of Plato and the notion that the inner world of
the individual is non-existent and an individual’s identity and interest
were bound up with the community; ethics was a means of regulating the
social roles and relationships in a community (Malik, ibid.). Plato also
has the theory of Forms, which required that there was a concept of
‘goodness,’ for example, to which all ‘good’ things aspired. Aristotle in
contrast argued that the knowledge of Forms was the knowledge of uni-
versals but ethics was the kind of knowledge needed to guide our actions
and needed to take account of the individual context as all contexts are
Freedom from Orthodoxy 25
different. Aristotle subscribed to two kinds of virtues, moral and intel-

lectual. Moral virtues are what we think of as character traits, and intel-
lectual virtues are linked to abilities such as intelligence or creativity to
give my own examples. For both Aristotle and Plato the primary good
was the good of the community not the good of the individual (Malik,
ibid.). This is important to the concept of Freedom Research where the
choices of the individual will have an impact on the community; the
community of researchers; the community of educators who read
research; and the community of those who are engaged to participate in
educational research, such as pupils/participants, colleagues, schools,
teachers and other educators.
The growth of Christianity in Western cultures and the broader
Enlightenment philosophies put the individual at the centre of choices
about his/her own destiny. Utilitarianism proposed that the ultimate cri-
terion used to judge an act was the consequences of the act for the great-
est good for humankind. This focus on the community of people has
gradually eroded, I suggest, in modern times; psychology and the focus
on the self and the construction of identity has resulted in a self-
centredness which is not man or woman as he or she could be or should
be but woman or man as she or he wants to be. In research terms there is
a dichotomy between morality as individual preference and rules or pre-
scriptions (deontology) about what one should do. I think that Freedom
Research demands that there is a bringing together of freedom of choice
in morality tempered by benchmarks that guide us in this making of
choices for the good of the communities mentioned earlier.
Virtues Needed for Freedom Research

Freedom Research demands courage. The dictionary defines courage as
the power or ability of dealing with or facing danger, fear and pain (Collins
Shorter English Dictionary, 1995). Challenging orthodoxy requires cour-
age as one may encounter criticism that demands effort to counter it and
confidence to remain emotionally committed to a point of view.
Orthodoxy is conforming to established standards and attitudes. These
standards in research are not absolutes as some would choose to believe.
26 K. McArdle
They are socially constructed and widely accepted points of view that
have a tradition of common use but are neither correct nor wholly invio-
late in terms of what we choose to do. In the same way that I have differ-
ent values from, say, my grandmother about the extramarital sexual
activity of teenagers, it does not mean that either she was or I am wrong.
Rather, it is the case that traditions and beliefs change and need to change
over time.
I have encountered researchers who believe in objectivity as if it were
achievable and indisputable in research and any challenge to it appears to
be a personal challenge to their moral philosophy and this has in my
experience on occasion led them to the desire to attack widely and, yes,
angrily, research which does not make this claim, as if they themselves
have been impugned. Many threads of influence over the years have
served to suggest that objectivity is indeed challengeable not least Kuhn
(1962) in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This is why courage or the
ability to deal with disagreement is important. There are many research-
ers who will choose to support the researcher in Freedom Research but
there are equally many who will find the new ideas to be challenging to
their orthodox viewpoint.
Courage is, however, dependent on two other concepts: knowledge of
research and confidence. By this I mean that it is important to under-
stand from what exactly one is choosing to be different. I have heard
atheist and agnostic parents talking about allowing their children to
engage with religious education so that they can choose later on in life
whether to believe in God and the Church. Being free in research choices
demands that one knows from what one may be diverging, so that one
can justify choices to oneself and to others. I do not recommend Freedom
Research to the beginning researcher who needs to understand the skel-
eton of research before putting the idiosyncratic flesh onto the bones.
I do not recommend diverging from certain key processes that underpin
inquiry as will become apparent in the descriptions later in this text.
Rather, I seek to expand the choices that can be made within the research
framework of inquiry. Knowledge of research can come from a range of
sources including literature on research methods, social interactions and
observations, experience of doing research, and simple critical awareness
of what other people think about different aspects of research.
Confidence or belief in one’s own abilities is required so that one can

justify oneself at the very least and stick to one’s guns. Certainty is needed
that what is done is robust, valid, relevant and appropriate. Confidence
is something it is hoped the reader will gain by reading this book and
others which seek to facilitate a mature approach to research choices.
Confidence is a belief in one’s own abilities, or trust, and this may be
achieved by a critical knowing that one has worked hard to get a choice
right. It is also often achieved through the support of others. So, seeking
out people who trust and share interest in freedom of choice in research
is useful.
A second virtue, an intellectual virtue, I wish to discuss here is criti-
cality. Freedom Research demands that one shows how and why one
deviates from orthodoxy and what has underpinned the choice to do
so. Criticality is a contested term and has a variety of meanings,
which inevitably reflect the ideology and the world view of the user
(Brookfield 2005). Criticality is much discussed by those in higher
education in terms of what they expect from postgraduate students,
for example. I find actual definitions of criticality less frequently dis-
cussed, except, sometimes, in terms of postulated outcomes for edu-
cational coursework. I was recently at a conference and heard the
definition of criticality—applying careful judgement—and I liked its
simplicity and directness. Careful judgement is required if one is to
deviate from the orthodox approaches to research which may them-
selves be both tried and tested and at the same time inappropriate in
Freedom Research. If one is to make free research choices then one
must be able to form an argument to justify them and this demands
the making of these careful judgements.
Punch (2009) quotes Wallace and Poulson (2003, p. 6), who define
being critical as:
Adopting an attitude of scepticism or reasoned doubt;

Habitually questioning the quality of claims to knowledge;
Scrutinizing claims to see how far they are convincing;
Respecting others as people at all times;
Being open-minded; and
Being constructive.
28 K. McArdle
I find this description also to be useful and implicitly full of virtues,

such as respect, broad-mindedness and a constructive attitude towards
the thinking of others. Hughes et al. (2010) are helpful in introducing
the basic skills of critical thinking outlined below, which they describe in
a way that foregrounds reasoning and argument. They assert that we rea-
son when we make decisions, solve problems, assess character, explain
events, write poems, predict elections and interpret works of art, among
other things. One needs, however, to distinguish reasoning and being
critical from mere thinking:
When we are merely thinking, our thoughts simply come to us, one after
another; when we reason, we actively link thoughts together in such a way
that we believe one thought provides support for another thought. (Hughes
et al. 2010, p. 19)
Constructing arguments to justify freedom approaches to research is

necessary. An argument is formally described as a statement(s) (premise
or premises) that leads to a conclusion. Every argument claims that its
premises support its conclusion but to be critical in an argument one
needs to see how strong the connection is between premise and conclu-
sion. It can be argued that critical skills are about carefully judging the
soundness of arguments. The skills needed for this are described by
Hughes et al. (2010). One needs to be good at
• interpreting meanings in an argument (interpretive skills);

• deciding, as much as possible, the truth (or likely truth) of statements
(verification skills); and
• assessing whether the premise links to the conclusion (reasoning skills).
Thinking about what is meant by the three skill sets above is important
for criticality. Interpretive skills involve establishing meaning and this is
a complex process where interpretation of language may be hindered by
ambiguity and vagueness. Verification skills involve looking for the evi-
dence that is adduced in a premise or conclusion. Reasoning looks for
linkages. I do not intend to discuss what is truth. Rather, I seek to explain
that the researcher needs to analyse or create evidential arguments.
Having these three sets of skills enables the researcher to persuade oth-
ers to agree; one can create arguments. Ethical judgements underpin the
use of critical arguments. Is it right to be critical of others’ arguments
without them being able to reply? Has the truth been bent to fit in with
our point of view? Has one bent another point of view to fit in with the
critique? These are questions the researcher needs to think about in creat-
ing arguments and critiquing the work of others. My mother used to call
telling lies that were told for a justified reason ‘practised lying.’ For exam-
ple if I told a friend she looked nice when in actual fact I thought she
looked unfortunate, this was practised lying. I think we need to avoid
‘practised arguing,’ which means using the skills of critical thinking in a
way that is not consistent with our own moral judgements of what is
right or wrong. Hughes et al. describe the moral dilemmas tellingly:
Like any skill, critical thinking skills can be used for good or ill. There are
many ways in which they can be abused. They can be used to make a bad
argument look much stronger than it really is and to make an opponent’s
position look much weaker than it really is. They can be used to make
ourselves look wise and others look foolish. They can be used to avoid hav-
ing to respond to legitimate criticisms and to persuade others to change
their beliefs for inadequate reasons. (2010, p. 27)
Translating this discussion on criticality back to the research project,

there is a multitude of questions one can ask oneself when preparing to
communicate research in a way that is critical of one’s research Values.
These are as follows:
• Is the problem clearly defined and is its significance established?

• What is my personal perspective concerning this study? Is it justified?
• What is my theoretical framework and why have I chosen this?
• Have I dealt with literature thoroughly and in a balanced way?
• How good is my method—sample, data collection and so on?
• Are my conclusions justified by my findings?
• Does my argument in the discussion hold together as coherent, cogent
and concise?
• Is my work written/spoken for the right audience?
30 K. McArdle
• Is my work useful to educational practice? What are its strengths and

limitations? Does it contribute to the body of knowledge in the field?
Answering these questions about the research will assist the researcher
to identify what matters to him/her about the research and how critical
he/she has been in its presentation.
hat Should the Researcher Do and What

W
Kind of Researcher Should the Reader Be?
Shafer-Landau (2007) has produced an interesting anthology of ethical
theory. He suggests that at the heart of ethical theory are two questions.
What should I do and what kind of person should I be? This is, in my
opinion, inherently subjective. I believe that there can be criteria for right
and wrong if we argue, as in the first chapter, that there are standards or
benchmarks that can be applied to educational principles and Values in
research should be guided by these standards insofar as they go. These
standards, however, provide no guidelines on behaviour about what
should be done in research or what kind of researcher one should be.
Objective criteria exist in some sense in that Values are frequently gov-
erned by religious dogma and explicit or implied moral standards. I have
yet to see a Christian or other religion’s guidance on research ethics. Yet
our beliefs in relation to research are representations of how we view the
world morally.
Values are entirely subjective, argues Mackie (1997 [2007]). That
this action is ‘right’ means I approve of this action or more generally
that moral judgements are equivalent to reports of a person’s own feel-
ings or attitudes. Rightness or goodness of behaviour is also subjective.
Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics argues that there is a goodness of hap-
piness and well-being that is intrinsically desired because it is good, but
Mackie suggests that a denial of objective values can cause us to feel
lost because one can lose a sense of purpose as nothing is prescribed.
I share Mackie’s opinion that moral attitudes are at least partly social in
origin:
[P]atterns of behaviour put pressure on individuals, and each individual tends

to internalize these pressures and to join in requiring these patterns of behav-
iour of himself (sic) and of others. … We need morality to regulate interpersonal
relations, to control some of the ways in which people behave towards one
another, often in opposition to contrary implications. (2007, p. 34)
Making a value one’s own is to embrace corresponding ways of think-

ing and ways of being. Harman (2007) agrees that morality arises when a
group of people reach an implicit agreement or come to a tacit under-
standing about their relationship with one another. One makes inner
judgements about what is right and supposes that other people will think
this way, too. There will be approbation. Of course, not everything gener-
ally agreed upon is right. One only has to look at history to see this.
Harman (ibid.) gives the complex example of slavery, which has been con-
sidered appropriate by society for an extended period in some countries.
Corporal punishment which still applies in schools in some countries is
another example. One’s moral landscapes, I would argue, are influenced
by what other people will think of what we do.
Kagan (2007) argues that intuitive reactions to situations are
important:
[W]hen arguing for or against a moral theory we should think of our case
specific intuitions as akin to observations. When thinking about particular
cases we can simply see—immediately-, and typically without further
ado—whether say, a given act would be right or wrong. … An adequate
moral theory must take account of these facts, it must accommodate these
intuitions. (p. 83)
The argument continues with the statement that there is no harm in

positing a moral sense and that something generates moral intuitions—
they do not arise out of thin air and one needs to trust them. One can
make the assumption that one’s moral intuitions are generally reliable
and that just as empirical observations are largely reliable ways of trusting
the senses, so too is intuition a means of trusting one’ s moral judge-
ments. There are of course objections to relying on intuition, but in every
ethical dilemma we encounter that the researcher is inclined to focus on
his/her intuition about the judgements he/she makes. The researcher
32 K. McArdle
needs to be reflective to make judgements about intuition. One needs

also to be conscious that a moral theory based on intuition requires some
justification based on having empirical theory that endorses most of one’s
empirical observations. This is of course troubling, suggests Kagan, but
the fact remains that one is inclined to attend to case-specific intuitions
and one worries when moral beliefs run afoul of them, and it is possible
to take comfort in the extent to which our moral beliefs accord with
them. ‘No moral argument—no claim, no theory will ever seem compelling
if it has not been subjected to the testing we provide when we think of cases’
(Kagan 2007, p. 93).
Sher (2007) discusses the implications of the fact that deeply held
moral beliefs have been ‘profoundly affected’ by upbringing and experi-
ence. Indeed, if the researcher thinks of Bourdieu’s (1972) concept of
‘habitus,’ he/she becomes aware of the culture and background that has
affected him/her and which will affect deeply held beliefs about the way
the world is and should be. This link to upbringing and experience sug-
gests that one’s character is important to one’s choices of Values and one’s
character is important I propose in considering virtues. Virtue epistemol-
ogy considers character and is frequently linked to social epistemology,
which looks at institutions, and I would suggest that orthodox views of
research are a social epistemology.
Social and Virtue Epistemology

Virtue, in common use, is an old-fashioned term in Western societies.
The study of virtue ethics has, however, a long history and there has more
recently been an upsurge in interest in virtues in academic communities.
I choose here to focus on the work of Russell (2005), who discusses self-
respect in terms of virtues, as I think that this has significant bearing on
becoming an autonomous educational researcher. He argues that not
only is it a character trait but one can ask if self-respect is of moral impor-
tance. He proposes that one can find self-respect in Aristotelian virtue
ethics. He cites stability and strength of character as important in the
virtue of courage, which is aligned to moral fortitude. Second, self-respect
is a form of the sterling, noble quality of good character, and third,
self-respect is also a form of maturity of character. He concludes that,

while respect is not necessarily a distinct virtue, it is a distinct character
trait that makes a person who he/she is.
Russell further suggests that self-respect is a deep and firm commit-
ment to one’s interests and goals, to one’s judgement and convictions and
to one’s progress and development. It is more than self-esteem or feeling
good about oneself:
[S]uch people are not merely true to their values, whatever they are, but are
committed to having their values be worthy of them, and are committed to
themselves as being worth the effort it takes to rise to embrace worthwhile
values. This also means that self respect is not just any commitment to
oneself but a reflective and rational commitment to oneself as valuable and
worthy of respect and thus worthy of values one can respect. (p. 103)
Self-respect changes and develops over time, and Russell suggests that
self-respect is holistic and necessary for holding values that regulate
behaviour. He suggests that self-respect and virtue shape each other and
that self-respect tends to strengthen values and be strengthened by them.
The virtuous person, he suggests, is not merely committed to values one
by one but is committed to being a whole person defined in part by the
well-reasoned values he/she has. Aristotle’s virtuous person is a self-
respecting persona, argues Russell, and self-respect is essential for the
development of the kinds of knowledge and skills that are appropriate to
virtue. Aristotle according to Russell advocates knowledge of values and
what is appropriate and inappropriate. To fail to live up to one’s own
values is to fail live up to oneself.
Kotzee (2014) provides helpful definitions to distinguish between
social epistemology and virtue epistemology. The former is how forms of
knowledge often depend on social factors; social epistemology holds that
one may best understand how to foster their growth of knowledge by
thinking about social institutions such as school, politics and research
institutions. Virtue epistemology focuses on the knower himself/herself.
The question is not so much what knowledge is as what it is to be a good
knower. Freedom Research brings these two understandings of episte-
mology together. Freedom Research demands that one considers the
34 K. McArdle
social construction of the research community and its principles. It also

demands that the researcher considers what it is to be a good knower.
Baehr (2014) in discussing virtue epistemology considers what are the
important goals of education and in doing so underscores the epistemo-
logical relationship between the purpose of education and generating
new knowledge, both are about knowing, He suggests the virtues of curi-
osity, open-mindedness, attentiveness, intellectual carefulness, intellec-
tual courage, intellectual rigour and intellectual honesty as the aim of
education to foster growth in these traits. I would argue that these are
essential for Freedom Research. Furthermore, Baehr suggests that intel-
lectual virtues or personal qualities of the lifelong learner are important.
The lifelong learner must have a broad base of practical and theoretical
knowledge but also requires a curious and inquisitive mind and a desire
for courage, attentiveness and reflectiveness. Intellectual determination,
perseverance and courage are also necessary. Once again these cognitive
virtues are important to the researcher. This shows the congruence of
aims of education and of Freedom Research. Autonomy which is dis-
cussed in the next section may be considered either as a character trait or
disposition or as a social context in which research takes place.
Autonomy
Autonomy in a Freedom Research context may be defined as the freedom
to determine one’s own actions or behaviours, which underpin the phi-
losophies and principles of Freedom Research, where choices depend on
the free judgement of the individual researcher. Autonomy implies a
degree of confidence and certainty that what one chooses to do is right.
This in turn implies maturity and wisdom. Wisdom implies an accumu-
lated knowledge based on propositional knowledge, experience, insight
and other ways of knowing. Maturity implies being relatively advanced,
which may not be linked to age, and to perhaps being ripe or fully grown.
It is these qualities that this book seeks to promote through advocating
and motivating the researcher to explore his/her own beliefs and knowl-
edge to judge what can and should be done in a research process in an
educational context. Justifying choice is required and Kotzee (2014)
describes the philosophy of ‘virtue responsibilism,’ where a true belief is

knowledge if it results from an acquired intellectual character trait such
as curiosity, open-mindedness or intellectual thoroughness. This applies
again I contend for Freedom Research.
Goldberg (2014), in discussing epistemically autonomous subjects,
defines the term in the following way:
An epistemically autonomous subject is one who judges and decides for

herself, where her judgements and decisions are reached on the basis of
reasons which she has in her possession, where she appreciates the signifi-
cance of these reasons, and where (if queried) she could articulate the bear-
ing of her reasons on the judgement or decision in question. (p. 15)
I cite this for its bearing on autonomy and the need to justify the
quality of judgements and decisions reached, which are founded on our
Values. Goldberg goes on to suggest that one of the central aims of edu-
cation is to inculcate, develop and support students’ capacity to think
for themselves. It is suggested that it is a tempting picture to hold the
opinion that to think for oneself is to depend epistemically only on
oneself. We are all, however, dependent on others for our beliefs and
judgments. Almost everything one knows about the world is derived
from others beyond immediate experience. Backhurst (2014) discusses
learning from others and suggests that one can start by thinking that
knowledge is shareable. When a knower expresses his/her knowledge,
then another person in accepting that knowledge by being willing to
reassert it shares in that knowledge. Accordingly, our Values are rarely
founded on nothing but belief. They are founded on perception, mem-
ory and understanding the testimony of others (e.g. teachers). Although
memory, perception and testimony are of course of knowledge,
Backhurst asserts that we need to have sensitivity to the context in
which the knowledge is presented. So, the researcher needs to be clear
that the source of knowledge is reliable. Two central thoughts inform
epistemic autonomy:
First, each of us is responsible for our own beliefs in the sense that, if our
beliefs are challenged in a reasonable way, we are beholden to respond or
36 K. McArdle
give up the beliefs in question. Second, each individual must settle for
herself the question what to believe. In forming a belief a person adds a
component to a conception of the world, allegiance to which is partly con-
stitutive of her identity. (Backhurst 2014, p. 46)
In this context of discussing epistemic autonomy and the dependence

on others, how the researcher establishes further and makes explicit
Values needs to be explored.
Exploring Our Own Values and Virtues

Baehr (2014) in discussing intellectual virtues proposes seven measures
for fostering intellectual character growth in the educational setting,
thinking perhaps of the child and the school. These are, I propose, rele-
vant to how we explore Values that relate to learning how to be autono-
mous in conducting research and I have adapted these measures.
A supportive culture is important—a culture which promotes intellec-
tual character growth. Direct instruction is helpful—a rich and informed
understanding of intellectual virtues can assist one to embody the traits
in question. Self-reflection and self-assessment are important strategies dis-
cussed further in this chapter. A fourth measure includes making explicit
connections between the course material and intellectual virtues and vices
required. This involves blending then into the curriculum—or life, I
would suggest for this context. A fifth way is facilitating growth in intel-
lectual virtues involving opportunities to practise actions characteristic of
intellectual virtues, putting theory into practice. The sixth measure is inte-
grating virtue concepts and standards in formal and informal assessments.
For me this is assessed by the reader of the research, and feedback on
research can have a powerful effect on future practice. Finally, modelling
intellectual virtues is important. As a supervisor of students or mentor of
colleagues, one can show how to reflect and communicate in ways that
have an impact on students’ fundamental beliefs and attitudes to con-
ducting research.
Clarifying values is interesting in itself as it gives knowledge of the self,
but here how values impinge on research in either positive or negative
ways is important. I wish to draw on four terms that I think are germane
to this clarification of values for research purposes. These are interrelated
and frequently confused but each is significant in its own right. They are:
Reflexivity; Reflection; Social Reflection; Self Awareness.
It is crucial to the quality and truth of research that the researcher

should use these four processes to allow himself/herself the freedom to
deviate from the conventional and the traditional. One must be able to
justify research choices to oneself as well as to others.
Reflexivity
Reflexivity is the process of challenging assumptions made by the
researcher at each stage of the research process. For those of us who wish
to be autonomous researchers, the challenging of what we think and how
this affects the research cannot be separated from Values. Bolton (2014)
defines what it is to be reflexive:
To be reflexive is to examine, for example, the limits of our knowledge, how

our own behaviour plays into organisational structures counter to our own
personal and professional values, and why such practises might marginalise
groups or exclude individuals. It is questioning how congruent our actions are
with our espoused values and theories (e.g. about religion or gender). (p. 7)
The quotation above sets out examples of how one can be reflexive. It
helps to understand reflexivity if we think of something that goes back on
itself like a reflex angle in geometry. Bolton goes on to discuss the strate-
gies that can be employed for achieving reflexivity and these include
internal dialogue and the support of trusted others, such as supervisors or
peers. Reflexivity is important at all stages of the research but is generally
considered to be most important in interpretation. I propose that reflex-
ivity should inform all aspects of the research process. As Alvesson and
Skoldberg (2000) propose, data and facts are the constructions or results
of our interpretations, ‘we have to do something with our sensory impres-
sions, if these are to be comprehensible and meaningful’ (p. 1).
38 K. McArdle
The practice of reflexivity is now almost taken for granted in qualita-

tive research (Dosekun 2015). In seeking to achieve reflexivity, I find
Bourdieu’s (1972 [2007]) concept of ‘field’ to be particularly helpful,
where he sees people as operating in a social field, which, like a football
field, has rules of behaviour in different roles. Conditions of competi-
tion and power predict our action dispositions in the everyday context.
So in research one is disposed to think in particular ways linked to com-
petition and power. But, this explanation is too simple. Bourdieu describes
how the unconscious is never anything other than the forgetting of
history:
The ‘unconscious’ is never anything other than the forgetting of history,

which history itself produces by incorporating the objective structures it
produces in the second natures of ‘habitus’ … in each of us in varying
proportions there is part of yesterday’s man (sic); it is yesterday’s man who
inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little compared
with the long past in the course of which we were formed and from which
we result. Yet we do not sense this man of the past, because he is inveterate
in us; he makes up the unconscious part of ourselves. (p. 79)
So, one is very aware of recent history because it has not had time to
become part of our unconscious but there are older histories, which form
dispositions. In short, the habitus mentioned in the quotation produces
individual and collective practices that seem sensible and reasonable but
are the product of our individual and collective histories. The history of
research informs in subtle ways how research is done today.
Reflexivity is a means of challenging what the researcher thinks at
each stage of the research process and considering what effect values
have had on choices made, decisions and interpretations. By being
reflexive one can liberate oneself for the purpose of freedom. One can be
clear how what one thinks is affecting the findings. There is no way that
one can set values aside, in my opinion, despite what some would argue
about research objectivity—one can simply be aware of one’s own biases.
One only needs to look at competing interpretations of so-called objec-
tive experiment in the biological sciences, for example, to see that objec-
tivity is impossible; approaching objectivity in the biological and physical
sciences is no doubt desirable, but in education it is arguably not

achievable. Reflexivity enhances the quality and robustness of our

research and seeks a fairness in the data.
Etherington (2004) discusses reflexivity from the point of view of ‘using
our selves in research’ in a counselling context. She promotes the concept of
reflection about how self-awareness can influence our research but, perhaps
surprisingly, pays little attention to ethics, values and virtues in her book
relegating ethics like most research methodology writers, to the methods
section. She does, however, provide an attractive definition of reflexivity:
I understand researcher reflexivity as the capacity of the researcher to

acknowledge how their own experiences and contexts (which might be
fluid and changing) inform the processes and outcomes of inquiry. If we
can be aware of how our own thoughts, feelings, culture, environment and
social and personal history inform us as we dialogue with participants,
transcribe their conversations with us and write our representations of the
work, then perhaps we can come closer to the rigour that is required of
good qualitative research. (p. 32)
Pillow (2003) discusses ‘uncomfortable reflexivity.’ Dosekun (2015)

describes it as messy and unsettling and that it is not simply more rigor-
ous but rather its aim is to confound and interrupt and to resist disciplin-
ary regimes of truth—an aim which sits nicely with Freedom Research’s
rejection of orthodoxy. Dosekun describes poststructuralist reflexivity,
which entails the researcher tracing and troubling the processes of his/her
research practice. One can reflect on one’s own contributions to and uses
of discourse and framing of research and look at the ontological and
political effects and reverberations of what one says and does.
This emphasis on reflexivity in all parts of the research process is closely
allied to my assertion that values clarification or awareness of Values is
required at all stages of the research process. Dean (2014) refers to meta-
cognitive processes or reflecting back on past learning in the present and
proposes:
• thinking about thinking,

• learning about learning, and
• reflection on reflection.
40 K. McArdle
Reflection
Reflection is a much-contested word. It continues to be promoted as a
central component of continuous professional development (CPD) of
educators in general and teachers in particular. I am making an assump-
tion here that the reader, as an educator, will be familiar with reflection as
described by Donald Schön (1984). Reflection is a subset of and an
important dimension of reflexivity in a research context. In my experi-
ence, reflection often falls into the domain of description in the staff-
room, often of things that have gone wrong, rather than embracing
Schön’s more critical and challenging description of reflection. Bolton
(2014) describes reflection in the following terms:
Reflection is in-depth review of events, either alone—say in a journal—or

with critical support with a supervisor or group. The reflector attempts to
work out what happened, what they thought or felt about it, who was
involved, when and where, what these others might have experienced and
thought and felt about it from their own perspective. (p. 7)
Bolton emphasises the questions that reflectors ask themselves. She

distinguishes between reflection and reflexivity by describing that reflex-
ivity asks critical questions rather than reviewing or reacting. Despite the
continuing reliance on reflection as a central concept for professional
educators, its application in practice remains problematical in terms of
how to actually do it (McArdle and Coutts 2003).
The researcher needs to reflect on his/her research and decide what to
think or do as a product of this. The difference between reflection and
reflexivity is that in reflection one is not necessarily challenging taken-
for-granted assumptions but thinking about feelings and the experience.
As Etherington (2004) suggests, reflection is a largely conceptual process,
but as Bolton (2010) suggests it needs to avoid ‘navel-gazing’ and become
politically and socially useful.
The researcher needs an overarching commitment to critical reflection,
‘the capacity to think discerningly about what one is thinking saying and
doing, to observe oneself through a glass clearly and check whether one is
actually living one’s values out in practice or simply engaging in rhetoric’
(McNiff 2011, p. 284).
Social Reflection
Social reflection is a term I use to describe reflective processes that involve
others in a vigorous active capacity rather than just as a listener. I think it
is very easy to reflect in a comfort zone, but challenge may arise when one
thinks in a social context. Accordingly, I recommend reflecting with oth-
ers. Social reflection often happens in a social context such as the staff
room or the community centre office. This can be safe and descriptive
and a case of cathartic narrative, but I have experienced situations where
staff have chosen to reflect together on a regular basis. They choose to
meet to discuss experience with a critical and challenging demeanour.
In a research context social reflection is vital to the research process. I use
social reflection frequently on a reciprocal basis with students and col-
leagues. I choose at a practical level to share transcripts and interpretation
with others. This frequently becomes reflective when I discuss how I feel.
When researching what makes teachers ‘good’ at what they do, I shared
with a trusted colleague that I had felt antipathy to one of the interviewees
I encountered in a transcript of an interview I had. She read the transcript
and agreed that she too felt this. This led us to identify in the text what I had
not liked and it was a sense that the teacher did not value the pupils except
insofar as they were achieving in her classes. She did not have empathy.
Social reflection is just one way of being reflexive or reflective and, in my
opinion, from my own experience is the strongest most productive means
of identifying values. Usually, I do this through conversation with a critical
friend. A critical friend is someone whose intelligence and empathy I trust
and who has a similar sophisticated understanding of research and the
importance of reflexivity. There are other ways of being reflexive. Always
keep a research diary and seek to analyse this for reflexivity. At its simplest it
is just an account of what has been done but one can choose to be reflective
too and include an account of feelings so that one can return to this at a later
stage and consider its impact on the research. I have had PhD students who
have used analysed research diary extracts to evidence reflexivity as part of
the quality protocols of their research. Finally, being interviewed oneself
with the questions one intends to pose to others, is one of the main ways in
which one can personally seek reflexivity. A critical friend can interview me
about my research questions and, by articulating an answer, I find out what
I think about the subject I am researching and my implicit assumptions.
42 K. McArdle
Self-Awareness
Reflexivity and reflection are not Value free. For example, they support
appreciation of diversity, a value to which we as educators should argu-
ably subscribe, but ‘theories, values and practices vary between cultures’
(Bolton 2014, p. 12). Bolton suggests that reflective practice and reflexiv-
ity are founded upon strong, coherent ethical principles and values. So,
self-awareness is critical to doing Freedom Research. The researcher needs
to know his/her values and be aware of how these influence the research.
I am of the view that this is not a process that has an end point. I have a
constantly changing sense of my own Values in a complex and changing
world. In different situations different Values will come into play and I
may minimise my regard for deeply held beliefs in some contexts. Values,
I would argue once again, are not absolutes. One simply needs to be
aware of their character and influence on research. A simple example is
that I value the qualitative domain in my own research and choose to use
this paradigm, as I value it as being the most illuminating for educational
and social purposes—also the most consistent with my values of includ-
ing participants in the research process as more than respondents to ques-
tionnaires. This is not to say that I never do questionnaires in quantitative
studies when they are relevant. There are circumstances when my values
become relative to the circumstances.
A creative tension may exist between espoused values and our practice.
To put it simply everyone I know in education is likely to say they believe
in equality, but how this is reflected in their practice is another matter. So
how does one get to know what one’s Values are in each circumstance?
I am of the view that Values underpin all one does in research through
networks of the meaning one makes of different situations in a way that
links behaviours with beliefs. That is not to say that one always acts
according to one’s Value base. I can think of occasions when I have felt
uncomfortable with research and analysing the discomfort has led to the
identification of a Values conflict. For example I did an action research
project that troubled me and when I analysed the discomfort I found that
I had not been as active as I would desire in including participants who
were the subject of the research in the research processes, thus empower-
ing them to participate actively in the interpretation of results.
An important caveat to self-awareness is that, in my opinion, for

research purposes it can be limited to the content and processes of the
research itself. Of course the better our self-knowledge, the better will be
our reflexivity, but sensitivity demands that we are careful about how, as
supervisors, we demand self-awareness on the part of a student. Clarifying
‘core values’ is considered by Gelb (1998), who suggests that our goals or
aims answer the question, ‘What do I want?,’ whereas values are the answer
to ‘why do I want it?’ One can then ask oneself, ‘How much do I want it?’
He suggests the question, ‘How much of what I want really springs from
my essence, independent of conditioning or reaction?’ As one thinks about
deeper motivations, core values are more likely to come into focus.
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4
Identity and the Freedom Researcher
Identity
Self-awareness was discussed in the previous chapter in terms of knowing
and being able to justify one’s own Values. In Chap. 1 the importance of
moral benchmarks was discussed, but also the importance of the research-
er’s own Values once these benchmarks have been met. Here the impor-
tance of the identity of the researcher will be discussed building on these
premises. The researcher needs to consider his/her identity in the context
of the research if he or she intends to justify its value and validity in terms
of ethics, values and virtues.
Benwell and Stokoe (2006) suggest that identity was an unthinkable
concept before the sixteenth century and choose to discuss identity mov-
ing from early treatments of identity as the self-fashioning, agentive,
internal project of self through more recent understandings of social and
collective identity to postmodern accounts of identity as fluid, fragmen-
tary, contingent and constituted in discourse. My own view of identity is
that it is indeed fluid and flexible and contingent on local conditions as I
have experienced changes in my own identity over time and indeed in
different circumstances, as the world is complex and itself changing.

46 K. McArdle
I aver, however, that there are consistencies in our accounts of ourselves,

which help with self-knowledge, and believe that these consistencies are
linked to discourse and are often linked to Values and, indeed, Bourdieu’s
notion of habitus discussed earlier in this book. I reject discrimination in
all its forms, for example, and that is linked to my own mixed-race heri-
tage and is an unchanging part of my identity and has been a part of my
identity as long as I can remember. Other parts of my identity have
changed at its simplest with life transitions from youth to young adult,
through middle age, to older adult. The dualism of fixity and change is
something that is a part of my ontology. This dualism is important as the
researcher needs to be aware of his/her own changeability and fixity.
It would be in vain to discuss discourse without referring to the dis-
courses of research and appropriate behaviour. These discourses will be
familiar to the experienced researcher, and the extent to which these are
socially constructed will be familiar to the Foucault reader and, therefore,
how the discourses of desirable and ‘correct’ research behaviour are sub-
ject to forces of implicit power and the dynamics of authority. The term
‘discourse’ is Foucauldian here and refers to the ways in which power
played a part in the forms of knowledge produced and how it controls the
production of knowledge. Discourse can influence beliefs about Values
and how to behave in ethically good or bad ways (Knowles and Lander
2012). The early-career researcher will find that the ‘correctness’ goes
largely unchallenged and it is my argument that the discourses need to be
challenged by the Freedom Researcher. There are external ethical princi-
ples that are applied to research such as avoiding plagiarism, citing all
authors in journal articles and building on the work of other researchers
overtly through literature review. Pring (2004) describes these as intel-
lectual virtues but my definition is broader. Thinking about identity, the
researcher needs to think about internal morality and how that impacts
on his/her research. Internal principles are those Values that govern how
one does one’s own research and it governs the choices that we make.
Identity is not just something that we are; it is something we construct
and actively live by (Holstein and Gubrium 2000). Experience provides
the means by which one becomes conscious of who one is. Self is also a
social idea in that we have different personae with different people. All
these dimensions are important in the context of research. One needs to
Identity and the Freedom Researcher 47
be aware of the educational and research principles with which one is

living. One needs to be conscious of how experience is shaping research
and educational practice, and one needs to be aware of one’s difference
with different people as all these impinge on the quality of the research.
Morality may be defined as relating to the character or conduct con-
sidered good or evil, and dictionary definitions frequently refer to ethics
and virtues but interestingly not values. Values I consider to be deeply
held beliefs and value implies standards of goodness or evil that may be
applied to beliefs. Morality plays a part in the conduct of research in that
notions of right or wrong will influence what we choose to do. The reader
may be familiar with the stages of moral development by Kohlberg
(1958), who described moral choices in children from 10 to 16. Educators
know from experience with children that morals change over growth
time along with the sense of right and wrong. For adults moral behaviour
in any situation may be argued to be linked to perception, evaluation of
the situation, decision-making and subsequent choice of behaviour. Each
of these steps is subjective and Values driven and linked I propose to one’s
sense of oneself or one’s identity. The benchmarking I proposed in Chap.
1 is linked to a conception of morality that values the individual’s right to
autonomy (the goodness for the individual) and beneficence or the good
of the group is no doubt linked to my identity but I would argue is
almost universal in its acceptability in principle. Adults, however, need to
make judgements, and Kohlberg and Ryncarz (1990) argue that adult
moral development goes beyond the stages notion and relies on the self ’s
particular and unique life experience. Hoffmann (2000) proposes a the-
ory of moral development based on empathy that involves a process of
socialisation towards cooperative behaviour. These theories are philo-
sophical and explore morality in considerable depth, but their relevance
here is their link to experience and socialisation.
Intra-group socialisation often influences what one chooses to believe
as it makes one’s life easier and more convenient. One’s identity as a ‘yes-
man’ or ‘yes-woman’ is much easier to live with than an identity that
seeks to challenge social order. Freedom Research asks you to adopt an
identity that seeks to challenge social constructions, but to do so from an
ethical standpoint. Freedom Research also asks you to adopt an identity
that is cognisant of the Values that underpin the research process and that
48 K. McArdle
you become aware of the Values that you use and make these Values
explicit in the research process. This is a demanding task and the dis-
courses that influence how research is done are powerful in influencing
what the researcher chooses to do. The autonomous Freedom Researcher
will be aware of these discourses and use them in a deep, reflective, reflex-
ive and mature way to influence his/her research within a considered
Values identity.
ducational Sociological Questions

E
and the Reflection of Values
To begin to practise Freedom Research, it is important to think about
educational sociological questions to see how they reflect Values. How
the researcher defines education underpins all the subsequent choices
about the research. Here is one definition of education:
A structural functionalist view of education tends to stress the activity of

schools in training and selecting children so they fit into some necessary slot
in a relatively harmonious society. (Meighan and Siraj-Blatchford 1998, p. 14)
This may seem rather harmless or bland as an explanation of children’s

education. Meighan and Siraj-Blatchford go on to qualify this statement:
This view implies that children need to be manipulated in some way for
that society’s convenience or for some other reason. The images used by
people who take this view stress this. The teacher is said to be like a potter
moulding clay or like a gardener cultivating plants, or a builder building a
house on sound foundations. In each case pupils are seen as things to be
processed, and often having no rights. (p. 14)
All too often, in my experience, education remains undefined in

research reporting, and it is assumed that the reader agrees with the
implicit definition, which is usually linked to schools. In research, per-
haps all would nowadays agree that pupils have a point of view that is
important. However, as Meighan and Siraj-Blatchford suggest, consulting

pupils is not automatically non-functionalist. Persuasion and coaxing
and more subtle forms of control can be used. The reasons for the neglect
of the authentic pupils’ views may be related to low power and status of
both child and pupil roles. One needs to recognise that doing research is
itself a social act. Children or adults are the subjects or participants in our
research and we bring our own habitus and hopes and fears to the research
process. Meighan and Siraj-Blatchford suggest, as I do, that research can-
not be objective and we should interrogate our work according to the
following three questions:
• By whom is the research being done?

• For whom is the research being done?
• For what purpose is the research being done?
These three questions raise important considerations for Freedom

Research. By whom the research is being done requires both systems con-
siderations such as by whom the research is funded and who has influ-
ence over it as well as identity questions. Who is the researcher and what
are his/her assumptions about education? For whom the research is being
done raises questions about the internal and external motivations of the
researcher. Is the research for the pupils, for teachers, for policy? Whose
knowledge does the research seek to influence? The third question also
embraces motivation. Is the research to gain a qualification or an award
of a degree or is it to embarrass the policy makers with whom one dis-
agrees? Freedom Research demands that this is made explicit.
Meighan and Siraj-Blatchford discussing perspectives in educational
research, suggest: It is not whether one should take sides, since inevitably,
one does, but rather whose side is one on? For example, I have seen theses
and research papers with very concise and correct research questions
about a phenomenon explored ‘objectively’ when it is quite clear that the
purpose is not to explore a particular problem but to generate evidence of
the wrongness of a current policy or practice. I am not saying there is
anything wrong with the conclusion just that it is masquerading as
genuine problem-solving and as questioning with a balanced viewpoint.
50 K. McArdle
Always, in doing educational research, the researcher needs to be

clear about what he/she thinks education is and what it is for, as these
assumptions will impact on all dimensions of the educational research.
Conceptual understandings of education are founded on Values. It is
very easy to make assumptions about what is and is not education, but
one needs to be aware of the assumptions made. As an educator, I
choose to place my understanding of education in a context of Smith’s
(1988) discussions of Informal Education, which describes a form of
learning that is very different from learning in a school context, which
I suggest is what most people think of when thinking about education,
perhaps as this is one’s own experience of the process. Informal
Education can happen anywhere, in a pub, or on the street or in the
schoolyard. It may be incidental learning, but it is not accidental. It will
have objectives that may be relatively loose but a learning experience is
taking place. People participate in Informal Education by choice; they
are not required to do it. In essence it seeks to work with or alongside
social forms and structures familiar to the participant. A practical
example of Informal Education is the education that takes place often
in youth clubs. It is frequently assumed in research writing that school
is what is meant by education and the school’s beneficent purpose is
assumed and not elucidated.
Freedom Research, indeed any approach to research, demands that
one is aware of one’s own assumptions and the Values that underpin these
assumptions. Furthermore in Freedom Research these assumptions need
to be made explicit. It is not appropriate to discuss educational research
without defining what it means. Similarly related terms often remain
undefined, such as ‘attainment,’ which usually means passing tests or
exams, rather than any other form of attainment. ‘Positive destinations’
are also discussed when thinking of school leavers but this demands a
socially approved destination such as university, college or employment
rather than any other destination. This is not simply about defining one’s
terms; rather it is about being explicit about one’s own assumptions and
why these assumptions are held. Knowledge of identity through self-
awareness, and how it is made manifest in one’s educational assumptions,
needs to be made explicit.
Theories
In Freedom Research, one is testing, proposing and exploring theories,
and theories are linked to Values. One needs to remain intellectually sen-
sitive to the fact that theoretical suppositions are bound to reflect the
Value positions one holds (Ransome 2013). A feminist might well assume
that the main causes of differences in attainment between boys and girls
are social, for example, while others may assume that they are linked to
nature not nurture.
Theory underpins the researcher’s choices in educational research—
not only in the sense that we shall have educational theories founded on
Values but also in the sense that researchers have different understandings
of exactly what theory is. Theory is surrounded in educational research by
many challengeable orthodoxies, not least that it is somehow superior in
merit to what is commonly known as practice or, conversely, that it is
somehow inferior to practice-driven research approaches. Theory, how-
ever one chooses to esteem it, is critical to the design of research. There
are many definitions and understandings of theory and theories. Pring
(2000) defines theory as
[a] set of propositions which are stated with sufficient generality yet preci-
sion that they explain the ‘behaviour’ of a range of phenomena and predict
what would happen in future. (p. 124)
This is quite an orthodox position to adopt on theory in that it refers

to the predictive nature of science, a tradition that springs from a positiv-
ist and orthodox approach to natural sciences research. Thomas (2009)
proposes four broad uses of theory in education, which provide a context
for discussion of personal theory. These are as follows:
• theory is the obverse of practice (theory is thinking and reflecting as

opposed to doing);
• theory as a generalising/explanatory model (the key word here is
‘model’);
• theory as developing bodies of explanation (the key word is ‘bodies’); and
• scientific theory (formal statements that can be tested).
52 K. McArdle
There are orthodoxies associated with theory, which need to be chal-

lenged—not least that theory is somehow superior to practice and dis-
tinct from practice. What is fundamentally missing from most discussions
of theory in education is the acknowledgement that theory relates to
one’s beliefs and interpretations about the way education is—both per-
sonal and practical theories, with practical theories being themselves
linked to personal assumptions. Carr (2006) is one of the few commenta-
tors to focus on the personal belief dimension of theory linked to educa-
tional practice:
What practitioners are committed to is not a theory but a set of beliefs and,
in reflecting on these beliefs, what they are making explicit is not their
theoretical assumptions but that cluster of related beliefs which provide
them with their interpretive understanding of the practice and the context
within which their practice takes place. (p. 149)
Kemmis (1995) in discussing theorising educational practice contends

that educational practice is a form of power—‘a dynamic force both for
social continuity and for social change which, though shared with and con-
strained by others, rests largely in the hands of teachers’ (p. 1). Kemmis fur-
ther discusses the relationship between researcher and practitioners and
suggests that new forms of relationship must be developed between the
people we have conventionally come to regard as theorists and practitio-
ners. This implies the development of new collaborative forms of research
which challenge the division of labour between these two groups of peo-
ple. He further contends, and I agree, that practice itself is constructed,
socially, politically and historically; it is framed by history and tradition
as well as by ideology. Theory is itself socially constructed. Theory is priv-
ileged over practice in many ways, not least by the assumption that edu-
cation is steered by theory and its influence over practice. Practice in my
opinion shapes understandings of the world and accordingly of
theorising.
Kemmis suggests that people do not stay neatly in the roles of theorist
and practitioner and that theory and practice cannot be separated. It is by
being theorised, he suggests, that practices have meaning and it is by

being practised that theories have historical, social and material signifi-
cance and I would add value. Kemmis discusses the public nature of
theory in a research context and that knowledge becomes theory by being
tested, justified and sustained through debate in public. Individuals may
act privately on understandings of theory and practice but the develop-
ment of theory depends on the conscious participation in discussions to
continue debate about new knowledge and traditions that need to be laid
to rest.
Carr (2006) described the notion of ‘embeddedness’—the thought
that it is impossible to understand either concepts or ourselves without
understanding the social and cultural context in which each is embedded
and further that educational theory should not be limited to scientific
knowledge but instead draw on various forms of knowledge, particularly
philosophy, history and morality. Education, suggests Carr, is not a theo-
retical activity but a practical activity concerned with the general task of
developing pupils’ minds through the processes of teaching and learning.
It is however only understood by reference to the framework of thought
in terms of which its practitioners make sense of what they are doing and
what it is that they are trying to achieve.
Theory is not applied but concerns the ‘whole enterprise of critically
appraising the adequacy of the concepts, beliefs, assumptions and values
incorporated in prevailing theories of education’ (Carr 2006, p. 35).
Theory and practice are inextricably linked and also have a complex of
power relationships, I propose, and this leads inevitably to the notion
that theory is not value free as many would have us believe but based
on the values that underpin the social and cultural context and tradi-
tions of education. This inevitably takes one back to the concept of
Freedom Research wherein I suggest that one becomes conscious of
the relative values placed on theory and practice and recognises the
power issues that surround this dialectic, recognising that theory and
practice are interdependent and part of the same socially constructed
processes.
Brookfield (2008) provides an accessible framework for discussion of
theory. He states that theorising is not a process restricted to academia:
54 K. McArdle
A theory is nothing more (or less) than a set of explanatory understandings

that help us make sense of some aspect of the world. (p. 3)
He quotes Gramsci (1971), who states that everybody is a theorist

because he or she participates in ‘a particular conception of the world, has
a conscious line of moral conduct.’ The word ‘moral’ should alert us to
the importance of Values. Brookfield (2008) focuses on theory in prac-
tice, arguing that it is essentially teleological in that it imbues our actions
with purpose. Theorising is a means of meaning-making and is ‘born of a
desire to create explanations that impose conceptual order on reality’ (p. 5).
So, the researcher needs to be aware of the Values that underpin his/her
research and that are linked to the conceptual order he/she creates.
Brookfield argues in the context of critical theory for values in practice
that contribute to building a democratic society based on democratic
values of justice, compassion and fairness. One needs to be mindful of
the values that underpin educational theory, both encountered and
devised. Improving educational examination outcomes for children is
based on a set of values that places worth on the measurable attainment
of children, the attainment of children in relation to each other, the
attainment of inherently measurable qualities and the attainment of chil-
dren being important to social and particularly I suggest, economic goals.
If one chooses to theorise about the best means of contributing to this
attainment as teachers, one needs to be aware of the values that underpin
what has been socially constructed—the school.
Devising models or theories about the way the educational world is, in
research, demands a similar scrutiny of the ideas that underpin what the
researcher proposes. Is it, as Brookfield (2008) suggests, born of a sense,
and a research process, which values justice, compassion and fairness? I
would add to his list a need for the values of inclusion, equality and
humanity as well as virtues of tolerance and humility in theoretical delib-
erations. It may be helpful to think of the social constructions that under-
pin our theoretical deliberations by thinking about the layers of an onion.
Peeling these back will lead us from the theories we propose to the under-
lying assumptions that underpin our thinking. With colleagues, as previ-
ously discussed, I researched what made ‘good’ primary school teachers
good at what they did from their perspective (McArdle et al. 2013). Of
course, we needed to be clear about how we were selecting the ‘good’
teachers we intended to interview. This was not easy as we began with
thinking about our own beliefs that underpinned why we had chosen the
respondents. It soon became clear that we were developing a theory of
‘goodness’ linked to a confluence of virtues in each person, idiosyncratic
and different in each person. We were valuing who they were, not what
they were. Pulling back the layers, it became apparent that our theory was
underpinned by values that recognised the worth of valuing all children
equally, as we valued the teacher who taught all children with equal
regard. We were not swayed by the educational attainment of the chil-
dren in a test, for example, as a means of judging the ‘goodness’ of a
teacher.
It is my experience that theory often causes some postgraduate stu-
dents angst, as they need to identify a theoretical framework for their
research and they find this difficult. The need for an explicit theoretical
framework is one of those conventions or orthodoxies that accompanies
research in terms of questions at upgrade or viva events for PhD students.
I do not intend here to disagree with this convention, as it is my view that
it is important to make explicit our theoretical assumptions, as these are
frequently Value based and underpin our subsequent assumptions, but a
‘framework’ suggests something finished rather than the messiness that
often accompanies our early thinking, and, arguably, our original think-
ing of conceptual order in research. Theory and practice are frequently
argued as being coterminous in that each professional behaviour is based
on some theory about the way the world is or should be. I agree with this
contention and would simply argue that we need to simplify the rhetoric
around theoretical frameworks to help students understand that explain-
ing a theoretical framework is simply making explicit what is often
implicit in their research design. The need to link this to prior commen-
tators is an orthodoxy that could be dispensed with in Freedom Research,
as each theoretical framework is distinctive and individual and could be
innovative and new. It must, of course, be referenced if it does indeed
draw on the theory of others, but this drawing on the theories of others
need not be a requirement.
56 K. McArdle
Paradigms
There are many conventional views and orthodoxies that surround a con-
sideration of paradigm philosophies and choices. This is an area of con-
cern for many students during educational Masters and Doctoral studies
in my experience, who struggle to identify which paradigm they are
working in or should be working in if they are working in an educational
domain. I wish to affirm that paradigms can be a source of considerable
pleasure as they are to do with complex and interesting philosophies of
inquiry and with self and identity. Paradigm choices are founded on
Value choices and I also wish to persuade the reader that some of the
orthodox thinking around paradigms is unhelpful to those of us working
in an educational research context. Traditionally, the educational
researcher has been expected to subscribe to a choice of paradigm in the
social sciences, preferably a named paradigm such as Positivism,
Interpretivism, Critical Social Science or Critical Theory, or
Poststructuralism, for example. Babbie (1995) discusses a range of differ-
ent paradigms in a social science context, including Symbolic
Interactionism, Ethnomethodology and Structural Functionalism,
among others. Some are more recognisable to the educationalist such as
Feminist Theory and perhaps Post-Positivism. This inevitably is complex
and confusing for the new researcher and demands an autonomous
approach to choosing the one or more paradigms in which to locate one-
self, as inevitably they overlap because they are associated with ideas
about the way the world is, a world full of complex ideas and Values.
Paradigms begin with questions of ontology and epistemology. Here I
choose to cite Punch (2009), who frames these concepts as straightfor-
ward questions:
The ontological question: What is the form and nature of reality and there-
fore what is there that can be known about?
The epistemological question: What is the relationship between the
knower and what can be known? (Punch 2009, p. 16)
These questions, in turn, lead to philosophical approaches to research

and subsequently to congruent methodology and typical methods.
Paradigms were defined by Kuhn (1922) to be unvarying sets of practices

and understandings shared by men [sic]. The definitions of paradigms
that refer to models or patterns should alert the reader to the potential for
challenge of orthodoxy. Paradigms may be thought of as general frame-
works or viewpoints or a way of looking at life (Babbie 1995). This way
of looking at life clearly links to Freedom Research and our Values about
the way the world is considered. Babbie further defines paradigms as a
fundamental model or scheme that organises our view of something. In
the educational community, ‘paradigm’ is often used to denote ontologi-
cal and epistemological suppositions within which the research is framed
(Thomas 2009). Paradigms emerge from custom, convention and exist-
ing knowledge and, accordingly, are socially constructed and open to
change and challenge.
Paradigms, historically, in the natural sciences have become entrenched,
resisting any substantial change and have been divorced from any con-
cept of self. Eventually, however, as the shortcomings of one paradigm
became obvious, a new paradigm emerged and supplanted the old one
(Babbie 1995). In educational research, the fate of supplanted paradigms
has differed; paradigms typically gain and lose currency. Orthodoxy sug-
gests that researchers need to choose between existing paradigms. What if
the researcher cannot choose between paradigms or finds himself/herself
shifting between paradigms? What if the researcher wants to see a new
paradigm or converse with an old one? Why should a researcher subscribe
to any paradigm? Why value paradigms? It is not intended to discuss a
range of paradigms and their respective merits here; rather I wish to focus
on the researcher and his/her freedom to choose.
The reader will find that this book refers infrequently to the best-
known paradigm of Positivism. Positivism is defined by Punch (2009) as
the belief that objective accounts of the world can be given, and that the
function of science is to develop explanations in the form of universal
laws, that is, to develop nomothetic knowledge. Positivism is likely to be
associated with quantitative methods. Positivism also values positive
knowledge in the sense that it is often concerned with uncovering the
underlying ways or basic principles of social action. This contains an
assumption that individual facts can only be understood in relation to the
larger whole of which they form a constituent part (Ransome 2013). I am
58 K. McArdle
of the view that Positivism is entirely appropriate to the natural sciences,

as it is closely aligned with ideas of fact, understood as knowledge state-
ments that absolutely and incontrovertibly describe something as it truly
is (Ransome 2013). In educational fields, it is valued highly by policy
makers as producing valid knowledge claims. I find, however, that the
separation of the world (reality) and the knower (researcher) does not
work for me and for what I choose to value in the relationship between
the world and the knower. Scott and Usher (2011) express this well:
As a way of doing research, it involves accepting the position that there is a

logical set of rules of explanation independent of the world and its social
practices that can distinguish between and judge all knowledge claims. It
involves accepting that research is a matter of observation and measure-
ment, that it is universal rather than an embedded rationality and that it
works with a unitary and invariant set of methods. (p. 13)
This is not to say that I do not choose to use quantitative methods;

rather I do not subscribe in an untrammelled way to this research para-
digm. There are many who would agree that there are few educational
researchers who now believe in Positivism (Scott and Usher, ibid.) but
Scott and Usher suggest that although it has suffered hard critique it is
not yet ‘fit only for the dustbin’ as it is valued in policy and practice in
particular. Sheehy et al. (2005) point to the importance of other ways of
knowing that can be excluded by scientific ways of knowing such as tacit
knowledge. Positivism is underpinned by theories that everything, all
propositional statements, is either true or false. In describing representa-
tional realism, a framework that is presupposed by Positivism, Scott and
Usher describe the relation between theories that explain the world and
the world itself. ‘One comes to know about the world but without being in
it’ (ibid., p. 15). They also describe how language ‘is to be a transparent
medium that enables the world to be accurately represented.’ This perception
of language as transparent means that only the literal and referential can
be taken into account. I find that this misses the ambiguous and natural.
I do hold to the view, however, that there are certain facts that are uncom-
plicated and can be explored using quantitative methods. Examining
attendance records would be an example of this.
Over the years of teaching research paradigms I have helped people to

establish their ontology, epistemology and axiology, to identify the para-
digm in which they are working for good reasons. This involves an explo-
ration of self and one’s beliefs. The reason paradigms matter is because
one’s paradigm underpins the research design and methodology and a
knowledge of paradigms in which one is working ensures a certain coher-
ence and substance to the research theoretically. We need to remember,
however, that paradigms are cultural. They are traditions of thought,
which bring with themselves assumptions about the way the world is and
how it should be explored, as well as assumptions that ontology, episte-
mology and axiology need to be consistent. In fact they hold epistemo-
logical and ontological assumptions about the way one SHOULD think.
Emergent and developing paradigms include, for example, the more
recent pragmatism of mixed methods (e.g. Teddlie and Tashakkori 2009)
compared with the loss of currency of critical social science from its pop-
ularity in the 1970s and its more recent revival, in my experience. So, yes
there can be coherence, but Freedom Research requires that we acknowl-
edge the doubts, inconsistencies and emergence of paradigm problems.
What does the researcher do if his/her ontology, epistemology and axiol-
ogy do not fit a given paradigm? In Freedom Research he/she can forge
the beginning of a new tradition.
Some consider that a paradigm choice must be made and that, once
chosen, it cannot be deviated from as this will run counter to one’s philo-
sophical beliefs, which by implication must be developed and fixed. From
the perspective of Freedom Research, paradigms are infrequently fixed
and are changing and emergent. As a researcher, I personally find myself
switching between paradigms. I am able in different research activities to
switch from critical social science in change-focused action research while
working in a disadvantaged community to Interpretivism in exploring
points of view of teachers on teacher identity through narrative inquiry,
for example. Husen (1988) indicates that the objective of research should
determine the paradigm and this works for my research but does not
emphasise the importance of identity. Others however argue that you are
somehow intellectually immature, though this is not how they phrase it,
if you do not know the paradigm in which you work. Some would argue
that this denies a sense of autonomy in ontology and epistemological
60 K. McArdle
stance. I would argue, however, that my understanding of epistemology

changes in different contexts. Bricolage is a word which begins to describe
this shifting between paradigms—the need to move between different
realities, derived from the work of Kincheloe, whose conception of
research bricolage involved the use of diverse theoretical traditions
(Kincheloe 2001). This argument does not deny the need for paradigms;
the bricoleur needs the materials to work with, so these are already defined
in some way. This runs counter to my contention that paradigms can be
flexible and individual, emergent and moving. Bricolage suggests that
paradigms have components that are separate from the self, whereas I
consider paradigms to be fundamental to the self.
I do not deny that ontology and epistemology are important to the
research process, but they are often embedded and emergent and change-
able. It is only through Values that we can work to define our ontological
and epistemological stance. For example, in my research I choose most
frequently to be participatory as I espouse values that require that the
participants in my research are empowered and have the right to guide
the research process. This means that I rarely choose to use question-
naires, as they are often clinical instruments that do not empower the
person completing it. Having said this, pragmatism requires that some-
times my espoused values are qualitatively different in using this method,
for example, when I am researching something that does not require an
in-depth understanding or commitment on the part of the research par-
ticipants, such as the frequency of attending a youth group or indeed if I
am seeking a causal connection. If I wanted to know why young people
attended such a group I would choose rather to ask them qualitatively, as
it is a more personal choice for the individual.
Ontologically, Values drive my perception of reality and this is change-
able and often emergent in the course of the research. I have lost count of
the times PhD students struggle with deciding which paradigm to choose
in the mistaken belief that only one will do. I believe, in the foregoing
example, that some realities are measurable and lend themselves to a
more Positivist approach, whereas other realities are too close to home to
be explored in this way in an educational context, where we are usually
researching people and where our identity may be changeable. My philo-
sophical stance is governed by my Values. If my research involves both
approaches, say using mixed methods, then my ontology is variable

within the research frame. Critical social science works for me often when
I am minded to change the educational world, albeit epistemology is also
variable and subject to Values. How I choose to know is for me a Value
judgement. I choose to know in different ways depending on what I want
to find out.
So what happens to the rigour and robustness of research that falls
between paradigms. I state simply that rigour and robustness emerge
from coherence in the Value base that underpins ontological, epistemo-
logical and methodological choices. We are being dishonest if we believe
one reality and explore it in a different way. The research would not hang
together, would not have consistency and some would argue would not
have internal validity. It would be no use believing reality is Interpretivist,
by which I mean seen differently by different people and then using a
questionnaire, which has closed questions framing respondents’ choice of
answers. If however we believe that there are certain measurable realities,
then this is fine. I am not substituting a new paradigm, but simply point-
ing out that Positivism and Interpretivism can sit side by side, and a
requirement that the researcher must choose one or the other is false.
One needs simply to be explicit about Values and to be aware that Values
can be relative to the circumstances of the research.
Underpinning paradigms are the epistemological assumptions that
frame how one believes one should come to know things in the world
around us. These assumptions are closely linked to the value placed on
different ways of knowing and therefore finding out. It is not new for me
to point out that value is placed by policy makers, the media and some
professionals on the value of knowing through numbers. There are many
different ways we learn and multiple intelligences are one example of how
we learn in these many different ways, and I would simply add that these
ways are multiple and interlinked. If we know this, how come then that
there is so much emphasis on knowing through numerical data? Yes, it is
important but so too are other methods that use qualitative data. It is my
contention that there is a valuing of particular forms of knowing above
others and that perhaps the conventions of the traditional approaches to
research are long overdue some retirement and a more holistic approach
to knowing would be better and more inclusive—an approach to knowing
62 K. McArdle
that values both numerical and non-numerical data equally. Freedom

Research also demands that we look critically at what is quantitative
research. It is not one thing. There is a range of methods in quantitative
research such as experiments, analysis of secondary data and survey meth-
ods. There are degrees of objectivity in the quantitative paradigm in
Freedom Research.
So what must the autonomous researcher do? He/she must be aware of
the Values that underpin paradigms and that these may render paradigms
variable and emergent. In terms of writing about research we need to be
explicit about this variability and the underpinning Values so that the
rigour and robustness of coherence remain. So, one is left with a set of
philosophical ideas that do not fit the paradigms of educational research.
One is left perhaps with an ontology that views reality as objective that
can only be known subjectively, through a spiritual dimension of think-
ing. The researcher is left perhaps with an epistemology that recognises
rigour of thought and logical thought processes to approach the truth but
rejects the traditional notions of experiment and science as inadequate.
One may be left with an axiology that is not overtly emancipatory but
values virtue and has a social dimension that implies a social good. These
complexities and disjunctions are valued in Freedom Research and are
made explicit, avoiding the pretence of a solid paradigmatic bulwark that
counters no attack.
Freedom Research Design

Freedom Research is important to the educational researcher because it
liberates the researcher to think more openly about what are acceptable
choices to make in a research process. It will diversify the ways of know-
ing that are considered to be acceptable to the research community and
will provide stronger, more explicit and more honest justification for the
research choices made by the researcher. Freedom Research is not com-
mitted to one set of Values beyond the benchmark that prevents atrocity;
rather it is a matter of being clear and explicit about values that underpin
choices at all stages of the research process. The reader can then judge the
authenticity, honesty and quality of the processes and choices made.
These values are already implicit in existing research; Freedom Research

requires that they are made explicit and known so that the contribution
to knowledge can be evaluated. Freedom Research also seeks to ensure
creativity. As the avoidance of orthodoxy is possible, so creativity is dis-
cussed in terms of its contribution to the research journey.
The Beginnings of Design

A research programme begins with curiosity, with a problem or with an
uncertainty, or with a passion to find out. Interest may stem from read-
ing, experience or the ideas of others, such as funders or research supervi-
sors, or the government. One may wish to find something out because it
needs to be known. One may wish to evaluate a practice of some kind.
One may wish to improve practice. Whatever the purpose of research,
there will be Values hidden behind the chosen topic. For example, if the
researcher wishes to explore anti-bullying programmes in schools, he/she
will almost certainly have a view on the efficacy of these programmes.
Evaluating a new adult education initiative, the researcher will almost
certainly have an idea of whether or not it was a useful and effective pro-
gramme. It is quite rare in my experience to have an objective regard for
research topics. Only when asked to evaluate a service with which one has
had no contact is one likely to come to it with a relatively fresh perspec-
tive. This is not to say one is biased in one’s research; rather that an intel-
ligent educator will have embryonic hypotheses and theories about the
research topic that can be explored and tested. Values will affect how one
frames the topic and research questions. An anti-bullying project that
seeks to explore resilience among those who are potentially bullied raises
questions, for example, about whose responsibility bullying is. Is it the
bullied who should be more resilient because bullying will take place
anyway? Another example is the exploration of online learning in higher
education and its ability to provide an effective learning environment.
With this topic the researcher would almost certainly have an opinion
about the value of online learning. He/she would also have a view on
what all makes an effective learning environment.
64 K. McArdle
It is helpful to be critical and aware of the assumptions that lie behind

the research topic, whether one is reading research or conducting one’s
own research, as this will help to identify theoretical frameworks and
assumptions that underpin the approach to finding out. The researcher
will have, I suggest, at least one assumption in educational research; that
is that education is a good, useful and important set of activities. For
example, if the researcher is studying peer influences on children who
take up smoking, an assumption is being made that smoking is a bad
thing. Exploring this quite-understandable assumption leads to a consid-
eration that the concept of a ‘bad thing’ does not impact on some chil-
dren in this case and may lead you to explore how children DO perceive
smoking. The assumption that peer influences have an impact assumes
that peer influence can be more telling in this case than, say, teacher or
parental or public education influences perhaps, which might lead the
researcher to consider how children react to these alternative influences.
Freedom Research demands that one makes explicit the assumptions that
underpin the question for which we one is designing a process and one is
explicit about why the choice of research topic is made.
References
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Teaching. Berkshire: OUP.
Carr, W. (2006). Education Without Theory. British Journal of Education Studies,
54(2), 136–159.
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Gramsci, New York, International Publishers.
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Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. F. (2000). The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity
in a Postmodern World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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Kincheloe, J. (2001). Describing the Bricolage. Qualitative Inquiry, 7, 679–692.
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Development and Consideration of a Seventh Stage. In C. N. Alexander &
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Growth (pp. 191–207). New York: Oxford University Press.
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McArdle, K., Hurrell, A., & Munozm Martinez, Y. (2013). What Makes
Teachers Good at What They Do? The Axiological Model. In J. McNif (Ed.),
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Meighan, R., & Siraj-Blatchford, I. (1998). A Sociology of Educating. London:
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Scott, D., & Usher, R. (2011). Researching Education: Data Methods and Theory
in Educational Enquiry. London: Continuum Books.
Sheehy, K., Nind, M., Rix, J., & Simmons, K. (2005). Ethics and Research in
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5
Creativity in Freedom Research
What does a research design hope to achieve? Does it seek to settle a ques-
tion, resolve an issue, promote a course of action or map the terrain of an
unknown territory (Schostak and Schostak 2008)? To understand the
design ability, it is necessary, suggests Cross (2011), to approach it slightly
obliquely. Like all sophisticated cognitive abilities it is impossible to
approach it directly or bluntly. Orthodoxy demands and results in a com-
monality that one hears about the outcomes of a design process, but one is
less likely to read or hear about the process itself, which is often assumed
to be sequential. The autonomous researcher can be creative in the Freedom
Research design process so I borrow from the literature on creative design:
The creative designer interprets the design brief not as a specification for
a solution, but as a starting point for a journey of exploration; the designer
sets off to explore, to discover something new, rather than to reach some-
where already known, or to return with yet another example of the already
familiar. (Cross 2011, p. 8)
Kao (1991) offers some attributes of the creative person, drawing on

Roe (1963) and Raudesepp (1983), which are germane I would suggest
to the research designer, who wishes to have a high-quality, purposeful

68 K. McArdle
and original design in his/her educational research. The following are

virtues of the researcher almost always overlooked in a research design
process:
Openness to experience
Observance—seeing things in unusual ways
Curiosity
Accepting and reconciling apparent opposites
Tolerance of ambiguity
Independence in judgement thought and action
Needing and assuming autonomy
Self-reliance
Not being subject to group standards and control
Willingness to take calculated risks
Persistence
Sensitivity to problems
Fluency—the ability to generate a large number of ideas
Flexibility
Originality
Responsiveness to feelings
Open to unconscious phenomena
Motivation
Freedom from fear of failure
The ability to concentrate
Thinking in images
Selectivity
Research into the creative aspects of design ability revealed that design-
ers when asked how they came up with creative insights and ideas referred
to intuition (Davies 1985 cited in Cross 2011). Intuition is interpreted
by Cross (2011) in the sense that designers find some aspects of their
work to be natural, perhaps almost unconscious ways of thinking. This
intuition draws from one’s experience and one’s learning from making
appropriate and inappropriate responses to situations. Design thinking is
‘abductive’ rather than inductive or deductive in that it deals with what
MAY be rather than what MUST be. In Freedom Research, drawing on
Cross, the designer generates early tentative solutions to problems that
Creativity in Freedom Research 69
are temporarily imprecise and inconclusive and this is part of the design
process. This, of course, demands that one can deal with uncertainty and
complexity for a time. Davie and Talbot (1987) identified personality
characteristics that are key to dealing with complexity and uncertainty.
These are as follows: that they (these people) are ‘very open to all kinds of
experience, particularly influences relevant to their design problems. Their
awareness is high. They are sensitive to nuances in their internal and external
environments. They are ready in many ways to notice particular coincidences
in the rhythm of events which other people, because they are less aware and
less open to their experience fail to notice.’ Successful designers Cross (2011)
concludes are optimists and, like all good explorers, are opportunists tak-
ing advantage of any unexpected opening and spotting what appear to be
fruitful ways ahead. In Freedom Research the researcher needs not only
to deal with this complexity but also to defend it to the orthodox thinker,
who sees design as being sequential and rational rather than intuitive and
complex.
Cross also describes how Rowe (1987) noticed the processes that archi-
tects went through in the design stage of a project. Rowe noticed that the
architects’ attention switched regularly between solution concepts and
problem exploration. He characterised the progress of the design activity
as episodic ‘or as a series of related skirmishes with various aspects of the
problems to hand. This can be related to the research design process. First
there is the to and fro movement between areas of concern, such as
research questions and methodology. Second there is a period of ‘unfet-
tered speculation,’ followed by more contemplative episodes, when the
researcher takes stock of the situation. Third, the orientation involves a
synthesis of these episodes into a congruent and coherent design. I seek
to communicate that design is rarely linear and if it is to be taken seri-
ously one needs to think of it as a design problem that demands intuition
and an episodic approach, rather than a series of sequential steps that can
be followed with guaranteed success in solving the problems of what to
do in the research topic.
Thomas (2009) distinguishes between linear and recursive planning
approaches. A recursive approach, I suggest, acknowledges the messiness of
the planning process in education and its sophistication and the need to take
into account a wide range of problems. It embraces the issues that arise in
70 K. McArdle
the course of planning, not least practical problems if one is, for example,
researching practice. Much design activity is unplanned, intuitive and ad
hoc in the conceptual stage and requires a degree of flexibility to deal with
problems. Ideation cannot be constrained to occur only during the pre-
scribed time for this kind of activity (Cross 2011). Potentially creative or
radical solutions to design problems can be lost through sticking to a specific
way of seeing a problem. The process of design involves reflection, planning,
reviewing, evaluating and adapting solutions to multifaceted problems and
the ability to shift easily between these abstracts during these processes.
Cross further proposes that there are three key strategic aspects of
design thinking. These are as follows: taking a broad systems approach to
the problem, framing the problem rather than accepting a narrow prob-
lem criterion and designing from ‘first principles.’ First, a systems
approach should not be seen as a prescribed system; rather one has a
‘systems mind’ in seeing how elements of the design fit together to form
a cogent and coherent design. Second, formulating the problems stimu-
lates and pre-structures the emergence of design concepts. Third, first
principles refers to the practicalities or the ‘givens’ of the design process—
that the solution needs to be ethical, for example, and needs to address
the research questions.
Concepts in Design
Theory is relevant to a consideration of creative research design. There are
different understandings of theory, as discussed in the preceding chapter,
but I enjoy the quotation by Anfara and Mertz (2006) of Silver (1983),
who purported that formal definitions of theory can rob it of its true
beauty, emotional significance and its importance to everyday life. In dis-
cussing Silver’s work, Anfara and Mertz suggest:
To understand a theory is to ravel into someone else’s mind and to become

able to perceive reality as that person does. To understand a theory is to
experience a shift in one’s mental structure and discover a different way of
thinking. To understand a theory is to feel some wonder that one never saw
before what now seems obvious all along. To understand theory, one needs
to stretch one’s mind to reach the theorist’s meaning. (p. xiv)
In design, thinking about theory demands the need to understand

concepts, which are the bricks that make up theories to begin the research
design process. Concepts are an abstract way of thinking about the topics
the researcher wishes to study. Concepts might include assessment of
pupils, which in turn embraces the concepts of formative and summative
assessment, which then embraces the concepts of the test or the essay or
the project. A higher order of thinking is then needed for the proposi-
tion, according to Anfara and Mertz (ibid.), which is simply considering
the relationships between concepts. Because one proposition is not usu-
ally enough to explain a situation, we develop a theory, which consists of
these multiple propositions. The Freedom Researcher will be alive to the
Values that underpin the conceptual choices made. The term ‘employ-
ability’ in an educational context, for example, is fraught with difficulties
linked to how one defines what is often termed a positive destination for
pupils, or furthermore, how one values the economy and those who work
in it, or who choose or are unable not to work.
Creativity—Defining Creativity
One of the goals of Freedom Research is that the researcher will be able to
be more creative in research by avoiding the strictures of orthodoxy and of
some accepted practice or discourse that impedes the research process.
Creativity is difficult to define. Children are often thought to be more
creative than adults as they have spontaneity and lack of inhibitions and
do not rely on past experience, assumptions and routines (Runco 2007).
Kohlberg’s (1987) theories of development of children suggest that chil-
dren have a ‘pre-conventional’ stage in early years. We only have to think
of young people struggling with conventions in later teenage years to see
the links to Freedom Research, which seeks to be unconventional. Creative
studies are interdisciplinary and eclectic and therefore an interdisciplinary
approach is needed to describe how creativity can work for the researcher.
Convergent and divergent thinking are one way of thinking about creativ-
ity. Divergent thinking is not synonymous with creative thinking but it
tells the researcher something about thought processes that lead to origi-
nal theories. Divergent thinking is employed when an individual is faced
72 K. McArdle
with an open-ended task, for example, how can this research question be
answered (Runco 2007)? It is a kind of problem-solving. In thinking
about theory deductively or inductively one can consider divergent think-
ing by considering all the possibilities. Linked to this is associative theory,
which is explained by Runco (ibid.), who describes how associative theo-
ries focus on how ideas are generated and changed together. Causality and
correlation in research are associative and demand that the individual con-
siders relationships. Using associative theory one can seek explanations
that bring apparently remote ideas together in new ways. Analogical
thinking and metaphor are another way of thinking creatively. Information
from a previous situation can be transferred to a new situation for exam-
ple. Ideas about transferability and generalisability fall in this domain.
Creativity does not emanate from cognition alone. It must emanate
from emotion, motivation, interest and aesthetic understandings, as well
as pure enjoyment. Intuition in research is never accorded status in an
educational research domain but is crucial to the field of moral philoso-
phy where it is understood that much of our knowing is neither techni-
cist nor rational but intuitive—one just knows. It is linked to ideas of the
inexplicability of the intuitive ways of knowing.
Claxton (1998) in discussing thinking too much proposes that the
creative mind has a dynamic integrated balance between deliberation and
contemplation. The mind is able to swing flexibly between its focused,
analytical, articulated mode of conscious thought and its diffused, syn-
thetic, shadowy mode of intuition. Claxton refers to the analytical ways
of thinking as d-mode and in the following quotation describes the pro-
cess of getting creative ideas:
If all goes well, at some unpredictable moment a new idea—novel, unex-

pected, but somehow full of promise- surfaces. And then, after this revela-
tion or ‘illumination’ comes the return of d-mode, to apply its tests and
check, probing to see if the promise is fulfilled, and seeking ways to turn the
illumination into a form which can be communicated, and which can com-
pel the assent of others. (p. 94)
Pictures communicate with us at different levels from words and in dif-

ferent ways. Research is arguably unduly dominated by text and the word
rather than by pictures or spontaneous representations in words of finely
honed meanings, as examples. Increasingly, poetry is being used in

research publications, not simply as a quotation at the beginning of a
thesis but as a means of expressing the ineffable. Metaphor has always had
a place in our writing as we express our findings, but what about irony,
satire or humour? They are undoubtedly effective means of understanding
and communication but are rarely admitted to the voice of the researcher,
and why not? I offer for your interest an extract from an observational and
narrative poem that expresses sentiments of a teacher in a classroom.
Maladjusted Boys
I have made ten minutes of silence.

I know they are afraid of silence
And the mind’s pattern of order.
They gaze at me out of oblique faces
And try to fidget away the bleak thoughts
Simmering in the dark tangle of their minds.
(Extract from Morgan, R, in Benton, M. & Benton, P. [undated]
Touchstones 4: A teaching anthology)
In a few lines, one learns of the ambivalent attitudes of the teacher, his/
her classroom behaviours, and of the attitudes of the pupils; one can sur-
mise the implications for the consequences for the latter of this education
and the future possible destiny of the boys. Succinct and colourful and
redolent with meaning for the educator, it is above all tolerant of ambigu-
ity, which enables this poem to be so true to life for some of us. Social
influences and tradition prevent us from writing about our research in
this poetical way.
Values in Creativity
Values are important in creativity. Runco (2007) reports on research that
suggests that openness to change correlated with creativity and tradition,
and security values were negatively related to measures of creativity.
74 K. McArdle
Openness to change and experience are Values that may be linked to

creativity and I would propose that openness to change in research is
linked to creativity in this research. There are many stories and theories
linked to the idea that scientific progress is linked to inspiration or cre-
ative thinking or intuition. This does not, however, link to the tradi-
tional and security values that underpin much thinking about what is
and is not relevant in a research context. Individuals who value creativity
are more likely in my opinion to solve problems creatively thereby
expanding the field of potential connections that are made in addressing
the problem. Linked to the Values of openness to change and to the
concept of creativity are the traditional research concepts of openness to
new interpretations of data, theoretical open-mindedness and original-
ity. How come we can be creative in ideas but not in our methodologies
and communication?
Theory on creativity is much linked to ideas of organisational develop-
ment, and Sternberg (2006) describes the investment theory of creativity,
according to which creative people are those who are willing to ‘buy low
and sell high’ in the realm of ideas, where buying refers to pursuing ideas
that are unknown or out of favour but that have potential and can then
be sold high. He suggests that there are six interrelated resources that are
required to be this creative person. These are as follows: intellectual abili-
ties, knowledge, styles of thinking, personality, motivation and environ-
ment. He proposes that three intellectual skills are important. Namely,
the synthetic skills to see problems in new ways and escape the bounds of
conventional thinking, analytical skills to see which problems are worth
pursuing and which are not and finally, practical–contextual skills of
being able to sell other people the value of one’s ideas. These intellectual
skills are equally important for being creative with research. I have already
argued the need to escape the bounds of conventional thinking. Analytical
skills are important and link to ideas of criticality and reflexivity. Being
able to ‘sell’ ideas is also important and links to the idea of the need for
courage but also for the need of the skills to convince others. Knowledge
is important to be able to move a field forward and I have already empha-
sised the need for us to be knowledgeable in our field before we can see
where new ideas may apply. Thinking styles are linked to attitudes to
thinking. If the researcher is prepared to think creatively by questioning,

reflecting, being critical and reflexive, he/she stands more chance of being
creative, original and innovative in the research.
Three Types of Creativity

Beghetto and Kaufman (2007) argue a case for three types of creativity.
There is little-C, which is everyday creativity, and Big-C, which is emi-
nent creativity, and they postulate a mini-C, which highlights the link
between learning and creativity. Mini-C creativity they define as the
novel and personally meaningful interpretations of experiences, actions
and events. It highlights the creative, transformative process involved in
developing personal knowledge and insights. Creativity is often assumed
to be the domain of those who make major breakthroughs like Einstein,
Picasso or Mozart. This suggests that only an elite has creativity potential.
This is where the ideas of Big-C and little-C came from—a need to value
the work of those who are not working at such lofty levels of the Big-
C. Big-C people and products are easily identifiable, and in the past
everything that did not fall under this umbrella was termed little-C. The
mini-C category embraces the personal creative processes involved in stu-
dents’ development of new understanding and personal knowledge con-
struction. Mini-C is a process by which creativity develops. Beghetto and
Kaufman give the example of nuclear physics. Simply reaching the level
of knowledge required to understand the concepts of nuclear physics is
already an achievement. A unique personal understanding of this is mini-
C. Applying that understanding in novel ways is little-C and making a
significant contribution to the fields is Big-C. The reason for describing
these Cs here is that creativity operates at all levels of the research process.
The way you frame and understand your field using metaphor, models,
diagrams and analogies is creative and is an example of mini-C work. If
one chooses to explore a field using dance and movement instead of the
off-the-shelf methods you are engaging in little-C activities. If one’s work
changes the understanding of the field then that is Big-C. Freedom
Research needs to operate at all three levels.
76 K. McArdle
Personality and Creativity
Personality and creativity have frequently been linked in the literature.
Sternberg (2006) cites attributes as including the willingness to overcome
obstacles, taking sensible risks, the willingness to tolerate ambiguity and
self-efficacy. Here, I wish to emphasise the importance of the willingness
to tolerate ambiguity and self-efficacy, which are linked in a research con-
text. Ambiguity will be inherent in traducing the dogma of traditional
research and a sense of the rightness of what one is doing will be impor-
tant. When one is creative, vested interests may seek to decry what you
are trying to achieve as it runs counter to their understanding of research.
Being an autonomous researcher means having the knowledge, skills and
motivation to stick with what one believes to be right. Motivation to be
creative is linked to a passion for what one does and this is likely to be a
feature of most students’ or practitioners’ work in a research context, as I
believe research and creation of new knowledge to be inherently exciting
and interesting. Finally, one’s environment is important to support cre-
ative ideas. Environments are variable in the extent to which they will
encourage creativity. Schools and universities with their interest in origi-
nality, innovation and new knowledge should be places to welcome cre-
ativity, but like all institutions they have traditions, bureaucracies,
orthodoxies and pecking orders, which do not always value the creative.
Opposition to the status quo can be enough to annoy some people. It
may be that you need to think about how to approach negative feedback
before you present creative ideas to protect yourself.
Resilience is important and in my opinion can be learned. You are a
competent researcher, you have support systems and you can argue your
point of view with energy and commitment. I cannot simply exhort the
researcher to be more creative and hope that this will work. Rather I can
argue that it is important and encourage him/her to be different and to
think with difference. I also encourage the researcher to reward creativity
and tolerate ambiguity in the research of others.
Sternberg (2006) puts creativity into types, which includes types of
creativity that accept current paradigms and attempt to extend them. In
research, this may include replication and redefinitions. Examples of this
include the redefinition of special needs in an educational context, where

originally this included only disabled people but now includes all chil-
dren as having particular, special or additional needs. His second category
is types of creativity that reject current paradigms and this in a research
context may include redirection of a field of study or re-initiation, which
means taking a different starting point. Considering paradigms of
research, a colleague and I are developing an argument that Anthroposophy,
the Rudolf Steiner approach to education, should be considered a begin-
ning research paradigm in its own right as it embraces traditions and
ideologies of thought and the concomitant methodologies and methods
of action research. The third category is types of creativity that synthesise
current paradigms and this is where two formerly diverse ways of think-
ing are integrated. An example of this is the bringing together in discus-
sions with medical colleagues, the fact that resilience to illness might be
learned and accordingly taught in schools. All of these types of creativity
are relevant to the research context.
Climates for Creativity
Isaksen et al. (2001) discuss perceptions of the best and worst climates for
creativity in an organisational context. Climate they define as the pattern
of behaviour, attitudes and feelings that characterise life in the organisa-
tion that support the development, assimilation and utilisation of new
and different approaches and concepts. They use a Situational Outlook
Questionnaire (SOQ). It is the dimensions of the SOQ that are of inter-
est here. There are nine dimensions that either support or limit creativity
and for those of us who lead and support research, they are vital, I sug-
gest, to the success of our research programmes. The first dimension in an
educational context is Challenge and Involvement. This is the degree to
which people are involved in the goals and visions of the work. People
may feel motivated by challenge and a dynamic, electric and inspiring
climate can result. In a research context this is particularly important as
the opposite can result in apathy and dullness, Isaksen et al. suggest. It is
important of course to make challenge manageable and be supportive of
those experiencing challenge in their work.
78 K. McArdle
The next dimension discussed is Freedom, which they define rather

simply as independence and autonomy. People are allowed to exercise
discretion. This is contrasted with working under strict guidelines and
with prescribed role definition. I have met supervisors of those working
towards a PhD who are minded to see the role of the PhD student to
agree with the ideas of a group of researchers and to produce a thesis that
follows a set structure. This does not stimulate creativity.
The need for Trust/Openness is arguably linked to notions of the degree
of Freedom allowed to individuals. Emotional safety in relationships
allows for sincere respect and frank discussion of ideas. This will have an
impact on quality of ideas. I have met supervisors of PhD students and
mentors of researchers who are able to generate this trust and this leads to
high-quality outcomes of research activity. I personally believe this is
linked to values of equality and inclusion in an educational context.
Isaksen et al. also refer to Playfulness and Humour, which delights me.
Spontaneity and ease in the workplace lead to a relaxed manner and
accordingly to a willingness to share ideas—ideas that may be unusual or
even controversial, which is important. Seriousness is important but
humour has its place. Conflict also has its place. In the same way that
plate tectonics results in mountains and fissures and earthquakes, so can
conflict and tensions be productive in my opinion. We are often afraid of
conflict in a research context but it can be valuable and show fault lines
in thought and new ways of thinking. It is destructive when it is personal
and involves plots, traps and territory struggles. I have been at confer-
ences where the argument has focused on the individual rather than his/
her ideas and this is inexcusable in my opinion. A person is not stupid
just because they do not share another researcher’s theoretical insights.
Conflict of ideas can lead to quality improvements in the ideas postulated
and the electricity of new ways of thinking.
Idea Time and Idea Support may be included as dimensions of the cre-
ative climate. There needs to be time to create and explore ideas. Idea
support includes ideas being received in an attentive and appropriate way.
Researchers are nearly all busy and committed to the everyday activities
of the organisation but often I think the researcher does not choose to
give himself/herself enough time for creativity. It is easier to do the small
and demanding things than to set aside time for creativity. It is often, I
suggest, our own choices that can limit us. Idea support for the supervisor
or mentor of researchers involves being accepting of the new and embry-
onic rather than being fixed and demanding of the finished product.
Finally Isaksen et al. include Debate and Risk Taking in their domains
of the creative climate. Where debate is missing, students and practitio-
ner researchers will follow the traditional and accepted ways of thinking.
We only need to think again in an educational context of the different
traditions of assessment and how they have changed over the years.
Debate is important. As a supervisor I use debate to broaden and deepen
ideas of my research students, rather than telling them they are wrong.
There is no wrong, just unformed or unbalanced or un-evidenced ideas.
Risk taking is absolutely crucial to a research community. Many research-
ers when presenting findings are in my experience terrified that there is a
‘fatal flaw’ in their thinking. ‘Going out on a limb’ is important to new
knowledge but the limb needs to be sturdy and full of growth potential.
Debate is the means of ensuring that risks are calculated and that the
limb is indeed sturdy.
I would add one final dimension of my own creative climate, which is
the need to Avoid Silo Thinking. There are many traditions that are taken
for granted in education. Poststructuralism has contributed well to the
critique of the assumptions we make about our discipline. In my teaching
of Poststructuralism to Masters-level students, I assist students to take
apart the notion of being child centred, as one example of a ‘sacred cow’
that needs critique. There are many reasons why we should think of
schooling with more group and community philosophies and theories,
but traditions and Western habits die hard. We tend to focus, in my opin-
ion, on seminal thinking well past its use-by date. For example, in adult
education theories in a practice context still remain stuck in the 1970s
with practitioners longing for the halcyon days of social movements and
community activism. The thinking of Zygmunt Bauman and the idea of
living in ‘liquid times’ as one example of new thinking has had barely an
impact on community in a practice context, which is a pity. Silos are,
however, very strong, large and isolated. They are very useful to the farmer
but we need to be able to recognise them for what they are and think in
a way that recognises the complexity of ideas and how power works with
ideas.
80 K. McArdle
Ideas and theories have a power dynamic that needs to be remem-

bered when considering their worth. For example, in the wider research
community ‘thinking’ is often valued above ‘doing.’ Many, including
myself, would argue that these are inseparable in that everything one
does is underpinned by the cerebral cortex but theory and practice
together link to action research, an approach that has long found it dif-
ficult to establish its credentials to the same extent as ‘blue skies’ think-
ing in a university context. A colleague of mine considers that action
research is not research at all; rather it is practice. Silo thinking about
what matters in education is enormously powerful in societal decisions,
and societal decisions are enormously powerful in determining what we
learn and, indeed, what we choose to research and how we conduct the
research. Eisenberger and Shannock (2003) help us to understand how
to enhance creativity in others. It has often been thought that creativity
is affected by intrinsic motivation, and it is my experience that research-
ers are similarly motivated by the intrinsic interest and creativity in of
what they do. Rewards, however, can be important too, and Eisenberger
and Shannock’s research shows that socio-emotional rewards can enhance
creativity as long as they are linked to creative performance, not the
opposite, such as doing repetitive tasks. If people think a task requires
conventional performance, then they do not show high creativity. One
needs, while working in a research context, to maintain one’s own intrin-
sic motivation through research in what one really cares about and
rewards for others need to be managed. Rewarding oneself and others
demands that one knows what is wanted as a reward.
In research there are intrinsic rewards such as recognition through
publication, grants awarded, increased status or promotion and the sheer
joy of finding things out. We can also contribute to the rewards of others
through social and emotional measures. Simply telling others about the
publication of a student can be important. Bottles of champagne at key
moments such as upgrade of a PhD can be symbolic and important, so
too can be the final report or presentation of a research practitioner.
Perhaps the most important reward to oneself as a researcher needs some
careful thought, so we can ensure we reward ourselves. Freedom Research
is intended to stimulate creativity, so rewards for finding out, well, are
important. Research may be argued to be inherently creative in that we
are finding new knowledge. It is however subject to a procedural design

discourse, which limits this creativity. Through Freedom Research one
can critique the discourse and reintroduce creativity.
References
Anfara, V. A., & Mertz, N. T. (2006). Theoretical Frameworks in Qualitative
Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Beghetto, R. A., & Kaufman, J. C. (2007). Towards a Broader Conception of
Creativity: A Case for “mini-C” Creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity
and the Arts, 1(2), 73–79.
Claxton, G. (1998). Hare Brain and Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases
When You Think Less. London: Fourth Estate.
Cross, N. (2011). Design Thinking. Oxford: Berg.
Davie, R., & Talbot, R. (1987). Experiencing Ideas: Identity, Insight and the
Image. Design Studies, 8, 445–461. In Cross, N. (2011). Design Thinking.
Oxford: Berg.
Eisenberger, R., & Shanock, L. (2003). Rewards, Intrinsic Motivation and
Creativity; A Case Study of Conceptual and Methodological Isolation.
Creativity Research Journal, 15(2–3), 121–130.
Isaksen, S. G., Lauer, K. J., Ekvall, G., & Britz, A. (2001). Perceptions of the
Best and Worst Climates for Creativity: Preliminary Validation Evidence for
the Situational Outlook Questionnaire. Creativity Research Journal, 13(2),
171–184.
Kao, J. J. (1991). Managing Creativity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Kohlberg, L. (1987). The Development of Moral Judgement and Moral Action.
In L. Kohlberg (Ed.), Child Psychology and Childhood Education: A Cognitive
Developmental View. New York: Longman.
Raudesepp, E. (1983). Profile of the Creative Individual. Creative Computing,
9(8), 78–265.
Roe, A. (1963). Psychological Approaches to Creativity in Science. In M. A.
Coler & K. H. Hughes (Eds.), Essays on Creativity in the Sciences. New York:
New York University.
Rowe, P. (1987). Design Thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Schostak, J., & Schostak, J. (2008). Radical Research: Designing, Developing and
Writing Research to Make a Difference. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
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18(1), 87–98.
Thomas, G. (2009). How to Do You Research Project. London: Sage.
6
Educational Values and the Link
to Methodology
This chapter focuses on Values and assumptions that characterise meth-

odology, seeking to make these explicit so that one does not follow ortho-
doxies in choices but rather seeks coherence with the Values that underpin
the researcher’s choices. It is important to read this chapter with the pre-
vious chapters in mind as methodology suffers from being singled out as
a discrete practice, independent of philosophy, theory and design consid-
erations, all of which are interlinked in the research processes that embrace
methodology. The second half of this chapter focuses on a much-neglected
dimension of research, the practical implementation of research practice
and the values and virtues in particular that this demands.
Children and Childhood
As this is a book about education, the reader’s research might be, but is
not necessarily, about children. There are books which focus wholly on
research methods with children (e.g. Christensen et al. 2008; Punch, S.
2002; Alderson and Morrow 2011), but here I wish simply to focus
briefly on the Values dimension. Mayall (1999) focuses on children as a
disadvantaged group in society:

84 K. McArdle
Adult policy and practice on, for and with children is based on the proposi-
tion that they lack essential abilities and characteristics of adulthood, but
that adult work may successfully steer them through dangerous waters to
adulthood. Through their designation as inferior they are denied the ability
to transform themselves but through submission to socialization they may
reach acceptable standards of adulthood. (p. 10)
Mayall, writing in the 1990s, further argues that children have little
power in decision-making or policy that affects their lives, and research
that concerns them is frequently undertaken by agencies that are respon-
sible for welfare and education, which see children as problems, which
need to be solved. Children, she argues, are understood in this way as
objects of adults’ activities, and the goal is to turn out adults that fit certain
norms. Her own position is that research about children should increase
knowledge about children’s experiences, knowledge and views. These data
can then contribute to policy and, I would argue, practice-orientated work
towards improving the social condition of childhood. The research process
engages with societal processes through insiders’ knowledge of their own
lives. She suggests a feminist track to childhood research which would
have the steps, which include deconstructing knowledge by studying the
concepts and categories in conventional views, which show how ideas
structure children and childhood; then, developing a child standpoint and
using it as the basis for restructuring theory.
You may or may not agree that Mayall’s position still applies, but how
one frames research and methodology will depend on how one chooses to
frame childhood. Childhood may arguably these days be more challeng-
ing for the child. Cooper in Knowles and Lander (2012) cites public
anxiety about boys’ underachievement in schools, the potential risks
imposed by unregulated contact on the internet, the early sexualisation of
girls by the media and retail, over concern with standards and achieve-
ment in schools and a perceived breakdown in traditional family life.
It is not the purpose of this book to discuss framings of childhood;
rather I seek to draw the researcher’s attention to discourses of childhood
and to encourage awareness of these and the need to be clear about one’s
own understanding of childhood and children in educational research:
Educational Values and the Link to Methodology 85
[I]f we believe in the notion of children having agency, that is having the
capacity to make decisions and to be part of decision-making processes,
this will in turn impact on the ethical approach we take to process or peda-
gogy of teaching and learning. That is to say, do we value the child as
something unformed until educate, a rather passive notion of what it is to
be a child, or as someone who has agency, is active in decisions about their
own life and is partner in the educative process. (Knowles and Lander
2012, p. 53)
Adult and Vulnerable Groups

How research subjects are framed, just as with childhood, will determine
the approach taken to methodology. Frequently adult education research
focuses on vulnerable groups. This of course casts research subjects or
participants into the category of ‘others’ or people who do not fit implicit
social norms, which is in itself argued to be disadvantaging groups of
people. I consider that, almost without exception, everyone is vulnerable
in some way or other. I am aware that researching vulnerable groups, of
which one is not a part, is a complex undertaking and requires care in the
framing of the research approach in order not to be patronising. Barr
(1999) describes how critical social science rests on the belief that,
through rational enlightenment, people will be enabled to change
society:
Critical social science and research based on it seek, then, to dig beneath
the surface of historically specific, oppressive social structures in order to
get at the underlying conditions which account for the experienced world
of appearances and events. (p. 70)
Critical social researchers have to ferret out what is really going on by

following leads, seeking out clues so as to understand circumstances such
as why women make and remake their lives in a capitalist patriarchy and
in which working-class children get working-class jobs, for example,
explains Barr. There are no particular methods for critical social science,
but what is important to Barr is that the research is designed to address
critically contradictions or myths at the level of actual practice that relate
86 K. McArdle
to broader questions about the operation of oppression. Again, Barr was

writing some time ago but it is a good example of how research can be
framed according to one’s deeply held beliefs about the population with
which one is working. The language of these discourses of empowerment
is problematical. People refer to giving ‘voice’ to disadvantaged popula-
tions. They indeed have a voice; it is a question of who is listening?
What Is Education?
Freedom Research seeks to critique orthodoxy. Many books have been
written which seek to define and critique education, but here it is impor-
tant to be aware of one’s own definitions of education, as these will be
Value based. It is not reasonable in Freedom Research to leave Education
undefined. The concept of education as transmission of knowledge is
now old fashioned, though this indeed may be a part of the educational
process. Dewey (1897) is cited by Knowles and Lander (2012), who indi-
cate that Education may be viewed as not limited to individuals acquiring
knowledge but having a wider and more profound influence as it sustains
and potentially transforms society:
[E]ducation is a regulation of the process of coming to share in social con-

sciousness and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this
social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction. (Dewey
1897, p. x)
Cooper in Knowles and Lander (ibid.) discusses the purposes of pri-

mary education from a personal point of view as educationalist and
parent:
I want my own children to be competent in literacy and efficient in their

arithmetic calculations. However, I also hold other aspirations for them. I
would like them to be active participants in their class, independent learn-
ers, mature and resilient human beings who take responsibility for their
own progress. (Knowles and Lander 2012, p. 117)
It is not the purpose of this book to define education, rather to ensure

the reader as researcher defines it.
Power and Values
I choose here to discuss Foucault’s understandings of power and the
implications for Freedom Research. Foucault defines power as being tied
to the identity of the individual:
This form of power that applies itself to immediate everyday life categorizes
the individual, marks him [sic] by his own individuality, attaches him to
his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognise and
others have to recognise in him. It is a form of power that makes individu-
als subjects. There are two meanings of the word ‘subject’: subject to some-
one else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a
conscience or self knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that
subjugates and makes subjects too. (1982, p. 6)
Power is not merely prohibitive, it can be productive—a lot of the time

it makes us up rather than grinding us down. Power is not then structure
but a complex arrangement of social forces that are exercised; it is strategy
embedded in other kinds of relations (Ball 2013). Power is not a thing or
a weapon as is frequently suggested. Rather it is always already there. It
operates in a kind of capillary mechanism being present in every transac-
tion. Michel Foucault’s work is highly accessible in translation and is
widely cited in research contexts across a range of conceptual frameworks
and theories. Here I choose to focus in a practical and values-focused way
on his discussion of power. Foucault is cited frequently for his views on
power, which he describes not as theories but as a focus on the history of
the ‘different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made
subjects’ (1982, p. 1). He is most well known for the description of power
relations that are complex and implicit in all relationships people have
with each other and within our society. He rejected the belief that power
was a commodity held by some people and not others.
88 K. McArdle
Increasingly, over the years the power of the researcher and the acad-
emy has been made manifest in journal articles and books that seek to
point out the interpersonal dynamics of qualitative research. Gubrium
and Holstein (2003) discuss this power dynamic in Postmodern
Interviewing, where they discuss, for example, metaphors of data collec-
tion that refer to ‘mining,’ ‘extraction,’ rather than what they propose
takes place in interviews, which is the co-construction of reality—a more
reciprocal approach. This thinking is closely linked to Values that suggest
that taking from respondents or co-inquirers in a one-way extractive
mode is somehow unequal and to be avoided. It is an ethical and moral
judgement embedded in epistemological thinking.
How this relates to the research process and Values for me is in the
need for the researcher to be very careful about his/her behaviours in
research relationships if one subscribes to the view that power is in every
dynamic of the process and that people should be treated in a way that is
as equal as possible in research. As I believe in avoiding ‘taking’ in an
extractive way from the interview process, as this is a one-way process, I
always find myself in a natural way ‘giving’ something of myself in an
interview process to rebalance the power dynamic. I do not foist myself
on the interviewee or lead them by my utterances into a particular way of
thinking. Rather, I return the gift of insight into the other person. It may
simply be a story of how I got lost on the way to the interview venue, but
it is an offering of my experience in return for theirs. This power dynamic
needs to be addressed at every stage of the research process. Whose ideas
frame the research question and what are the implications of this? Who
decides the methodology and why? Who chooses who will participate
and how? Whose meanings interpret the data? Who owns the data?
Freedom Research and Methods

Methods, as a term in a research context, refers to what one chooses to do
to gather or generate data and may be understood by the range of ‘off-
the-
shelf methods’ of experiment, interviews, questionnaires, focus
groups and observation, for example, used to gather these data in an
educational context. There are discourses that go with the individual
methods about how to use them and their intrinsic value. Methodology,
in contrast, is variously described as an approach or the underpinning
philosophy behind methods. Somekh and Lewin (2005) describe how in
a narrow sense it is often used to describe the collection of methods or
rules by which a particular piece of research is undertaken. However, I
prefer their broader definition, which describes it as the ‘whole system of
principles, theories and values that underpin a particular approach to
research.’ (p. 347). The principles, theories and values of action research,
for example, may be described in the following ways. The Values of action
research are linked to ideas of participation and inclusion of participants
in inquiry, for example. Theoretical and epistemological assumptions of
action research are linked to the notion that it is preferable and closer to
the truth to involve the subjects of research in framing and managing the
action research process. Principles include the use of a group or group of
participants to assist with these framing and implementation processes in
a manner that is consistent with the Values. As you can see, methodology,
which embraces Values, determines how the researcher will implement
chosen methods.
Cohen and Manion (1994) suggest that methodology embraces under-
standing the processes of scientific inquiry. Methodologies are linked not
only to ontology and epistemological beliefs but also to our values and
beliefs. If one believes that research should be about making practical
change then one might adopt an action research methodology and seek
to implement appropriate action as part of this methodology. Similarly, if
one believes that identity is important to how teachers behave profession-
ally, then, when researching in this area, one might choose to use narra-
tive inquiry to explore the way individual teachers frame their
understandings of education. If we believe that behaviour is determined
by the phenomena of experiences and that subjective consciousness gov-
erns what we do then we shall probably adopt a phenomenological meth-
odology. Generally, but not exclusively, in educational research values
prevent an approach that uses experiments on people from a tacit under-
standing that experiments are manipulative and intrusive and may disad-
vantage those included or excluded from the process.
Somekh and Lewin (2005) describe the political dimensions of educa-
tional research, which have led researchers to develop ‘elaborate
90 K. McArdle
ethodological fortresses’ in which particular understandings of knowl-

m
edge, truth and values give firm foundations for research design and pro-
vide ‘defensive bulwarks’ against external criticism. These bulwarks such as
action research, narrative inquiry and phenomenology can be reassuring
for the novice researcher, but this concept runs counter to the desire for
Freedom Research, which requires that the researcher think with greater
freedom about what is and is not possible and desirable in research pro-
cesses. I am not saying there is anything wrong with these bulwarks, just
that there is a need to recognise and use them with the fact they are bul-
warks in mind. It is arguably much easier to pick up an established meth-
odology with books written about it and to use the methods proposed. For
example, methodologies linked to narrative inquiry and phenomenology
provide a certain degree of safety through their relative recognition in the
academic establishment. This recognition is for good and substantial rea-
sons. If your way of seeing the world matches these methodologies then by
all means embrace them, but I am inviting Freedom Researchers to avoid
being constrained by established methodology if their world looks differ-
ent. These bulwarks also follow a fashion-like trend in that phenomenol-
ogy is currently very popular in my university, whereas narrative inquiry
has a limited following, though this has not been the case in the past.
Methodological Choices
Scott and Usher (2011) suggest that there may be a tendency to assume
that doing research is simply a matter of following the right procedures
or methods. This assumption or orthodoxy needs to be challenged as it
portrays research misleadingly as mechanistic. If one uncritically accepts
this portrayal, they state, then one forgets that research is a social practice
and that it is therefore both ‘embodied and embedded’ (p. 10). We need,
they suggest, to recognise that research is not a technology but a practice,
that it is not individualistic but social and that there are no universal
methods to be applied invariantly. One needs to be cognisant of the axi-
ology, epistemology and ontology that underpin methodology. All
research has these dimensions implicit if not stated. The battle between
quantitative and qualitative domains has been well rehearsed elsewhere,
and Scott and Usher suggest that it is less acute in the educational domain
than in other social sciences. They suggest that there is a need to prob-
lematise the continuing need for legitimacy in qualitative research by
academics. I have seen many research reports, qualitative theses or dis-
sertations that seek to explain why Positivism in particular is rejected. I
am of the view that paradigm choices need to be explained but not as an
apology for deviating from the norm.
In this chapter, I wish to extend the possibility of a range of methods
chosen by researchers to undertake a study by suggesting that we can
move beyond the traditional and off-the-shelf methods to embrace a
wider range of activities. I am not being original in suggesting this; rather
I seek to underline what is required for this to ensure that the data gather-
ing remains cogent and robust. Here, I am concerned to ensure that
choices are cogent. By this I mean that choices hold together. Values
should remain consistent with the methodology chosen, and then with
the methods used to gather data. Why should not kinaesthetic and aes-
thetic ways of knowing be increasingly translated into methodology and
methods if the researcher believes that one of these ways of knowing is
ontologically and epistemologically important? Rigour is a term I have
avoided in this chapter so far in thinking about methodology. In the dic-
tionary, definitions include ‘harsh’ and ‘grim,’ and it is my experience that
early career researchers have found it to be anxiety provoking. I prefer to
think of robustness as a quality I would seek in research proposals or
reports. Robustness I am delighted to say has the definition of ‘full-
bodied,’ like freshly ground coffee, or ‘sturdy’ and ‘ruddy,’ and I find this
to be an attractive feature of the cogent research project. Robustness is
linked to cogency in that it suggests a strength and coherence in the
research design and is linked to the methodology being appropriate to
the beliefs that underpin the questions to be asked.
One cannot discuss methodology and methods without encountering
the notion that research questions should drive methodology. I subscribe
to this view to a limited extent in that there is no point conducting an
interpretative study that seeks individual perceptions using a question-
naire with closed questions only. This would simply find out how the
researcher framed the subject. I do, however, need to qualify this with
learning from my own experience, which is that research questions are
92 K. McArdle
flexible and prone to shifting as one’s knowledge of a subject increases

over time as the researcher learns from literature, from reflection and
inductively from the data themselves. I myself have started exploratory
studies with a simple statement of purpose in terms of finding out and
have found the research questions to have grown naturally from a com-
plex exploratory study. This view of mine is founded on the belief that
our knowledge is never fixed at one point. It is always growing in a com-
plex world, and research questions can freeze one’s knowing in time. I do
not want to suggest that one has no research questions or clarity of inten-
tion. Rather, in a research study, I would be surprised and perhaps a little
worried if the research questions were not challenged or did not fluctuate
or change at some point in time. Research needs to be about finding out
and contributing to knowledge, so there is a need to be conscious of what
one is seeking to find out. This, however, can be an emergent process and
data will have an impact on the questions that appear to be most impor-
tant. I undertook a study of the impact of equine therapy on young adults
with autism and intended to describe this impact in terms of developing
language skills and social skills. I found, however, that the data from my
ethnographic study supported a focus on the impact of rhythm in riding
a horse on physical and emotional well-being. Language and social skills
were important but the impact of the rhythm of the horses’ gait held my
attention and changed the focus of the interpretation of the data.
I do not intend here to describe innovative methodologies and meth-
ods that could be used; this would circumscribe the boundaries of choices
that could be made and render them no longer innovative. I do not seek
to suggest that educational research is generally NOT innovative—indeed
there are many examples of interesting and creative work; rather I seek to
render innovation more mainstream and less marginalised. Rarely is pol-
icy linked to the creative and innovative in methodological terms in my
experience. I seek to point to the design questions that must be asked
from a Values perspective when we are making methodological and meth-
ods choices. Design choices implicitly draw on axiological, epistemologi-
cal and ontological assumptions. In my view the only strictures on
methodological choices should be Values considerations and choices
linked to quality and validity. Many studies use naturalistic events as the
basis for data gathering. I am currently at the time of writing examining
a thesis that uses lifelong learning opportunities or workshops as a source

of data where the researcher is running the workshops as participant
observer. This means that the method of data collection embraces the
activities of teaching such as getting the resources in place and managing
conflict in the classroom, as well as observations of learning.
Methodologically anything goes as long as it is ethically and respectfully
sound.
Practical matters will also influence our choices of methods. Access to
a sample and characteristics of a population will determine what we do
with our research methods. In an educational context our methodology,
if it involves children, will need to be considered carefully from an ethical
standpoint concerning securing permissions and from the standpoint of
having methods that are fit for age and purpose. So making choices about
what we do is a careful judgemental decision, which balances practical,
belief and value matters. It may also balance orthodoxy because it is sim-
pler and safer in term of one’s reputation to stick to well-developed
approaches to research. I would like to invite the researcher to consult
creative instinct rather than an instinct for safety. I am of the opinion that
anything should be acceptable as a method for research as long as it is
sound in terms of Values and can be justified with the balancing process
I mentioned earlier. Why should we not explore aesthetically as well as
through the more orthodox theory and reason? Knowing through dance,
drama and visual arts is gaining currency in higher education, but even
these are subject to normalisation of perceptions. As long as the method
is suited to the purpose of the research and is ethically sound, I think
anything can be chosen as long as it can be justified.
Sampling Choices
Who the researcher includes in samples is a question often underpinned
by power and always by Values. Power frequently plays a part in educa-
tional research selection of respondents or participants. One may choose
to use people in a way that is linked to a relationship with them and this
is hidden behind the idea of purposive sampling. Questioning students
or practitioners of research about how they chose people for purposive
94 K. McArdle
reasons often unleashes complex relationships, where pupils are chosen

for the arguably good reason that the researcher knew they would be will-
ing to participate without demur and that they already were known and
therefore available to the researcher. This raises issues about the power
dynamics in the relationship. Sampling is frequently discussed in terms of
who is included and why, but less frequently, in my experience, from the
perspective of who is excluded and why. My colleagues in higher educa-
tion frequently research with their student teachers. Who is included
raises the issue of who is excluded from the research and, accordingly, may
feel slighted or not clever enough or well regarded enough to be included.
In researching attainment in school, for example, does the researcher
choose to value the opinion of Ministers for Education, local educational
authorities, head teachers, teachers, school nurses, pupils in general, pupil
or parents? Clearly there may be ethical issues, but there are Value judge-
ments behind how the problem of achievement is framed and to whom
one chooses to give priority in research. Beliefs and culture affect the way
we choose to sample. For example, we may choose in considering research
into high achievement of young people in secondary school to think in
terms of interviewing those who get jobs or places at college or university.
Behind this is an implicit belief that achievement is about certain kinds
of success in society and that some people are more successful than oth-
ers. Success is not being defined in terms of aesthetic or sporting achieve-
ments, for example.
Practical Implementation—Research as Craft

Peering through a window into a carpenter’s shop, you see inside an elderly
man surrounded by his apprentices and his tools. Order reigns within,
parts of chairs are clamped neatly together, the fresh smell of work shavings
fills the room, the carpenter bends over his bench to make a fine incision
for marquetry. (Sennett 2009, p. 19)
I choose in this section to focus on the concept of the craftsperson,

what used to be known as a craftsman. I draw on the writing of Sennett
(2009). Sennet describes the usual image of the craftsman [sic] as above,
but suggests that others can be craftworkers if they are dedicated to good
work for its own sake. To do good work, he suggests, is to be curious
about, to investigate and to learn from ambiguity. I propose that these
qualities are needed in the practical implementation of research.
At the higher reaches of craft, Sennett suggests, technique is no longer
a mechanical activity; people can feel fully and think deeply about what
they are doing once they do it well. All craftwork is quality-driven work;
Plato formulated this aim as the arête, the standard of excellence inherent
in any act. In this own time, Sennett explains, Plato observed that
although craftworkers are all poets, they are not called poets. Plato wor-
ried that these different names and indeed different skills kept people in
his day from understanding what they shared. I wish the reader to think
of the practical implementation of research as a craft. Craftwork involves
skills, and skills are trained practices in this context. I would add that
valuing quality in the work and being knowledgeable are also important
to craftwork. Becoming an autonomous educational researcher demands
practice and experience. The skills required are not a laundry list of pro-
cedures but embedded in a culture formed around these understandings
(Sennet 2009), and learning from other researchers in this culture is a
means of gaining the tacit knowledge and skills that surround the research
process. Learning with and from other researchers will assist with the
practical domain. The researcher can make a point of discussing with oth-
ers what is intended, as this is an important way that the craftworker
learns.
Getting better at using tools to pursue the image of the craftworker
comes to the individual when the tools challenge. They may not be good
enough or may need to be used differently. Adapting the tool is a means
of learning to do better what we are choosing to do. Furthermore, repair,
says Sennet, is a poorly understood dimension of craftwork. He quotes
Harper (1987):
The sociologist Douglas believes that making and repairing form a single
whole; he writes of those who do both that they possess the knowledge that
allows them to see beyond the elements of a technique to its overall pur-
pose and coherence. The knowledge is the ‘live intelligence,’ fallibly attuned
to the actual circumstance of life. It is the knowledge in which making and
96 K. McArdle
fixing are parts of a continuum. Put simply, it is by fixing things that we

often get to understand how they work. (Sennet 2009, p. 198)
In the traditional crafts there was an emphasis on the ethics, on per-

sonal responsibility and loyalty to the craft (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015),
and I would argue that this is relevant to the craftworker in his/her imple-
mentation of Freedom Research. So, problem-solving as described above
is an important dimension of our craftwork, viewing challenge as an
opportunity not a threat and the ability to see the purpose of a high-
quality coherent study as our overall purpose. I wish to explore some of
those forgotten skills and the qualities and virtues that are required to be
an autonomous and effective Craftworker Researcher.
Practical Research Implementation

The research journey demands a holistic approach and, accordingly, the
ability to synthesise information from disparate sources into a coherent
whole. Good practice consists of more than merely carrying out a practi-
cal act; it also involves a situated judgement of what knowledge and tech-
niques to apply when acting in a given context (Brinkmann and Kvale
2015). When working with research practitioners and students, I am
always careful to insist that a methodology demands integrity and coher-
ence. It is easy to break down a chapter in a PhD proposal, for example,
into sample, methods of data gathering, data analysis and interpretation,
and ethical considerations. However, it is important that this process is
seen as one process that is cogent and that is well thought through. Data
analysis cannot be separated from the methods chosen for data gathering.
One clear example is that the sample will influence the methods to be
used for data gathering. If I am working with young people on the autism
spectrum, I shall think hard about how to generate a response that does
not cause distress or discomfort to my participants. This leads me natu-
rally to think of the qualities this demands of the researcher.
Creativity and Entrepreneurship
Kao in discussing creativity discusses the strong linkages between creativ-
ity and entrepreneurship. I am of the view that entrepreneurship is fun-
damental to the researcher’s qualities. Kao defined an entrepreneur as
‘[s]omeone who is responsive to opportunity and has a sense of freedom both
in personal and in organizational terms to act on that opportunity … While
creativity implies a vision of what is possible, the entrepreneur translates this
creative vision into action’ (Kao 1991, p. 17). He suggests that the entre-
preneurship and the creativity overlap, but are not identical and that they
may reside separately in individuals and organisations. I suggest that the
autonomous researcher needs to have a creative ideology and an entrepre-
neurial inclination. Kao in the context of organisations managing creativ-
ity explains what hinders creative expression. To hinder creative expression,
we should
Emphasize bureaucratic structures and attitudes

Pile on tradition and established culture
Stress the importance of standard operating procedures
Suppress suitable role models for creative expression
Minimize the availability of needed resources
Ensure poor communication, which blocks the flow of ideas
Enforce strict penalties for failure
Omit rewards for success
Emphasize values that inhibit risk taking and questioning of the orthodoxy
Carry out undue surveillance of creative activity
Freedom Research seeks in particular to avoid the tradition and estab-

lished culture and to emphasise values that inhibit risk taking and ques-
tioning of orthodoxy as has already been established. Kao goes on to
suggest that we can enhance creativity by the following, which I have
derived from his text:
Create an open decentralised organisational structure

Encourage experimental attitudes
98 K. McArdle
Circulate success stories

Provide the freedom to be wrong
Stress effective communication
Ensure that new ideas cannot be easily killed
Remove bureaucracy
Ensure a culture, which supports risk taking and questioning
Minimize administrative interference
Loosen deadlines
(derived from Kao, J.J. (1991), pp. 21–22)
Kao is further helpful in showing managerial responsibilities in a cre-

ative organisation, which apply to principal investigators and supervisors
of research projects or managers in the organisations in which a researcher
seeks to conduct his/her research. Responsibilities that I have derived
from his text include:
Creating and sharing a vision or supporting this in others

Communicating clearly and flexibly
Providing interpersonal support
Celebrating and coaching
Honouring failures
Knowing when to open up a creative process and when to close it down
Balancing originality with resource constraints
Balancing vision with attention to detail
(Derived from Kao, J.J. (1991), p. 25)
I would also add to these:
nsuring the ethical dimensions of creative approaches to research are

E
managed
Balancing the demands of the organisational culture with the need for
creativity
One needs to think about what is done practically in working through

the research process, and here I wish to draw attention to the need for a
range of qualities on the part of the researcher. First, I cannot underesti-
mate the need for agency, which will contribute to the quality of the
research. Agency is about having an inner power to make things happen.

Research in education is not sitting in an ivory tower or doing blue skies
research; it is about people—parents, pupils, head teachers, adult learners
and janitors. Agency demands the ability to be confident enough to make
things happen, to manage gatekeepers, to approach a preferred sample of
people and to assist them to do what the researcher wants and what one
hopes the participants will want too.
It may need the skills for cold calling if one does not have a population
ready to access. It might involve approaching aforementioned gatekeep-
ers such as head teachers or local government officers to find a location or
sample for the research. Put simply, it may need a little of one’s ability to
cope with embarrassment or social unease as people are approached, who
may choose not to participate. Molloy (2015) distinguishes between ‘get-
ting by’ and ‘getting in’ when accessing groups of people, in her case
vulnerable people. The ethics of entry where people are vulnerable are
complex, but here I am concerned with the seeking of authentic engage-
ment with the people with whom one is working, so that the people are
not involved superficially in creating knowledge but actively interested
and participating in the research process. This demands the skills of form-
ing relationships with individuals to persuade them that the research is
interesting and worth their time to participate in.
Effective communications skills are central to the craft of educational
research. This includes all dimensions of our ability to act appropriately
with our participants or respondents, but many students in my experi-
ence in the past have been left to guess what appropriately might mean
and worse than this have been encouraged to behave ‘objectively’ or ‘neu-
trally’ and to remain thick skinned as far as communication with poten-
tial participants is concerned. Being friendly and human with potential
participants is both desirable from a humanistic point of view and practi-
cal in that it will encourage people to engage with you and participate.
The ability to listen and to communicate sympathetically and with con-
gruence between verbal and non-verbal behaviour is crucial. As educa-
tion is a discipline which requires highly developed communication
skills, I shall not take this further.
Other virtues linked to communication skills include sensitivity and
the ability to be aware of others’ comfort and discomfort with the research
100 K. McArdle
process or activities. I have already discussed courage if one is engaged in

Freedom Research. The virtue of kindness is fundamental to my under-
standing of Values (McArdle and Hurrell 2016). Central to the craft of
research, in my opinion, is humility; this is an awareness always of one’s
ability to learn and to discover new and better ways of achieving one’s
purpose. The absence of humility in research means a denial that all peo-
ple are potentially equal in the research domain. If the researcher thinks
he/she knows more than others, it signals a lack of openness to new
knowledge and ideas.
Things do not always go our way in research in terms of practical
implementation. Ong et al. (2010) cite empirical data and systematic
reviews which show the adaptive functions of positive emotions. They
discuss how multiple studies show the beneficial downstream effects of
positive emotions, such as promoting flexibility in thinking and problem-
solving, and facilitating adaptive coping as well as sparking enduring
well-being. What this means is that positive emotions during setbacks
help the researcher to proceed better. Ong et al. define the term ego-
resiliency as the capacity to overcome, steer through and bounce back
after adversity. Ego-resilient children, for example, were described as con-
fident, perceptive, insightful and able to have warm and open relations
with others (Block 1971, 1993). I suggest that these personality traits are
desirable for the adult researcher as a resilient human being.
Managing one’s own emotions is an important practical skill. It is
desirable to immerse oneself in research and to be passionate about
research as I have mentioned previously. It is however counterproductive
and unkind to oneself to run oneself into the ground or to worry unduly
about the implementation of the research.
In discussing action research, Dadds (2009) describes her journey
from passionate inquiry to ‘loving detachment.’ She discusses emotional
intelligence and the need to be as kind to oneself as to others; otherwise
one is not in the strongest spiritual frame to be of use to others in the
research process. Her meditative approach she relates can soften the heart
while strengthening understanding:
One can relate to one’s inner drama (for that is where we play out our dra-
mas) with a kinder heart and a clearer perception. One can achieve, what I
have called this state of ‘loving detachment in which there is an emphasis

on seeing more clearly and responding more kindly to self and others in a
non-judgemental way, with Buddhist equanimity. This state allows us to
acknowledge, not deny or reject, the difficult, negative thoughts and emo-
tions that are part of us, at the same time helping to transcend them.
(p. 285)
I think extended research in general and Freedom Research in particu-

lar can be a journey of self-discovery, as one is learning about oneself as
one creates new knowledge. Dadds further suggests a cultural phobia in
placing oneself in the research from the point of view of foregrounding
the self being shown off. I am of the view that one needs to be self-aware
of thoughts, actions, feelings and motivations, not only for reflexivity but
to allow oneself a pleasant and productive journey. Viewing one’s research
through the metaphor of a journey is very common for students, who
frequently use this to frame their writing up of the research.
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7
Creating Meaning and Communication
When thinking about Values, it is important to remember that analysis

and interpretation of data requires that the researcher keep in mind
assumptions and is careful to be clear about his/her own Values. This is
the time when Values play an important part in analysis and interpreta-
tion of data as the researcher is the instrument that is making the deci-
sions and choices about what is chosen to be included in a write-up and
how far the findings are going to be interpolated or extrapolated. The
analysis of a qualitative interview contains the story told to the researcher
and the story told by the researcher to those who will read it or hear it.
Brinkmann and Kvale (2015) refer to the triple hermeneutics of the
interview, for example, where the understanding of the interview by the
interviewee is the first hermeneutic. The second is the interpretation of
the meaning of this by the researcher. The third hermeneutic put simply
is the change the meaning may have for people’s understandings of the
everyday world when it is reported or the change it may make to the
original interviewee’s understanding of their reality. Communication of
our findings also requires choices and clarity of Values.

104 K. McArdle
Hermeneutics
In order to understand the Values viewpoint of Freedom Research in
analysis and interpretation, it is necessary to take a brief foray into herme-
neutics. Hermeneutics maybe defined as a basic human activity of inter-
pretation concerned with understanding the meaning of communication
or life situations. It is also the name for the philosophical discipline con-
cerned with analysing the condition for understanding (Zimmerman
2015). For Freedom Research purposes it is important to explore the
second definition to understand the first. Hermeneutic philosophers, for
example, Zimmerman explains, examine how our cultural traditions, our
language and our nature as historical beings make understanding
possible.
Analysis and interpretation in a hermeneutical context elide and
become part of the same meaning-making process, a process of under-
standing. Understanding is the interpretive act of integrating particular
things such as words, signs and events into a meaningful whole, explains
Zimmerman. ‘We understand an object, word, or fact when it makes sense
within our life context and thus speaks to us meaningfully’ (Zimmerman
2015, p. 7). Some philosophers argue and I agree that interpretation is
not only something we DO but something we ARE. Charles Taylor
(1989) discussed the notion of a disengaged self. This is a self that is dis-
engaged from the world and which sees the world as if it were a series of
external events. The engaged self has a consciousness that is, rather,
shaped by the world. Moreover culture, language and upbringing shape
our attitudes as observers of the world. As Zimmerman puts it, ‘the com-
munity or tradition to which we belong gives us the lenses through which we
see the world’ (p. 11).
Constructing Meaning
Analysing data is about constructing meaning. One can analyse meaning
using concepts and one can choose to use well-known concepts to frame
explanations of the data, but one can also choose a poststructural analysis
Creating Meaning and Communication 105
in which diverse concepts are used to create new meanings. Kaufmann

(2011) suggests that using the same concepts when analysing empirical
evidence functions to ignore difference and to limit the possibilities of
living differently. Kaufmann describes how traditionally qualitative
researchers thought meaning was inherent in the object of analysis, and
that one could discover evermore closely the truth. Then constructionism
became even more prevalent and meaning was constructed between the
researcher and the object of analysis; meaning was co-created. In a post-
structural theoretical perspective researchers are noted as looking for dif-
ference rather than similarity, absence rather than presence and the local
rather than the universal.
This approach is akin to the notion of exploring freedom in research,
which is the theme of this book. Kaufmann (ibid.) suggests that through
experiment, by creatively connecting and disrupting intensities, it is possi-
ble to bring that into view which is erased by concepts that are habitually
applied. For example, she argues that traditionally qualitative research has
practised the art of representing a humanistic understanding of the self—a
conscious, agentic, stable, unified, bounded, all-knowing, rational, autono-
mous, ahistorical, present individual. This she replaces with Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1980) notion of ‘haeccity,’ a different understanding of what ‘I’
am or might be. A haeccity could be a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a
pack. Kaufmann further uses the strategies of Deleuze and Guattari’s so-
called rhizomatic connections in analysis—connections of disparate empir-
ical matter made through creative intuition.
So it is not simply the case that one narrates what is seen in the data
with an objective viewpoint. Rather, one chooses how to conceptualise
the concepts that are related to the data. One chooses the concepts to
be applied and one makes judgements about the extent to which one is
going to apply pre-existing concepts or create new ways of seeing the
data. The researcher also chooses what he/she recognises. One can as
Kaufmann suggested look for what is silent or missing from the data.
Models that fit or models that do not fit to the data can be applied, and
one can of course generate theory inductively from the data, linking
this or differing from previous theories. All these activities are about
Values.
106 K. McArdle
One needs to recognise how to create and/or select the theories that
emerge from data in qualitative research. The interview, for example, is
frequently already analysed or has begun to be analysed by the time the
interview has finished. Using the word ‘emerge’ suggests that theories are
independent of us. Perhaps we should rather think of theories synthesised
or extrapolated from within the data. Perhaps the word ‘nourish’ embraces
the sense I am trying to make of the way theory is derived from data. It is
a creative and extenuating process that, in qualitative research, moulds
data into a shape that has meaning.
The word ‘analysis’ has a strength and robustness in that it is about
discovering the general principles that underpin phenomena. It is how-
ever a process that involves placing meaning on empirical data and,
accordingly, is subject to the vagaries of preferences and underpinning
theories and world views, if one is not careful. Interpretation on the other
hand makes no bones about its subjectivity. Implicit in the concept of
interpretation is the idea that there is more than one possible explanation
of meaning from the ‘facts.’ ‘Bracketing’ one’s subjectivity is in my opin-
ion a mirage. It is suggested that it is possible to put to one side one’s
perceptions about the way the world is to view data in a more objective
manner. I am of the view that it is not possible to put one’s values and
attitudes aside. Rather, I suggest that one should view the ability to
bracket as being on a continuum, where, on one extreme, we are very
subjective and refuse to see any interpretation but that which matches
our own views. The other extreme I argue is not objectivity or ‘bracket-
ing’; rather it is an extreme that disappears into the ether as a lesser form
of subjectivity that masquerades as objectivity. At the very least, the
research has been framed according to the researcher’s choices and this
will affect the data. I do, however, suggest that one can place oneself on
the continuum, trying to take into account subjectivity, and one can
therefore seek to have a more conscious and explicit quality of subjectiv-
ity affecting the data.
All constructions of meaning imply choice. We highlight some aspects
and neglect others. Every choice involves values (Zimmerman 2015). In
Freedom Research it is important to be aware of this and to be explicit
about the Values that underpin our choices. To understand the world, we
need to be engaged rather than detached. Zimmerman is again helpful
towards my purpose of proposing that objective knowledge is not possi-

ble in either qualitative or quantitative research:
Knowledge is thus always the action of integrating particulars into a coher-

ent whole. And this integration does not happen all by itself but requires
personal engagement. As in any area of human knowledge, this integrative
work depends on the training, personal convictions, and imaginative power
of the scientist. Scientific knowledge as much as artistic knowledge depends
on this personal dimension for success. (p. 123)
Zimmerman suggests that scientific discovery depends heavily on the

personal intuition of the scientist. Prior knowledge, a knowledge shaped
by choices of what to value, I suggest, allows him/her to integrate all the
relevant details into a coherent framework. The integrative framework is
shaped by the Values of the scientist and what he/she has chosen to value
through tradition, personal involvement, history and commitment. The
creative and visionary side of science aligns, suggests Zimmerman, scien-
tific activity with the creative arts, poetry and literature. It is however
valued more highly than other forms of knowing, and the creative and
visionary dimensions are rarely discussed.
The Interpretive Tradition

Jon Nixon (2014) describes three insights in educational research linked
to the ‘interpretive tradition.’ First, in any attempt at interpretation, one
is interpreting that which has already been interpreted. Second, the inter-
preter is always already a part of what is being interpreted. A third insight
developed by Gadamer (2001) and cited by Nixon is that all understand-
ing inevitably involves an element of self-understanding. The hermeneu-
tical task is to locate oneself within one’s own field of understanding.
Gadamer refers to these fields as traditions, and Nixon explains that these
traditions are constantly evolving as new generations interpret and rein-
terpret them, and by so doing modify and elaborate them. We under-
stand the world, Nixon explains, in relation to what we bring to it by way
of prior assumptions, preconceptions and prejudices. To have trust in
108 K. McArdle
interpretation is to trust that the interpreter has undergone this process

of self-examination in respect of the Values and assumptions that have
shaped the interpretation. What this requires is a conversation that can
be conducted in company but is equally valid and worthwhile in solitude.
Nixon asks what is required in first entering this conversation:
First and foremost, we require the courage and patience to listen to others.
Listening requires courage because so often it involves hearing what we
don’t want to hear or what is difficult to wrap our heads round. It requires
patience because listening—and reading with a listening mind—can be a
long and hard slog. Reading in particular is crucial, being attentive to the
words on the page and/or screen and with what on first and even subsequent
reading may appear difficult and unfamiliar; reading in such a way as to
understand the text from its own historical perspective; reading inter-textu-
ally so as to understand the text in context; and finally, interpreting the text
with reference to our own contemporary concerns. (Nixon 2014, p. 7)
Nixon goes on to ask, what now is required of us? Does the researcher
have a sense of his/her starting point to interpretation? He answers his
own question by adducing determination and imagination to stay with
the question and refine and focus it to sharpen it and apply it. Refining the
question requires determination because it is a process, not a single act,
and imagination is required as interpretation proceeds through ‘inference,
guesswork and intuition.’ The endpoint of this process of question and
answer is not a definitive answer, he suggests, but rather a question so
refined as to imply the parameters, if not the substance of any response to
it. The process of question and answer is endless, but there comes a point
when one decides to go public and then one needs the virtues of openness
and magnanimity: ‘[O]penness in acknowledging that no-one—least of all
oneself—ever has the last word; magnanimity in recognising the value of alter-
native and possibly critical viewpoints and counter-arguments’ (p. 8).
Being Practical About Analysis in Interviews

Analysis needs to be considered at every stage of the research journey.
Interview subjectivity is not so much revealed as constructed during
social practices such as interviews (Brinkamnn and Kvale 2015). We need
to be engaging in analytical strategies while collecting data. The most

practical means for doing this is to maintain a research diary. The
researcher will be making judgements about worldview meanings as he/
she interviews, observes or transcribes and reviews field notes, for exam-
ple. One might view sub-groupings in interview populations; for exam-
ple, one may spot patterns or aberrations in field notes. This preliminary
analysis always takes place in my experience and is an important insight
into the study topic:
What was it about me that made me cry when we observed and docu-
mented the first time a child ran down a hill after we learnt that the child
had been kept all her life in the sitting room of her drug addict mother?
What is it about me that made me angry at the noise in a classroom when
we were trying to do an action research intervention? Why were we fed up
when only the girls in the class volunteered to be anti-smoking monitors in
our study of smoking cessation?
If one engages in thinking about methods of analysis, widely used

approaches are dealt with in many textbooks. Critical discourse analysis,
some authors suggest, cannot be used on interview data, for example,
because it assumes that meaning is socially constructed, and so is con-
structed by the researcher and the participant together and thus is not the
perception of the interviewee. I would argue that this is possible with
reflexivity. Some forms of analysis seek to break data down to patterns,
trends, similarities and differences. Coding and condensation are pro-
cesses that seek to bring out what is contained or hidden in a text. This is
a condensing of the meanings of what you have found and runs the
avoidable risk of reductionism. Other forms of analysis, such as narrative
inquiry, seek to interpret what is said to seek what is implicit in terms of
the identity of the respondent. Other analyses are more in line with a
view of knowledge as socially constructed and seek to analyse the
interaction between the interviewer and his/her questions and the respon-
dent. Brinkmann and Kvale (2015) cite the metaphors of traveller and
miner as representing the kind of knowledge that may be sought, and I
see these metaphors as defining the relationship between the knowledge
to be derived and the analyst. The miner seeks pre-existing nuggets of
information, whereas the traveller seeks to share a journey of discovery
with the respondent.
110 K. McArdle
One can analyse data from recordings by listening or writing or view-

ing in the case of films. Revsbaek and Tanggaard (2015) discuss how what
we consider our data and how we understand our analysis of it are inter-
twined. They cite St. Pierre (2011), who problematises data. It is postu-
lated that data are collected during thinking and indeed during listening
and writing. Revsbaek and Tanggaard acknowledge the entanglement of
data, data collection and data analysis in a way that brings researcher
subjectivity to the forefront, as he/she, the researcher, is the instrument of
research. They further discuss the iterative reinterpretation that can occur
in re-listening to interview recordings, in what they refer to as ‘analyzing
[the] present.’ They describe how they do this in the car on the way to
work as part of the interpretative process:
[Yet] listening to it again, while driving to work, going on the tube or train
to and from work, doing the dishes after tucking in the kids before return-
ing to do your last writing of the day, has much to offer. The work we do
when we are not really working, the ordering and re-ordering we do when
we are not consciously ordering things, are all part of this process. You have
your whole body, your whole memory, your whole sense of what study is
about, interpreting the significance of some incidents in the interview,
compared with others, at specific times of listening, marking where you are
with your work and how this resonates with specific incidents in the
recorded material. (p. 385)
They further suggest that it is listening that teaches the researcher about
the research material and the relationship between it and him/her.
Accordingly, they share my view that reflexivity needs to be integrated
into the research process, not be a retrospective ‘add-on.’ Analysis has
been described so far broadly as reduction of text. Looking at this from
the perspective of Freedom Research, which seeks to avoid the view that
analysis is like the scientific dissection, I am attracted to look at analysis as
construction. Bradley (2015) describes analysis as assemblage. Analysers
start from their own stances by using the understanding they have to un-
make and remake. Each analysis leads to a synthetic assemblage resulting
from an interaction between interpretations of what has been selected for
attention. Writing, Bradley suggests, is also analysis and is the work of
assembling from writing as inquiry and thinking. Analysis and assembling
are processes that continue to explore more thoroughly an endless variety

of potentially fruitful outcomes. Bradley suggests that assemblage overlaps
with bricolage, which I define as a term used to describe a serendipitous
approach of a craftworker to create an artefact or work of art. Bradley
warns against these terms, which include collage and patchwork and
kaleidoscopic texts, as they can be used to deceive as well as challenge and
illuminate. I suggest these processes illuminate the constructive nature of
what we do in creating the meaning of our research. The processes do not
produce just an assemblage of pieces of data and meaning but can be cre-
ated to form a whole which is greater than the sum of the parts like a
tapestry of our research findings, wherein there are threads, colour and the
skill of weaving to produce a true likeness.
Interpretation
So far I have mainly discussed analysis, but interpretation is important
from a Values perspective. Analysis looks at the meanings of texts, but
interpretation is a deeper and more critical look at the text from the per-
spective of its existence and meaning in a social and cultural context. The
interpreter goes beyond what is directly apparent in the text (Brinkmann
and Kvale 2015); interpretation is an expansive process, rather than being
reductionist.
If I think back to my interpretation of poems at school, I paid atten-
tion to the language and to the meaning as I saw it, and it was no prob-
lem to have different interpretations in the class if they could be tracked
back to the poem. I would argue that this is legitimate as long as I have
been reflexive in my interpretation and have thought about what ques-
tions I am posing to the text. Is it the purpose of the researcher to get at
the original meaning of the respondent or is it to develop a broader inter-
pretation of the meaning of the data in a social context? Brinkmann and
Kvale refer to the letter of the text or the ‘spirit’ of the text. What one
must do is ensure that arguments and interpretations refer back explicitly
to the text so that the reader or listener can make his/her own judgement
about the meaning of a text, but we can then interpret the ‘spirit.’
112 K. McArdle
Brinkmann and Kavle warn against ‘sloppy and unreliable’ work, where
only evidence that supports a particular opinion is adduced.
Interpretation allows a wider frame of understanding than the under-
standing only of participants. This may be derived from the expertise of
the practitioner researcher, from the literature, from insights into the
respondent’s ‘real’ meaning and from experience. It is quite clear to me
that as long as one can evidence interpretations in relation to the text
with a critical and balanced perspective, then the interpretation can
stand. I do not intend with this statement to leave out the alternative
explanations or imaginative interpretations, just to pose a balance on
what we choose to produce that relies on a linkage to the evidence in (or
missing from) the text.
Written Communication
[A]cademic writing tends to draw on textual forms—tropes—which con-
struct a god-like, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-comprehending stance, which
is at the same time disinterested and fair. Real authors are, of course, located
in history, in particular communities, constrained by their grasp (or lack of
grasp) of bodies of ideas, by the quality of their libraries and so on. Writing
is full of serendipity and is inseparable from academic biography. (Potter
2004, p. 10)
Communication of research findings in Western cultures in written

form is largely dependent on knowledge of the conventions and of the
orthodoxy that applies. For example, the structure of journal papers fol-
lows a common format including the sequence of segments of the paper
and there are common terms used without the need for explanation.
Ivanic (1998) refers to ‘discourse communities’ to explain group norms
and conventions. There is tacit agreement in the community about how
research should be communicated. In academic communities there are
both spoken and written discourse practices and a complex interplay
between spoken and written discourse. Some suggest that learners simply
need to learn the conventions and they put effort into teaching these
conventions. Such an approach takes an uncritical view of the status quo:
treating the conventions as if they were natural—the product of common

sense, rather than naturalised—the product of relations of power (Ivanic,
1998). Many people who are new to research or who have been away
from it for a long time find using the conventions difficult. This is not
simply because they have not learnt the conventions. The power dynam-
ics complicate the learning process. For example, the text is open to
sometimes harsh critique and the author has the need to demonstrate
certain implicit qualities such as intelligence, objectivity, critical balance
and the validity of what he/she is writing about.
Some of the conventions are useful as they provide a structure to the
text that can be followed and a clear stylistic genre. A useful shorthand of
the conventions obviates the need to explain key concepts such as the
terms ‘literature review’ or the word ‘theory.’ They are complex concep-
tions but require little explanation usually in a written text. This having
been said, conventions need to be challenged to ensure that the best use
is made of our research processes. There is no reason apart from a nod to
the tried and tested for papers to follow a standard format. They can
develop and emerge in a flourishing manner. A paper of mine (McArdle
and Mansfield 2007) attempts this alternative mode, using a simple dia-
logue to structure meaning about two contrasting discourses.
I wonder at the inclusiveness to early career researchers of the expecta-
tions of the language used. It is not so much the complexity of language
that needs to be mastered, but the complexity of ideas. Complex ideas
and convincing arguments do not need to be couched in complex lan-
guage. All of us will have read papers that are incomprehensible to the
uninitiated and it is unnecessary for educational papers to be inaccessible
to the educated layperson. I would encourage the reader to seek to make
papers accessible in format, style and language used, and to recognise the
colonisation of the privileged world of academia by a language community
and seek to open up membership to this community for those who seek
to express themselves differently.
It is impossible here to describe the sophistication of the language one
can use for persuasion around research. We all form arguments in our
everyday lives and justify ourselves to others frequently. One needs to learn,
however, how to do this in written work, not by following conventions, but
114 K. McArdle
by studying the writing of others and being aware of what reads convinc-
ingly. This however is not sufficient. One also needs to be aware of what
will convince the reader. One needs to know the audience. One also needs
to be aware that writing is in itself a social construction; the language will
provide a particular take on the data being described.
Poetry as a means of analysing and communicating findings has been
used for many years now, in some quarters, and at its simplest, researchers
use interview transcripts to create poems in the words of participants or
respondents (e.g. Furmon 2004; Miles et al. 2008; Poindexter 2002;
Shapiro 2004). Miller et al. (2015) describe how poetry can introduce a
third voice apart from that of the researcher and the interviewee, and sug-
gest that it is a special language that can engage, reach and resonate with
more diverse audiences. Typically Miller et al. suggest that research poetry
is created from one participant’s interview and uses their exact words. The
researcher then applies poetic language, approaches and techniques such
as metaphor, rhythm, imagery, emotion, image, synthesis and lyrical
forms to create a poem. The authors distinguish between lyric and narra-
tive poems. The first expresses personal and emotional feelings from the
first person. Narrative poetry is about storytelling. Miller et al. studied
residential aged care in Australia and produced the poem reproduced in
part below.
You Could Scream the Place Down

All your independence is taken away from you.
I’m not able to do it myself.
That’s very hard to take,
you get so frustrated at times
you could scream the place down. (Miller et al. 2015, p. 410)
This way of expressing data emphasises, through the repetition and

rhythm, the frustration of the elderly woman and the bluntness of her
reality in the shortened lines. Its sheer simplicity communicates the
directness of her experience and condition.
Spoken communication of research can be daunting to the uninitiated,

particularly through the challenge of unexpected questions and critique. It
does not need to be this way. There is no reason apart from the ego of the
questioner for the questions to be frightening or disconcerting. Questioning
can be always supportive and thoughtful, seeking to improve and explain
data, to challenge thinking, not the researcher. Communications strategies
can be developed to cope with the difficult or unsympathetic questioner,
which may be employed in any circumstance. Acknowledging a comment
or question and moving on or throwing it back to the questioner or audi-
ence is a simple strategy. As a member of an audience, why not defend an
individual who is under attack, rather than ideas—it is the humane thing
to do.
The talk itself can be disconcerting. What to say and how to say it?
Once again ideas should be accessible for the audience without compro-
mising complexity of thoughts and ideas. Telling a story with a begin-
ning, middle and end is the easiest way to present research for the
beginning researcher. The story of your journey may be an appropriate
and authentic method.
Ethics and Communication
‘No form of representation, writing or reporting is innocent. The forms are all
loaded with the researchers’ interests and intentions’ (Brinkmann and Kvale
2015, p. 317). The publication of findings raises Values questions about
to what kind of effect the report will lead (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015).
The kind of meaning derived from the data will trigger certain educa-
tional responses, one hopes, in others. One needs to anticipate this and
think carefully about what is proposed. One cannot always predict the
political consequences of reporting, but one needs to think about this and
make explicit to oneself the likely impact on children, pupils and adults.
Brinkmann and Kvale warn against a tacit and unquestioned link
between qualitative methodologies and an emancipatory agenda. Like all
forms of research, they suggest, qualitative research has the potential to
disclose racism, inequalities and, I would add, exclusion of certain peoples
116 K. McArdle
and the ‘othering’ of vulnerable groups. Potter (2004) argues that descrip-
tive language in the social sciences provides a set of constructions of the
social world that can be, and are, orientated to action. This is also the
purpose I suggest in educational research.
Narrative Choices
Usher (1999) describes the ways in which text raises questions about the
role of the author in a postmodern context. Our habitus can shape the
way we communicate with others, I suggest, and Usher refers the fact that
power is central rather than peripheral in the research process. We can
create spaces, he contends, for the voices of those who are normally
silenced and (we) should have an eye to the political in the sense that
categorising and analysing is an act of power which marginalises. Usher
refers to the performativity or constructing nature of language rather
than its referential function, which raises the question, ‘[I]s the text to be
written purely in a linear way in the style of narrative realism or is it possible
to use textuality against itself and write in a way which exemplifies openness
and multiple meanings but which yet it still about something? (p. 71). The
focus in postmodern research is not exclusively on the found world but
on the world as it is constructed and investigated and then inscribed in
text (Usher, ibid.). Postmodern research takes more than faithful report-
ing and truthful representations, as Usher explains:
By also focusing on what is inscribed in the text through the way the mean-
ings are organised in the text a reflexive or self—referential task is being
undertaken. As researchers we then ask: why do we do research? [H]ow has
our research been constructed? [W]hat is it silent about? [W]hat gives our
text its narrative authority what are the gender, race and class relations that
produce the research and how does that text reproduce these relations?
(Usher 1999, p. 71)
The use of the third-person voice in writing is intended to be dispas-

sionate and show objectivity. On the positive side it lends a certain relief
to the colourfulness of quotations or examples of data. On the down side,
it can be argued to be a facade of objectivity and suggests a certain power

and omnipotence of the narrator. It suggests not only author but author-
ity. The first-person voice can be argued to be passionate, and I find that
I am worried if I read student research without passion. It can, however,
on the down side be unduly narcissistic and thus requires balance and
care in what is communicated of the narrator and how this underpins the
data.
There are choices we can make about how we present data. Is it in
mind-maps, quotations, collages, photos of artefacts, film or theatre
voice, or pictures, for example? Brinkmann and Kvale (2015) quote
Dahler-Larsen’s three rules for communicating qualitative findings from
which I have derived the following criteria for inclusion of data. These are
as follows: first, authenticity and it is clear that data should be presented
as close as possible to its original form. Second, inclusion suggests that as
much data as is reasonably possible should be included to illustrate
silences as well as themes. Third, transparency suggests that the reader
should know how the display of data has been constructed and the prem-
ises on which the selection of data is based.
Argument and the Link to Validity

Validating knowledge claims is not a mechanical process but is instead
argumentative practice (Polkinghorne 2007). One aims to convince the
reader that support for our claims is strong enough, that the research is a
contribution to a body of knowledge and is a basis for action in an edu-
cational context. One needs, when writing, to be anticipating and think-
ing of the response to questions a reader or audience may have to the
claims made and to answer these questions. Demonstrating validity is not
a honed science; it is rather a commitment on the part of the author to
arguing from Values of trust and honesty that the data are as described in
both quality and quantity. Polkinghorne (ibid.) discusses useful
approaches to argument that relate to the citing of evidence and linking
evidence to conclusions so that these conclusions are persuasive.
Research embraces two processes, those of analysis and of interpreta-
tion; these two processes are blended into each other often in writing
118 K. McArdle
dissertations, theses and research reports, and journal articles. Often a

Findings section has the beginning of interpretation in it, and Discussion
naturally refers to Findings, but often ripples out to ideas and concepts
that are linked rather than directly linked to findings. The communica-
tion skill is located in holding these two dimensions together in a coher-
ent way so that the grounding in data is never lost and the writing never
becomes wayward:
Experienced meaning is more complex and layered than the concepts and
distinctions inherent in languages. Although the meaning people experi-
ence about a situation is influenced by the conceptual structures inherent
in their language, the experience itself is more intricate than can be articu-
lated in language. (Polkinghorne 2007, p. 480)
The quotation above points to the fact that language constrains experi-
ence and experience can only be described in the concepts that are part
and parcel of our language system. Research conventional language tends
towards the literal rather than the figurative or imaginative ways of
expressing the complexity of human life. Some of the best research writ-
ing that I have seen involves the use of a storied approach to the research
process, outlining a personal journey of experience and learning, and
using pictures to illustrate that which cannot be described as well in
words.
Writing for research excludes the emotional reaction one may have to
data and ideas or theoretical positionings. This is an omission in my view
as it is a way of knowing that can be important. I wish to know if a
researcher is scandalised by their findings, amused or faintly smug that
their hypotheses have proved to be supported by the data. The conven-
tions of research writing are derived from the traditions of supposed
objectivity. I do not hold that this supposed objectivity is the only way of
knowing or representing knowledge, so I cannot hold that the traditional
conventions of research writing are to be considered sacrosanct. Rather, I
seek writing that does justice to the complexity of human experience and
the different ways of knowing. This is not to say that I do not value tra-
ditional approaches to research writing.
These approaches are fine in their place but I suggest that they need to
be developed to do justice to the complexities of educational experience.
This development can be just a small part of the research writing that
allows the use of metaphor to express ideas and events, or it can be a large
development, as with much autoethnographical writing, which can
embrace appropriately a stream of consciousness with ideas and events.
The writing should be congruent with the subject and methodology of
the research and also congruent with one’s values of trust and honesty in
representing the research in the best way possible for the reader.
Autoethnography presented in the passive voice is disturbing to the
reader, for example, just as presenting narrative inquiry without substan-
tial representation of the voice of the respondents is not congruent with
the philosophy that underpins the approach to research. Interview data
are socially co-constructed by interviewer and participant and needs to be
represented, I suggest, with the voice of both using reflexivity to signify
where the interview has taken place and how the researcher framed and
contributed to the data. Observations are framed by the researcher and
again need to be considered in terms of what has been chosen to be
noticed and expressed as significant (Siddique 2016).
Values and Communication
It is clear that Values underpin communication. Philosophies about the
way the world is and Values determine how one communicates findings.
For example, if one believes in an observable and measureable reality, the
language is inclined to be descriptive and factual in relation to the data
and one will seek ways in which one can theorise to make a general appli-
cation of the findings. If, however, one is postmodern in beliefs, one may
follow Jean-Francçois Lyotard, a philosopher who expressed incredulity
at metanarratives. Narrative is a contrast term to abstract or theoretical
knowledge produced by science (Potter 2004). Narrative knowing is a
more traditional form of knowing which is embedded in a culture. If this
were the researcher’s perspective, he/she would avoid metanarratives and
focus on the local, the anecdotal and that which disturbs the status quo.
120 K. McArdle
Foucault focuses on how discourses produce objects or descriptions

which seem to be unproblematic and solid and accepted by the majority,
so they are commons sense but often associated with powerful institu-
tions, such as educational psychology or medicine (Potter 2004). It can
be very convenient to use discourse without troubling the assumptions
behind it. For example, inclusive practice is a discourse based on assump-
tion about children’s rights, abilities and needs, all of which can be argued
and contested.
With whom we communicate is an important consideration. All
research in an educational domain can be communicated in language for
the layperson. Researchers in education should be thinking of the partici-
pants in the research and the stakeholders, such as educators, learners and
policy makers as well as the academic community. How one values respon-
dents determines whether and how one chooses to communicate with
them. Working with vulnerable communities and individuals requires, for
example, that the research be communicated in person. People with com-
plex lives usually do not have the time or inclination to read a research
report but will welcome a friendly face with ideas about them and their
ideas and lives. Similarly policy makers are not likely to be reading aca-
demic journals, so one will need to find means of breaking into this
domain. I do it by networking with government officials and those politi-
cians who are likely to take an interest. The use of the media is also a good
way of reaching politicians. You need to just think about who are your
audiences and how best to reach them. Thinking practically, if you are to
deviate from the conventions of research writing and its orthodoxy through
Freedom Research, you need to find peers who will welcome your approach.
By reading the contents of possible publishing journals, you will find that
many are open to new and exciting ways of presenting research, but many
others will not value work unless it subscribes to the traditional format.
The Self and Identity

Ivanic (1998) discussed academic writing and the identity of the author. She
suggests that there are three ways of thinking about the identity of a person
in the act of writing. These are the autobiographical self, the discoursal self
and the self as author. She argues that the three selves are socially constructed
and shape and are shaped by the cultural context. The autobiographical self
is the identity, which people bring to any act of writing by their prior social
history. This is the self that is ‘a writer’s sense of their roots, of where they are
coming from, and that this identity they bring with them to writing is itself
socially constructed and constantly changing as a consequence of their developing
life history’ (p. 24). She links this sense of self as close to Goffman’s (1978)
understanding of writer as performer and one’s inclination to present oneself
in everyday life, and it is also close to Bourdieu’s (1977) sense of ‘habitus,’ a
person’s disposition to behaving in certain ways.
The discoursal self is the impression which a person consciously or
unconsciously conveys of themselves in the written text. She calls this
aspect discoursal because it is constructed through the discourse character-
istics of a text, which relate to values, beliefs and power relations in the
social context in which the text was written. It is the writer’s voice in the
sense of the way they want to sound, rather than in the sense of the stance
they are taking. This is Goffman’s sense of the writer as character. The self
as author is when writers see themselves as authors and present themselves
as authors. This aspect of the text sees the writer’s voice in terms of posi-
tion, opinions and beliefs. The self as author is particularly relevant to
academic writing ‘since writers differ considerably in how far they establish an
authorial presence in their writing. Some attribute all the ideas in their writ-
ing to other authorities, effacing themselves completely; others take up a strong
authorial stance. Some do this by presenting the content of their writing as
objective truth, some do it by taking responsibility for their authorship’ (p. 26).
These three voices are interlinked and are apparent in most texts,
including this one. One’s identity is bound up in the linguistic choices
one makes. I am conscious that I have all the three voices in this text, and
my linguistic choices indicate something about me and my attitudes to
self in relation to research. I choose to use ‘I’ as well as ‘one,’ so I fall
between the academic and the more personal, or arguably the subjective
and the more objective.
The last word on identity can go to Ivanic:
Writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio-

culturally shaped possibilities for self-hood, playing their part in reproduc-
ing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values, belief
sand interests which they embody. (p. 32)
122 K. McArdle
Freedom Research Texts

Freedom Research will look different from conventional research projects
in its presentation. I am thinking of extended research projects such as
project reports, doctoral theses or journal articles. Its main principles are
as follows:
• The explanation of the researcher’s identity will be paramount to the

understanding of the research.
• There will be a detailed description of Values positions and underpin-
ning assumptions.
• Ethics will be embedded in all sections of the text.
• The research will be original, creative and innovative.
Freedom Research does not suggest conventions to be followed; rather

it avers principles that underpin the Values approach to research. It is
unlikely, however, that this Values emphasis can be managed without the
researcher communicating something of his/her own identity and beliefs.
This is required to show the context and underpinning values of choices
made in the research process. This could be presented, for example, as a
personal statement or be embedded in the text as gobbets of self-
explanation as the text proceeds.
The detailed description of Values positions and underpinning assump-
tions will be more than the usual explication in extended research of
epistemology and ontology. Epistemology and ontology are important,
but these can be closely linked to the process or practical implementation
of the research as well as to the underpinning methodology. They will not
simply be used to justify the paradigm choice; rather they will be used to
describe how the processes of gathering data were managed in a way that
concurred with beliefs about the nature of knowing and reality.
Value positions will be made clear at each stage of the research process,
assuming there are stages. The assumptions that underpin the research
choices will be clear, for example, with an explication initially of how the
project demonstrates beneficence in its contribution to knowledge. To
put it plainly, values will be discussed in the rationale, the choice of
research questions, the choices of literature reviewed, the methodology,

the ethical explanations, validity, the presentation of findings, analysis
and interpretation, and discussion and conclusions. They may not be
presented in this order or be so explicit but will be present in some form.
Ethics will imbue all aspects of the research description. Ethics is sepa-
rated from Values to convey the particular focus at each stage of the
research on others. Others may be colleagues, participants in the research
or the wider community or community of researchers. It is possible to be
explicit about values without addressing others’ experience of the research.
In Freedom Research ethics will be accounted for with each dimension of
the research process, not just the methodology, which is typical of con-
ventional approaches to writing. Accordingly, research description of
interpretation in discussion, for example, will include an explanation of
how the concepts or themes derived from the data represent or impact on
participants and the community.
Aesthetics and Emotion
Aesthetics and emotion are two concepts that are generally conspicuous
by their absence from much of the research opus. Increasingly visual anal-
ysis finds a place for artefacts, icons and pictures in the literature on edu-
cational research. Communicating findings or literature review through
pictures or moving pictures is less common. Poetry and font or layout
changes in text are infrequently used but can be used to good effect.
Theatre and dance/movement are even less frequently used for communi-
cation of findings but have a powerful potential, especially for communi-
cating findings to participants in the research or the general public. It is
more than just a pre-eminence of text; there is a power dynamic that
suggests the nuance that enjoyment in the presentation of research is
somehow not serious enough and that the Arts are for one’s leisure time
not for work time. It is a complex power relationship between the disci-
plines of science and aesthetics that results in alternative modes of presen-
tation despite their potential impact being less frequently used and being
seen as ‘other.’
124 K. McArdle
References
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Bradley. (2015). Conversation Piece? Qualitative Inquiry, 21(5), 418–425.
Brinkmann, S., & Kvale, S. (2015). Interviews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative
Deleuze, F., & Guattari, D. (1980/1987). A Thousand Plateaus (B. Massumi,
Trans.). Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Furmon, R. (2004). Using Poetry and Narrative as Qualitative Data; Exploring
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Gadamer, H.-G. (2001). Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary.
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Goffman, E. (1978). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Pelican
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8
Ethical Education and Research
Many books have been written about ethics and educational research and
these tend to focus on the actual implementation of just the methodology
with a discussion of codes of practice and ethical dilemmas. Those that focus
on the whole research process are not in the majority. In this book so far,
ethics has been implicit in the discussion and embraced explicitly in the
introduction and the discussion of Values. Here I separate ethics from Values
and discuss ethical principles as they relate to the research methodology
specifically and address the common discourses of research ethics. Normative
ethics, which is the area of philosophy that considers right conduct (Driver
2007), describes discourses or theories that concern ‘right action’ in research
methodologies and implementation of research and what makes action
‘right.’ Freedom Research has a holistic approach to normative ethics and
embraces a range of different ethical approaches as outlined below.
Deontology
Deontology is the study of duty and is a term used to describe prescribed
ethical rules. These rules usually, in an educational context, embrace
avoidance of harm, anonymity and confidentiality, informed consent and

128 K. McArdle
rights to withdraw at any time on the part of participants or respondents

from a research project. Kantian ethical ideas propose that we should
look at pure ethical reason to make our decisions, and it is this reason that
makes us capable of morality. The effectiveness of a code of ethics relies
to a large extent on the willingness of the researcher to subscribe to it.
Researchers in a higher education context will almost always need to fill
in an ethical template to gain permission from the institution’s ethical
systems to conduct research. It is an important dimension of the research
process. It is my experience, however, that some people consider the ethi-
cal process to be over once the appropriate form has been completed.
This is something I find troubling and is entirely inconsistent with the
principles of Freedom Research. Standards need to be applied to ethical
choices and these should be made explicit by the researcher; however,
externally imposed standards can be troublesomely easy to meet or pres-
ent problems implementation. The challenge with deontology is that
ethical codes are largely unsituated in a context.
Consequentialism
Consequentialism is the term used to describe an approach to ethics that
looks at actions from the point of view of their consequences. In educa-
tional research, I suggest that both approaches are generally used, with
deontological principles being included in ethical codes and consequen-
tialist approaches used in determining the best course of action in a par-
ticular set of circumstances. Strict adherence to our moral intuitions in
consequentialism may not be desirable (Driver 2007) for many reasons.
Our intuitions might be wrong, for example, and also there may be con-
flicting ethical choices to be made. Do we, for example, breach confiden-
tiality given to a participant in research to protect or work towards the
‘good’ of that person. While interviewing pupils in a school I was alerted
to bullying by a victim. Should I breach confidentiality to protect that
pupil? In Freedom Research thinking about the consequences of one’s
actions is crucial.
Ethical Education and Research 129
Virtue Ethics
Freedom Research values strongly virtue ethics. In deciding what one
ought to do, one first considers how one ought to be. Virtue ethics main-
tains that character and human excellence are the basic modes of evalua-
tion of a situation, as opposed to evaluations such as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’
(Driver 2007). According to Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics there are two
kinds of virtue, intellectual and moral virtue, and he described two intel-
lectual virtues, theoretical and practical wisdom. Practical wisdom enables
the individual to work out how to act well. There are many things one
ought to be in Freedom Research. One ought to be caring for the well-
being of participants or respondents. One ought to be disposed to be
transparent about the ethical choices one has made. Clearly, moral percep-
tion is important in virtue ethics. McNamee and Bridges (2004) discuss
the emotion of guilt in this context, which is considered to be relevant in
ethical choices. Choices can be troubling, and when this occurs one needs
to be explicit about the concern and consider the source of disquiet.
Ethical Posture
An underpinning principle of this book is that the term Values, which
embraces ethics, permeates all choices in research design. Indeed, orienta-
tion to one’s conceptions of research underpins what I term ethical pos-
ture. Individuals choose an ethical posture linked to their understanding
of the purpose of the research (McArdle et al. 2015). Moral perceptions
characterise our choices in the research process. This means that one’s
approach to ethics is influenced by how research is conceptualised in terms
of purpose and process and also how one conceptualises education.
John Elliott (2015) discusses Stenhouse’s (1975) powerful critique of the
use of an ‘objectives’ model of curriculum design—an example of the
encroachment of technical rationality into thinking about education.
Stenhouse specified an aim of teaching in the humanities field, which could
be analysed into principles rather than a set of measurable behavioural
130 K. McArdle
objectives. Elliott discusses how this ‘process’ form of curriculum design

furnishes criteria for the quality of the interactions in teaching and learn-
ing. Aims such as ‘learner-centred education,’ ‘independent autonomous
learning,’ ‘self-directed learning’ ‘inquiry/discovery learning,’ ‘collaborative
learning’ and ‘active learning’ provide examples of such criteria. Elliott goes
on to describe the ‘process model’ as ‘ethical’:
The ‘process model’ enables teachers to create an ethical space for learning
in which the individuality and creativity of the learner to be an autonomous
subject are respected and she/he is allowed to take responsibility for their
learning. Within this model’s frame of reference, the concept of ‘under-
standing’ constitutes an ethical perspective on learning that implies a
dynamic view of ‘knowledge’ as provisional and open to speculation and
doubt. (Elliott 2015, p. 5)
Elliott chooses to describe teaching as an ethical practice rather than a

‘making practice.’ A critical feature of an ethical practice from an
Aristotelian point of view, Elliott suggests, is that the actions of which it
consists are seen as an expression of the values to which the teacher is
committed, in contrast to skills and techniques. Skill and techniques are
assessed in terms of the outcomes of activities, whereas virtues are assessed
in terms of the habitual dispositions of the teacher to make emotional
responses to a situation that are consistent with their values. Ethical
frameworks, argues Elliott, require teacher engagement in research; if you
remove this then you cast teachers in the technical mode of inquiry not
the ethical mode of inquiry. The development of teaching as a virtuous
action depends, argues Elliott, on the development of a pedagogical sci-
ence in which teachers play a central role as researchers. He focuses on
action research as follows:
Action research should no longer be an optional extra for teachers. There

are fewer comfort zones into which they can retreat from the problems that
they are confronted with in formal educational settings. They can either
strive to empower themselves to make and create worthwhile educational
change through action research or simply hand responsibility for change
over to policy makers and educational managers. The latter are attempting
in many counties to re-engineer the educational system to render its out-
comes more predictable. In this scenario teachers are cast in the role of
technical functionaries responsible for delivering changes that have be

planned and designed beyond the world of the classroom and school.
(Elliott 2015, p. 19)
I have already given an extended definition of ethics in the Introduction

and at the beginning of this chapter, but here I intend to use a simple
definition of Foucault (1984); ‘the relationship you ought to have with
yourself.’ He draws on the ideas of the ancients in thinking about how
one’s self has been socially and culturally formed. This Foucauldian defi-
nition is attractive because it is apparently simple and reflexive and
implies moral conduct. Hammersley and Traianou (2012) provide a
range of definitions of ethics in a research context, of which the following
is the most simple:
A field of study concerned with investigating what is good or right and how
we should determine this. On this interpretation, ‘social research ethics’
means the study of what researchers ought and ought not to do, and how
this should be decided. (p. 16)
Clearly we need to think about what good or right mean if we follow,

and this is of course not straightforward. Hammersley and Traianou
(ibid.) suggest that, outside of specific contexts, the words good and right
are very abstract or thin in meaning and mean little more than ‘should be
approved of.’ In ethical judgements we are evaluating our potential
behaviour and need to subscribe to high virtues, but the difficulty with
this arises when we seek benchmarks for these virtues. It has already been
stated that education typically uses a combination of deontology and
consequentialism. In Freedom Research virtues are paramount, but stan-
dards for virtues are also important, and Hammersley and Traianou pro-
vide a helpful list of conventions that can be used to distinguish the
ethical from the unethical in research. They point out that the two halves
of the description below overlap and circumstances may change the ethi-
cal viewpoint:
1. To do with what is of ultimate value rather than what is only of instru-

mental value.
2. Concern of the interests, feelings or rights of others versus following
self-interest.
132 K. McArdle
3. Consistently following rules rather than acting in the most expedient way
in the circumstances.
4. Concern with ‘higher values,’ such as self-realisation, the common good, or
the interests of science, rather than other considerations, such as financial
concern or social status.
5. Action from duty versus responding to desire or inclination.
6. Behaving thoughtfully as against impulsively. (p. 20)
I find it helpful to summarise these for myself with the concept of

‘beneficence.’ The root of this word is in the Latin bene, meaning ‘well,’
and facere, ‘to do.’ The Chambers Dictionary (1995) in defining this uses
the word ‘kindly’ and ‘service,’ which I find helpful in thinking of research-
ers needing always to think about the virtue of kindliness and the aim of
providing service to others. So our evaluation of ethical situations is gov-
erned by virtues in the context of our ‘good’ or beneficent intentions.
If we are to declare ourselves to be free from conventions in Freedom
Research, we need to ensure that the freedom we choose is responsible
and has the benefit for others or a desire to do ‘good’ as its objective.
Benchmarking what is beneficial in an educational context is crucial to
avoiding the extremes of unethical research. We only need to think about
research to support genocide and other atrocities of thought and action
to reject certain sets of values as being inappropriate for research in our
research culture. A code of research ethics or values, I contend, can be
based on universal assumptions about human rights. What makes values
universal is not their origin from one culture or point of origin but the
profound mutuality of experience that characterises human life (Ransome
2013). There is a strongly communal dimension to codes of ethics in that
they shape the behaviour of communities of researchers (ibid.). Freedom
Research is not committed to one set of values beyond the benchmark
that prevents atrocity; rather it is a matter of being clear and explicit
about the values that underpin choices. Dewey (1920) comments on
moral goods and ends, stating: ‘[M]orals is not a catalogue of acts nor a set
of rules to be applied like drug-store prescriptions or cook-book recipes’
(p. 177). He goes on to explain what is needed in methods to be used in
a particular case to ascertain the ‘good’ of a situation:
The need in morals is for specific methods of inquiry and of contrivance:

Methods of inquiry to locate difficulties and evils; methods of contrivance
to form plans to be used as working hypotheses in dealing with them. And
the pragmatic import of the logic of individualized situations, each having
its own irreplaceable good and principle, is to transfer the attention of
theory from preoccupation with general conceptions to the problem of
developing effective methods of inquiry. (p. 177)
Dewey focuses on what are generally acknowledged as ‘goods.’ These

are ‘health, wealth industry temperance, amiability, courtesy, learning, aes-
thetic capacity, initiative, courage, patience, enterprise, thoroughness and a
multitude of other generalized ends.’ (p. 178). The literature on ethics in
the context of practitioner research frequently focuses on values but less
often on virtues, which may be seen to be values in practice (McArdle
et al. 2015). This focus on values seems to be uni-dimensional in that
somehow it seems to be enough to have the correct values without neces-
sarily putting them into practice. Values, argued elsewhere, have become
a little tired through over-usage, and so values such as ‘avoiding harm to
participants’ in research and ‘confidentiality’ have become bland and ill-
defined. Situating these values is important to assist with the retention of
meaning.
Ethical codes, it is further proposed, leave ethics unsituated. I do not
intend to critique ethical codes here other than to cite Hammersley
(2009), who refers to the extreme position of principalism (ethical
codes) versus particularism (ethical practice), arguing that neither is
sufficient. It is impossible to create standards to address all potential
research situations, and the standards we do create tend to be ‘non-
specific, sloganised ideas (Collins 2004, p. 349). Freshwater (2001)
states that practitioner research has an ethical agenda, which practitio-
ners can begin to articulate through a critical and reflexive dialogue
with their own individual and professional morality. McArdle et al.
(2015) postulate a multi-layered approach to ethics in educational
research in that one needs to balance personal values with the values of
the profession and with the values the researcher brings to a research
context.
134 K. McArdle
Ethical Judgements
Freedom Research in its eclectic approach to ethical choices proposes that
one’s axiological assumptions can be explored in a series of questions. The
axiology questions are derived from Cannella and Lincoln (2007):
Research Axiology—whose knowledge is this? Why do I choose to construct

this problem? What assumptions are hidden in my research practice? What
is my privilege or power position in this research?
Professional Axiology—What do I do in my profession? What matters to
me in my work? What is non-negotiable?
Personal Axiology—who or what am I? What are my deeply held beliefs?
What are my moral judgements?
McArdle et al. (2015, p. 72)
In Freedom Research ethical judgements are not straightforward.

Elsewhere the importance of knowing self has been discussed. The most
common individual principle that underpins ethical codes is, arguably,
the avoidance of harm, meaning injury or moral wrong. It is however in
my experience almost impossible to do this. One cannot always predict
what will be harmful to someone else. One needs to seek to eliminate this
risk, but what this suggests is that one needs to be aware of risk and inves-
tigate if harm has taken place and, if so, make reparation in some way.
For example, a student of mine, interviewing someone about her work
history with a simple request to take her through her work history,
revealed to the respondent that she was always trying to please her father,
who had not loved her as a child in the way she had wanted. She told the
researcher this and the research ceased. An offer to discuss this with her
was made, though the researcher was doing this as a caring human
being—she was not skilled in counselling. Discussion for reparation may
have focused on ways in which assistance could be sought to discuss this
further. This is further complicated in an educational context where
knowledge of self and learning about oneself are valued, and evaluative
judgements on the hoof need to be made about whether a reaction
described above is indeed a harm. There are also degrees of harm, ranging
from mild discomfort to physical, psychological or material damage.
The judgement we need to make is complex and involves, among other
practices, balancing risk against the benefits of the research proposed.
Each context is different and the risk of harm will be different for differ-
ent individuals. There are different levels of harm we need to consider.
Once again self-knowledge is important to assist us to be aware of our
values and to adopt virtues that minimise risk. We need to be aware that
sometimes these values are in conflict or tension with each other and
result in what McArdle et al. (2015) have termed ‘ethical posture.’ We
identified in the aforementioned research four linked layers of the ethical
posture. These are as follows:
• ethical rationale,
• professional stance,
• ethical methods, and
• the link to validity.
Ethical rationale refers to the main purpose of ethics as interpreted by

the researcher. Below are two statements from co-researchers that show
the contrast in this dimension of ethical posture:
The term ‘ethical’ is used to describe those issues that relate to the relation-
ship between the researcher and research participant and the impact of the
research process on those individuals directly involved. (ANNA)
The researcher should maintain a high degree of professionalism at all

times and follow established protocols while being approachable, creating
a trusting relationship, an ethos of acceptance and genuine interest; and in
which the delivery of confidentiality and anonymity can be delivered.
(SARAH)
Professional stance has bearing on the ethical approaches we adopt to

research. Anna stopped her research as described above when a participant
became distressed because her role as a teacher did not embrace counsel-
ling, whereas Sarah felt a strong ethical commitment to colleagues:
136 K. McArdle
The researcher has responsibilities not only to the participants but also to
colleagues and co-researcher to work effectively as a team. (SARAH)
Ethical methods are again different for Sarah and Anna, as they dis-
cussed the ways they thought, for example, of engaging their participants
ethically in the research:
Throughout our conversations, through my language (verbal and non ver-

bal) the warmth of my welcome, my validation and valuing of stories, the
sharing of my stories, it was hoped that the putative boundaries between us
would dissolve. (ANNA)
Techniques to break down the power imbalance were employed. For exam-
ple, those sampled were involved in the feedback and the discussion of
findings (anonymously) through a discrete WEBCT (a virtual learning
environment) discussion forum. (SARAH)
The link to validity is a dimension of the ethical posture. Anna sees the
possibility of her research cascading into a Pandora’s box and holds tight
onto her desire for beneficence. Sarah is more concerned with internal
bias. Both, however, were being reflexive in their research process:
This could be the opening of a Pandora’s Box and I would have to remain
alert at all times to the concept of beneficence. (ANNA)
Through continual reflexivity and examination of assumptions, disengage-

ment from findings was achieved and information was dealt with profes-
sionally and in an impartial manner throughout—this negating any
internal bias within the findings. (SARAH) (McArdle et al. 2015, p. 76)
Both Anna and Sarah had coherence in their posture linked to their
identity as a researcher. Who they are, their values and their conceptions
of inquiry influenced ethical posture and accordingly the choices they
made, which were very different.
It is difficult to extract ethics from values and virtues, and it is also dif-
ficult to extract ethics from considerations of morals and morality. Morals
and morality can run the danger of becoming prescriptivist, arid and
absolutist (Denzin and Giardina 2010), whereas the term ethics has a
greater emphasis on one’s relationship to others in a research context. I
choose not to embrace abstract metaphysics here; rather to embrace eth-
ics as it applies to reciprocity and relationships in research. One of the
most important things ethical research can do is to ‘help us recognise
people as fellow human beings with the all-too-human powers and vul-
nerabilities that characterise our species’ (Brinkmann 2010, p. 83).
Brinkmann argues however that consensus among qualitative research-
ers does not exist concerning research purposes and that the advancement
of human rights is the legitimate goal for our research practices. Some
researchers choose to remain morally and politically neutral. I argue here,
and elsewhere in this book, that this is impossible. All educational
research or all educational science is implicitly moral in that it has an
intention to improve the way we learn and accordingly live. Many quali-
tative researchers hold that ‘social inquiry simply cannot mirror the world
and that all such research has ethico-political presuppositions and implica-
tions’ (Brinkmann 2010, p. 85). One’s choice of research topics and
boundaries reflects one’s understandings of what is important in an edu-
cational context. Some theorists are explicit about the research ethics to
which we should aspire. Habermas describes ‘discourse ethics’ through
which the researcher should seek social justice through critical research. I
am clear about my ethical standpoint in that social justice is at the core of
what I research. Is the reader clear about what he/she researches and why?
Erickson (2010) argues that
[a]t its best, qualitative social research advances human rights and affirms
human dignity by seeking and telling the truth about what particular peo-
ple do in their everyday lives and about what their actions mean to them.
(p. 113)
He goes on to argue that
[q]ualitative research also advances human rights and affirms human dig-
nity through its proper conduct during the process of inquiry by treating
research subjects honourably: with respect, as genuinely informed about
the researcher’s purposes, as able to participate in the research without
being coerced to do so. (p. 114)
138 K. McArdle
Erickson does qualify this with an explanation of the difficulties that

can go with this ‘proper conduct.’ What is meant by treating subjects
honourably? I think that in education one needs to draw on transactional
analysis (TA) as a psychological model of the way we behave towards
others. TA proposes that there are three roles that we adopt in our rela-
tionships, parent, adult and child. When researching with children we
need to treat them as adult insofar as is safe. This means acknowledging
that they have rights—to make informed choices, to not be deceived or
‘fooled’ with what we do and the rights to anonymity and confidentiality.
These are straightforward ethically and would be covered by most ethical
frameworks, but children have other adult rights—the right to withdraw
if they do not like the process the adult proposes, the right to not speak
if they choose when spoken to by an adult, the right to not speak or not
be embarrassed in front of peers, with them deciding what is or is not
embarrassing. We ARE adults and the children ARE children but we need
to be certain that we are honouring them by giving them rights in the
research process.
Respect
Respect is singled out for consideration in the ethics of Freedom Research.
It is used as both an adjective to describe the researcher’s demeanour and
as a noun for its status as a virtue. Treating the subject with ‘respect’ can
be challenging when working with children or vulnerable adults. The
British Educational Research Association (2011) suggests that all educa-
tional research should be conducted with an ethic of respect for
• the person,
• knowledge,
• democratic values,
• the quality of educational research, and
• academic freedom.
Brooks et al. (2014) discuss the difference between Western values and
those of indigenous communities, where, for example, informed consent
is considered to be a decision for the community not the individual. Also,
the authors suggest that informed consent is based on the notion that
research should respect the autonomy of those being studied; however,
autonomy may be a Western concept. While thinking about respect for
the person, the researcher needs to put aside judgements about behaviour
in a research context. As a teacher one may have one approach but can
change this when adopting the researcher role. It is important that this is
clear for the child. If one is researching children’s behaviour, the researcher
wants to see their preferred behaviour not the behaviour preferred in the
role as the teacher. Ethically one needs to be clear to children or vulner-
able adults about which hat one is wearing as they can be very sensitive to
culture and context. Making this explicit in language appropriate to the
age is how I handle this. It does however raise ethical dilemmas:
Alison, a student of mine, was observing behaviour in the primary school

playground for her dissertation. She observed a child was being left out of
all the play. She knew him to be an unwelcome playmate as he smelled so
the children rightly said. She felt very sorry for this boy and took off her
researcher hat and went and played with him, which ruined her observa-
tion process. Some of her peers said she had been stupid to do this as it
would make no difference to the boy’s situation in the playground, just
single him out more. Others said they would have done the same as Alison.
McArdle, K. (2015) Reflexive Diary.
Genuinely informed about the researcher’s process is an important

dimension of respect. Children of all ages and abilities can understand
largely what is happening in research. Learning and finding out are inte-
gral to play and research can be explained in this way:
I have researched with autistic teenagers who have limited speech and find
relationships difficult. I found that I could usually seek agreement to par-
ticipate in observation by using trusted intermediaries to explain my pres-
ence; by finding out what behaviour will be most suitable on my part and
by using things they are interested in to gain attention. McArdle, K. (2014)
Reflexive Diary.
There is always the difficulty of making explicit why one is observing

people and if the observation is changing their behaviour. I met a student
who wanted to research cliques in the playground of a girls’ school by
140 K. McArdle
observing them through a window so as not to interfere with their play.

She had a particular clique in mind and the clique’s exclusion of certain
girls. She was going to be watching selected girls. She chose to tell the
whole school that she would be observing them so as not to isolate the
clique. I found this to be troubling as she was being economical with the
truth and others said that was the only way that the research could genu-
inely explore clique behaviour. Similarly our research can be quite chal-
lenging in its intent. Rarely does one hear a researcher saying, ‘I am going
to do an interview with you to see why you and others like you are failing
this subject at school or university.’ Perhaps this is the intent, but usually
it is hidden behind words concerning achievement and success. Likewise,
one does not say, ‘I am researching achievement so I can tell the
Government how hopeless is their policy on maths education.’ Again,
this may be one’s intent and one needs to be explicit with oneself.
Coercion in participation is another fine ethical line and a dimension
of the respect one holds for one’s participants. Is giving a group of elderly
learners in a community a coffee and a biscuit coercion to participation?
Will they feel obliged to reciprocate by giving an interview to the
researcher? If one asks children to participate in classroom research, what
are they going to do if they say they do not want to be part of it? Is there
a reasonable and achievable alternative for them so they do not feel
pushed out or excluded?
Respect for knowledge I understand as a respect for the truth and hon-
esty of research, and how one chooses to interpret it; in particular, how
the researcher chooses to communicate knowledge in terms of who owns
it. Increasingly, there is a move towards open access for knowledge and
promotion of knowledge exchange activities. There is an ethical question
about who is able to access knowledge and who is the target audience of
knowledge. Increasingly, students are choosing to communicate findings
to participants as well as to other researchers, which is consistent with
educational principles of inclusion and equity. There is a fundamental
principle, that is, a tradition in the university research community, that
all new knowledge should be owned by everyone for the greater good.
This is adhered to, to greater and lesser extents, in different disciplines
and traditions of research, but in education, where we are usually not
looking for patents or to make money from our research findings other
than in funding for future research, it is appropriate to consider that

everyone should have a right to access the data generated and that it is
desirable for findings to be communicated to two audiences, participants
as well as other researchers.
Respect for democratic values is an interesting proposition. Democratic
values may be interpreted differently by different people. Democratic val-
ues to me imply that educational research should usually be participatory
with participants in the research being co-inquirers where possible and
having the choice of being involved in multiple dimensions of the research
process. Others may limit democracy to the methodological and meth-
ods stages of the research process, where participants may have an equal
chance of being selected for participation. Democratic values might also
underpin the content of the research in different ways. There are, for
example, many different definitions and understandings of inclusion in
an educational context from the more limited definitions that have been
a part of the educational traditions, with inclusion being linked to those
identified in special groups, such as disabled people. Whereas now all
children are likely to be considered as having special or individual needs
that need to be addressed.
Respect for the ethic of the quality of educational research is a judge-
ment that is also open to varying interpretations. There are individuals,
often in positions of power, in an educational context, who only value the
quality of certain kinds of research. Randomised controlled trials are val-
ued highly as evidence for policy decisions, and quantitative studies are
frequently valued above qualitative studies in my experience in policy
situations. Similarly, different approaches to qualitative inquiry are val-
ued differently according to a range of factors including the age of the
tradition, who expounds it, the number of users of the methodology and
books/journals dedicated to the approach. The ethic of the quality of the
research is linked to validity. The ethic of quality is linked to our choices
and attitudes to research. A fine balance is needed between optimal qual-
ity and management of scarce time and resources. One’s demeanour in
relation to research is being highlighted in this ethic. One should seek to
create the best knowledge possible, which means avoiding shortcuts and
scanty research in favour of that which is robust and valid.
142 K. McArdle
Respect for academic freedom in higher education is easy to argue as a

principle, but I have seen situations where this has been compromised
both directly and with subtlety. For example in one European country it
is still commonplace for PhD students to be required to agree with and
copiously cite their supervisor, and I have heard of subtle and strategic
bullying taking place in another country to ensure that findings contrib-
ute to the promotion of a particular theory. This is of course reprehensi-
ble from many humanistic and ethical dimensions. Academic freedom is
of course important to the development and growth of knowledge but it
can be very difficult to take a line that runs counter to accepted social and
cultural values in education. I remember talking to a group of students
who could not grasp that school is a social construct and could not imag-
ine a world in which school need not exist, or need not exist as a collec-
tive of multiple pupils and one adult. This is only a small example, but
students need to be able to challenge orthodoxy in ways that are not seen
as risky or dangerous to accepted values.
Ethical principles have been developed by the Centre for Social Justice
and Community Action (2012 at Durham University, UK). These are
intended for community-based participatory research, but have, in broad
terms, a wider significance, it is proposed. The Centre postulates seven
ethical principles. These are as follows: the principles of mutual respect,
equality and inclusion, democratic participation, active learning, making
a difference, collective action and personal integrity. In the case of mutual
respect the Centre suggests that developing relationships is important,
where there is agreement on what counts as mutual respect, everyone
listens to the voices of others and accepting that there are diverse perspec-
tives. This is arguably difficult to accomplish without the skills of engage-
ment that will enable a relationship to be fostered and management of
what may be conflicting diverse views. These capabilities will also be
important for the principle of equality and inclusion, which involves
encouraging and enabling people from a range of background and identi-
ties to lead, design and take part in research, including seeking actively
people whose voices are often ignored. This demands the ability to recog-
nise the people and to engage with them in a way that encourages them
to choose to be heard. Challenging discriminatory and oppressive atti-
tudes and behaviours demands a degree of bravery and ability to argue a
point. Democratic participation is defined as encouraging and enabling
all participants to contribute meaningfully to decision-making and other

aspects of the research process according to skill, interest and collective
need. This will demand an ability to make sensitive judgements about
ability, motivation and need in others, which imposes a power dynamic
between researcher and participant.
Ethics is a complex study in a research context, and deciding what is
right and good is a highly charged process. Freedom Research is eclectic
and values transparency in the approaches used and standards/bench-
marks chosen and processes undertaken to achieve ethical judgements. I
shall leave the final word to Dewey (1920), who describes a useful conse-
quential process as follows:
There are conflicting desires and alternative apparent goods. What is

needed is to find the right course of action, the right good. Hence, inquiry
is exacted: observation of the detailed make-up of the situation; analysis
into its diverse factors; clarification of what is obscure; discounting of the
more insistent and vivid traits; tracing the consequences of the various
modes of action that suggest themselves; regarding the decision reached as
hypothetical and tentative until the anticipated or supposed consequences
which led to it adoption have been squared with the actual consequences.
(p. 173)
References
Brinkmann, S. (2010). Human Vulnerabilities: Toward a Theory of Rights for
Qualitative Researchers. In N. K. Denzin & M. D. Giardina (Eds.),
Qualitative Inquiry and Human Rights. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
British Educational Research Association. (2011). Ethical Guidelines for
Educational Research. London: BERA.
Brooks, R., te Riele, K., & Maguire, M. (2014). Ethics and Education Research.
London: Sage.
Cannella, G., & Lincoln, Y. (2007). Predatory Versus Dialogic Ethics:
Constructing an Illusion or Ethical Practice as the Core of Research Methods.
Qualitative Inquiry, 13(3), 315–335.
144 K. McArdle
Collins, S. (2004). Ecology and Ethics in Participatory Collaborative Action

Research; An Argument for the Authentic Participation of Students in
Educational Research. Educational Action Research, 12(3), 347–362.
Dewey, J. (1920). Reconstruction in Philosophy. In J. A. Boydston & J. Dewey
(Eds.), Volume 12: 1920 Essays, miscellany and Reconstruction in Philosophy.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Driver, J. (2007). Ethics: The Fundamentals. Carlton, VIC: Blackwell.
Elliott, J. (2015). Educational Action Research as the Quest for Virtue in
Teaching. Educational Action Research, 23(1), 4–21.
Erickson, E. (2010). Affirming Human Dignity in Qualitative Inquiry: Walking
the Walk. In N. K. Denzin & M. D. Giardina (Eds.), Qualitative Inquiry and
Foucault, M. (1984). On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in
Progress. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (pp. 340–372). New York:
Pantheon.
Freshwater, D. (2001). Review: Does Nursing Need and Ethical Code for
Research? Journal of Research in Nursing, 6, 790.
Hammersely, M. (2009). Against the Ethicists: On the Evils of Ethical
Regulation. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 12(3),
211–225.
Hammersley, M., & Traianou, A. (2012). Ethics in Qualitative Research:
Controversies and Contexts. London: Sage.
McArdle, K., Birchley, J., Bruce, J., Hurrell, A., Paterson, S., & Stephen, M.
(2015). When Practice Takes Precedence: Conceptions of Inquiry and the
Link to Ethical Posture. Educational Action Research, 23(1), 68–84.
McNamee, M., & Bridges, D. (2004). The Ethics of Educational Research.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Macmillan.
9
Validity and Freedom Research
Definitions of Validity
The first chapter explained that I was not throwing the baby out with the
bathwater and that Freedom Research demands robustness and does not
shy away from validity. Quality criteria are central to Freedom Research
and demand a clear statement of the Values being, or that have been,
used. Modernist ideas see validity as a kind of quality control on produc-
tion—an inappropriate view when knowledge generated is complex and
Values driven, and understood differently by different people.
Validity may be defined broadly as the extent to which one measures
or describes what one thinks one is describing in research. Validity refers
to the truth, the correctness and the strength of a statement. A valid argu-
ment, for example, is sound, well grounded, justifiable, strong and con-
vincing (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015). Validity is a measure of the quality
of our research. Cresswell and Miller (2000) describe it in qualitative
research as ‘how accurately the account represents participants’ realities of the
social phenomena and is credible to them’ (p. 124). Over the years there
have been many different criteria for qualitative goodness of research.
Cresswell and Miller cite authenticity, goodness, verisimilitude, adequacy,
trustworthiness, plausibility, validity, validation and credibility. As Tracy

146 K. McArdle
(2010) suggests, in qualitative research there is a cornucopia of distinct

quality concepts which contrast with the quantitative community’s sim-
pler aims for validity, reliability, generalisability and objectivity.
Criteria for quality are important as they help us to assess the quality
of the ideas and new knowledge that underpins research. In Freedom
Research validity lies firmly on the coherence between Values espoused
and Values enacted. The term ‘assess the quality of ideas’ implies judge-
ment and judgement in turn implies Values. The validity and reliability
of results depend to a large extent on the robustness of the research pro-
cess—a process that is accepted by a variety of academic and other inter-
ested audiences as producing information that is as objective and factual
as it can be (Ransome 2013). I hope, however, that the reader is already
convinced that the process is itself value laden and can only aspire to be
objective and factual.
Polkinghorne (2007) discusses the difference between two social sci-
ence communities. In the beginning decades of the twentieth century
social scientist and educational researchers had a consensus about what
counted as evidence and what kind of knowledge claims could be vali-
dated. In the early 1970s the reform movement known as qualitative
inquiry argued that ‘there are important aspects of the personal and social
realms that could not be investigated within the limitations of what has been
conventionally accepted as evidence and arguments used to justify or validate
knowledge claims’ (p. 472). He suggests that our field currently consists of
the two communities of qualitative and quantitative members, with over-
lap in this membership and I agree that this is the case and that, as
Polkinghorne further argues, different kinds of knowledge claims require
different kinds of evidence and argument to convince the reader that the
claim is valid. I would suggest that different kinds of evidence are used
but that they are similar in their subjectivity and Values basis.
Quantitative Validity
Accordingly, issues of validity are fairly well defined and accepted in the
quantitative domain as will be described below but are still judgemental
and socially constructed and open to Values. Validity is not something
Validity and Freedom Research 147
that is inherent in a research report, journal article or dissertation. Rather,

it is a judgement of quality given to a piece of research by those to whom
a claim of validity is addressed. It is not the case that something is valid
or invalid; rather there is a continuum of validity where the evidence of
the quality of work is strong or weak. Weaker evidence can be useful in
triangulation. Thus you will immediately see that subjective judgement is
involved in determining validity. ‘A statement’s validity rests on a consensus
within a community of speakers. The validation process takes place in a realm
of symbolic interaction, and validity judgements make use of a kind of com-
municative rationality that is nonrule governed that differs from rule-
governed purposive rationality’ (Polkinghorne 2007, p. 474). Accordingly,
it will be apparent to the reader that beliefs, values, ethics, assumptions
and judgements will affect the extent to which a reader or audience is
prepared to acknowledge the validity of a piece of work. Colleagues refer
to internal and external validity. Internal validity refers to whether the
effect the researcher is describing is a product of the causes maintained or
is it something else that is interfering. This is arguably a useful way of
thinking. It is derived from the experimental domain. External validity is
again quantitative in origin and refers to whether one can generalise from
the study.
Reliability and reproduceability are common in quantitative research.
Reproduceability is arguably impossible in all research involving people,
as people are never the same in two contexts. Reliability is the ability to
measure or observe what you think you are observing. This too is open to
judgement. Generalisability is arguably never possible as no two contexts
involving people are ever the same. Within the current wave of qualita-
tive research the role of validity has been questioned and in postmodern
philosophy of the 1990s the concept of an objective reality to validate
knowledge against has been discarded (Kvale 1995). Kvale further sug-
gests that the ‘trinity’ of reliability, validity and generalisability has the
status of a scientific holy trinity. This orthodoxy makes me uncomfort-
able and makes me want to challenge this and point to the judgement
inherent in every validity claim.
148 K. McArdle
Qualitative Domain
In a postmodern era, Kvale (ibid.) suggests, there is a move from knowl-
edge as a construction of reality to knowledge as communal construction
of reality and it involves a change of emphasis from observation to con-
versation and interaction. ‘Truth is constituted through a dialogue; valid
knowledge claims emerge as conflicting interpretations and action possibilities
are discussed and negotiated among the members of a community’ (p. 24).
Polkinghorne (2007) puts it more clearly, saying that in qualitative
research validating knowledge claims is not a mechanical process but an
argumentative practice. Kvale (1995) suggests that the ‘craftsmanship’ of
the research and the credibility of the researcher are decisive as to whether
other researchers will rely on the findings. Validity is not only an issue of
the methods used but also of the researcher’s person and accordingly ethi-
cal integrity of Values becomes important. He further suggests, and I
agree, that quality control in term of methods must pertain at each of
seven stages. I would bring these together in a holistic framework and
suggest that quality is overarching. Kvale (ibid.) provides an example of
the interview investigation as summarised below:
1. Thematising—validity of an investigation rests on the soundness of

the theoretical presuppositions and the derivation from the theory to
specific research questions.
2. Designing—the adequacy of the design and methods for the topic;
and ethically, the ethical knowledge produced for the human
condition.
3. Interviewing—trustworthiness of the respondents; reports and the
quality of the interview process.
4. Transcribing—what is a valid translation from oral to written

language.
5. Interpreting—are questions put to the text valid and the correspond-
ing logic of interpretation.
6. Verifying—a judgement about what forms of validation are relevant
in a study and the relevant community for a dialogue on validity.
7. Reporting—does the report give a valid account of the main findings

of the study?
(Derived from Kvale 1995, p. 25)
Generalisability is also of interest to the qualitative researcher.

Qualitative research is frequently said to be ungeneralisable. I wish to
argue against this from two points. First, transferability from one context
to another is common sense. If I study why young people use legal highs
in my youth club and find that it is because of a combination of peer
influence and the ways in which they are marketed, then common sense
says that this is transferable to other contexts, where I shall be careful to
conduct educational programmes about the influences of marketing and
peer influence. Second, I wish to argue using the example of case studies.
Scott and Usher (2011) argue that case studies may not be designed to
itemise the features of a case but may be to support theoretical conclu-
sions. A case study may be a study of an event that evidences the opera-
tion of some identified general theoretical principles.
Generalisability is an important dimension of validity. In qualitative
inquiry there is often a limited number of subjects. It is however contex-
tualised and socially and historically valid knowledge, we may argue.
Often common sense as a way of knowing suggests that behaviour in one
situation may be extrapolated to other situations. We can use our qualita-
tive data to understand a situation better and to provide insights into
other situations. Our own experience as educators enables us to make
sensitive judgements about transferability from one situation to others
and we can argue this through analysis of the situation we are studying.
The risk of researcher bias cannot be eliminated completely, but it is
arguably less likely to happen when interpreting numbers. The likelihood
of arriving at a preferred reading of the data when using qualitative meth-
ods increases as this is often interpretative (Ransome 2013). Objectivity
is also a problematic term. Many people think it implies that we can be
free from bias. I am not sure that this is ever possible as our cultural,
social values are with us all the time. At the very least we need to be free
from prejudice. We can produce knowledge that has been verified by oth-
ers and we can be reflexive and make informed judgements. Brinkmann
150 K. McArdle
and Kvale (2015) suggest that objectivity may mean letting the ‘object’
speak, reflecting the nature of the object researched:
Validation of claims about understandings of human experience requires

evidence in the form of personally reflective descriptions in ordinary lan-
guage and analyses using inductive processes that capture commonalities
across individual experiences. (Polkinghorne 2007, p. 475)
What Should the Criteria of Quality Be?

There are many different understandings of what the criteria of quality
in research should be. Educational research almost always falls short of
the scientific requirement of replicability, and reliability and validity
are also often problematical. The research community therefore needs
to rely on the voice of the researcher (Ransome 2013). There are differ-
ent criteria for different epistemologies, paradigms and methodolo-
gies. Lincoln and Guba (1985) introduced concepts such as
trustworthiness, credibility, dependability and confirmability for qual-
itative research. For example, Lather has argued in the 1990s that there
is a need in poststructuralism for criteria that are open-ended and con-
text specific to accord with this research paradigm. Any criteria chosen
would need to be deconstructed to identify the discourse that under-
pins them. She described validity in 2010 as the conditions of the
legitimation of knowledge:
Over the last 20 years or so of postpositivism, the boundaries surrounding

the issue of research legitimation have been constructed from many angles,
naturalistic, and constructivist, discourse theory, ethnographic authority,
poststructuralism, forms of validity appropriate to an emancipatory inter-
est. (p. 118)
Specific qualitative research traditions have quality criteria for their own
area, such as Cresswell’s (2007) criteria for good grounded theory, as an
example and criteria specific to phenomenology. The quality of research is
obviously dependent on the quality of the research design, the
implementation, verification and reporting. It is important to mention

here the difference between generalisability and validity and ‘transferability.’
In postmodern conceptions of social sciences the goal of global generalisa-
tion is replaced by transferability of knowledge from one situation to
another, taking into account the contextuality and heterogeneity of social
knowledge (Brinkmann and Kvale 2015).
Lather describes in Getting Lost (2010) her rethinking of validity
theory in a poststructuralist context. She questions whether the
‘obsession’ with validity is a part of the disciplinary nature of our
society of confession and conscience. She says that in the social
sciences validity has always been the problem not the solution and
various efforts have been made to resolve the problems, but they
always are only partial or temporary. Rather than taking a line of
couching validity in terms of disciplinary maintenance, Lather seeks
to open new lines of discussion by taking a ‘forthrightly personal and
deliberately ephemeral antithesis to more conventional and prescrip-
tive discourses’ (2010, p. 131). She develops what she terms scandal-
ous categories of ‘transgressive validity.’
This can all be very confusing for the educational researcher and the
Freedom Researcher, who is seeking to ensure that the quality of his/her
research is assured. It is important to explore the different dimensions of
validity, as they differ for different approaches to research and, indeed,
can relate to different dimensions of the research process. For example,
McNiff and Whitehead (2009), in discussing how the quality of a text
will be judged, refer to rhetorical validity. They discuss how the text aims
to both persuade and educate the reader. The writer should show how
through the use of language, that his/her account is comprehensible,
authentic, truthful and appropriate to its context. McNiff and Whitehead
also discuss educational validity, which is explained in the text according
to the following statements:
• I have used a form of language in my practice that encourages people

to take responsibility for their own choices.
• I have shown through my text how I have communicated my capacity
for critical deconstruction.
152 K. McArdle
• I have used a self-reflexive form of language in my report to show my

capacity to communicate the educational significance of my work.
Criteria of Quality in Freedom Research

Freedom Research demands criteria of quality concerning Values. These
criteria are, I propose, as follows:
• Values are made explicit.

• The self of the researcher as research core and his/her choices are made
explicit.
• The choices made are explained and justified.
• The ethical beneficence is made explicit.
These are founded on principles of
• being open about hidden beliefs and implicit assumptions;

• self-disclosure as research choices are dependent on the Values of the
researcher;
• choices made should be explicit in term of what is accepted and
rejected; and
• the purpose of the research and its impact on beneficence are discussed
overtly.
Overcoming the Confusion
To overcome the confusion about validity, the autonomous researcher
needs to read around his/her methodology if he/she has chosen a meth-
odology that is well defined and needs to explore the criteria that are
commonly used in order to have a practical way forward. If the research-
er’s methodology is more creative, I suggest he/she read about quality and
decide what the relevant criteria will be. That criteria may be in doubt
and socially constructed needs to be understood by the researcher as well
as the link to the philosophies of what is truth? Tracy (2010), for example,
presents eight criteria of quality that I find attractive in their simplicity

and their attempt at universality for qualitative inquiry. She suggests that
her eight criteria are designed to provide a parsimonious pedagogical tool
and promote respect from power-keepers, who do not understand quali-
tative work.
Tracy proposes that high-quality qualitative research is marked by (a)
worthy topic, (b) rich rigour, (c) sincerity, (d) credibility, (e) resonance,
(f ) significant contribution, (g) ethics and (h) meaningful coherence.
This once again brings us straight back to Values. One person’s idea of
sincerity or credibility may be different from another person’s idea. A
significant contribution in action research on selected individuals in a
context may be quite different from a significant contribution in the
form of findings of a large number of semi-structured interviews.
A worthy topic is relevant, timely, significant and interesting or evoca-
tive according to Tracy but another person’s idea of evocative may be
quite different to mine. Worthy to me means that it will make a differ-
ence to people’s lives. Rich rigour is interesting as a criterion of quality. I
prefer to use the word ‘robust’ as this has for me the connotations of
strong and freshly brewed coffee, of hardiness and vigour or sturdiness, as
described earlier. Sincerity is important as a virtue and links to honesty
and trustworthiness. Reflexivity is central to this criterion of quality.
Credibility is linked to plausibility and Tracy suggests a measure of this
plausibility is whether people are inclined to take action or make a deci-
sion on the strength of it. Resonance refers to the research being able to
reverberate and affect an audience. Once again this rests on the judge-
ment of the audience or reader of the research. A significant contribution
is perhaps the most difficult of criteria for the reader to judge though
Tracy refers to theoretical significance, heuristic significance, practical
significance and methodological significance.
Tracy refers to procedural ethics or those of the institution in which
you are conducting research, situational ethics and relational ethics,
where you consider self as a researcher in relation to those with whom
you conduct your research. Finally meaningful coherence is something I
always seek in marking Masters-level dissertations and PhD theses or
reviewing journal papers. Tracy defines this well, if a little reductively as
coherent studies which achieve their stated purpose, accomplish what
154 K. McArdle
they espouse to be about, use methods that marry well with paradigms
and espoused theories, and attentively connect literature with the research
foci, findings and methods.
It is my contention that validity in Freedom Research must take
account of Values and Value coherence. The Freedom Research has valid-
ity if implicit Values are made explicit for the reader to understand the
choices made and the judgements that underpinned these choices at
every stage and nook or niche of the research process. This means that in
writing for a research audience, Freedom Research will be explicit about
Values and will be self-aware and reflexive on the part of the researcher.
Practical Dimensions of Validity

Cresswell and Miller (2000) propose that there are three lenses used by
the researcher that are used as viewpoints to establish the validity of a
study. These are the lenses of the researcher who determines features of
the research such as how long to stay in the field, whether the data is satu-
rated and how the analysis of data evolves into a persuasive account. The
second lens they suggest is that of the participants and involves checking
how accurately participants’ realities have been represented. The third
lens may be that of the external authority, a reviewer or collaborator.
Validity procedures they argue further are governed by paradigm
assumptions. The postpositivist researcher historically assumed that qual-
itative research consists of rigorous methods and systematic forms of
inquiry. Accordingly individuals embracing this position looked for the
quantitative equivalence of validity. In the constructivist position,
researchers, Cresswell and Millar suggest, believe in pluralistic interpre-
tive, open-ended and contextualised perspectives and accordingly seek
criteria that are distinct from quantitative approaches—these criteria
being credibility, authenticity and so on. A third paradigm is the critical
perspective where the paradigm holds that researchers should uncover the
hidden assumption about how narrative accounts are constructed, read
and interpreted. The implication for validity of this perspective is that
validity is called into question and the researcher needs to be reflexive and
disclose what he/she bring to a narrative.
alidity Is Dependent on Ethics, Values

V
and Virtues
Validity is a fine art not a ‘measure’ of quality in my opinion and needs to
be judged carefully and authentically. This requires virtues of honesty and
conscientiousness. One needs to be guided by one’s values, as long as
there is beneficence at the foundation of these values. There is a need for
a quality attitude that embraces the whole study rather than a reduction-
ist tick-box approach to only certain dimension of the study such as the
methodology.
It is my contention that an appropriate treatment of ethics, values and
virtues in the research leads to a rigour and robustness that provides valid-
ity. If the reader goes back and considers all the criteria for validity pre-
sented in this chapter, he/she will be hard pressed to find any criteria that
are separable from ethics, values and virtues. Honesty, truthfulness and
authenticity fall into the category of virtues, for example. In the quantita-
tive domain I would argue that attention to internal and external validity
is dependent on virtues of honesty and truthfulness as well. So how does
one show the validity of research? One needs to argue that each stage of
the research process has been underpinned by specific moral judgements
either explicit or implicit and one needs to make the implicit explicit
when the research is communicated to others.
The researcher needs to ensure that he/she is clear about the ethics,
values and virtues that have guided the research. We need to be clear
about the internal and external morality of what we do. I choose to define
internal morality as the morality that governs our personal choices within
the research process, such as a commitment to inclusion in the research
process of participants as co-inquirers. This is by no means a required
choice for a researcher to make. External morality implies those moral
choices that are external to us and imposed by the research community,
such as a commitment to including others on academic papers when they
have contributed sufficiently or a commitment to lack of bias. I suggest
that it is the internal morality one needs to argue most cogently as exter-
nal morality is largely, though not always justifiably, taken for granted.
One needs to justify the moral judgements one has made to the audience
of the research.
156 K. McArdle
References
Brinkmann, S., & Kvale, S. (2015). Interviews; Learning the Craft of Qualitative
Cresswell, J. W. (2007). Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design; Choosing
Among Five Traditions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Cresswell, J. W., & Miller, D. (2000). Determining Validity in Qualitative
Inquiry. Theory into Practice, 39(3), 124–130.
Kvale, S. (1995). The Social Construction of Validity. Qualitative Inquiry, 1, 19.
Lather, P. (1991). Getting Smart: Feminism Research and Pedagogy with/in the
Postmodern. London: Routledge.
Lather, P. (2010). Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Towards a Double (d) Science.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Lincoln, Y., & Guba, E. (1985). Naturalistic Inquiry. Beverley Hills, CA: Sage.
McNiff, J., & Whitehead, J. (2009). Doing and Writing Action Research. London:
Sage.
Polkinghorne, D. (2007). Validity Issues in Narrative Research. Qualitative
Inquiry, 13(4), 431–486.
Macmillan.
in Educational Enquiry. London: Continuum Books.
Tracy, S. J. (2010). Qualitative Quality: Eight ‘Big-Tent’ Criteria for Excellent
Qualitative Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 16, 837.
10
Conclusion and Reflexivity
Freedom Research is an opportunity to critique some of the taken-for-granted

assumptions that underpin what we do in research and to seek new ways of
doing educational research. One needs, however, to ensure that what is done
in the name of research is underpinned by an ethical position and by Values
that prevent the researcher from doing just what he/she wants without think-
ing about the consequences and the virtues that guide the task.
In terms of process, Freedom Research is qualitatively different from
other research approaches in the combination of likely activities. These
activities are not, however, original in themselves individually and are
common to many people’s practice, particularly in qualitative research.
The process is, however, multifaceted and will combine cognitive, emo-
tional and practical skills. The process is likely to include:
• criticality of social dimensions of research process,

• self-awareness and self-evaluative activities,
• values clarification activities,
• reflective/research diary,
• creativity activities, and
• reflexivity approaches.

158 K. McArdle
Awareness and self-evaluation were discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3. In

terms of the research process, identity is important and will be contribut-
ing to the character of the research. One does not necessarily need to
explore the minutiae of personal history for research purposes, though
one might choose to do this. One will, however, be aware of how self is
influencing choices and how self is influencing the process of the research.
Self-evaluative activities imply that judgement will be used to assess the
value of the choices made. The researcher will probably be maintaining a
reflective diary and will be exploring self in terms of identity, self-
awareness and self-evaluation. He/she will be immersed in the research as
‘self ’ and will probably be committed to and passionate about the pro-
cess. Values clarification will be a dimension of the reflective diary as the
researcher analyses his/her deeply held beliefs and analyses at each step of
the research process for its implicit and explicit assumptions. He/she will
be asking questions such as why have I chosen this topic? What is impor-
tant in education today? How have my beliefs influenced the choice of
topic? What methodology is consistent with my beliefs about power and
involvement in research by participants?
The Freedom Researcher

Knowing a Freedom Researcher, one will recognise a sharp criticality of
the social construction of ideas, concepts and conventions linked to
research. One will recognise the self-knowledge, particularly in term of
Values and their impact on his/her research. The researcher will be inno-
vative and creative in demeanour and challenging of the strictures
imposed by others on research.
The Freedom Researcher will value his/her research highly as it is a part
of himself/herself and will be critical of research in which the individual
who influences the research remains hidden. The Freedom Researcher
will be courageous in challenging orthodoxy and highly ethically focused
in terms of his/her work and the work of others.
Originality will be inherent in Freedom Research as it will be so
closely aligned to the experience of the researcher who is an individual
Conclusion and Reflexivity 159
and whose Values will be idiosyncratic. Originality may be defined

inter alia as including something no one has said before and as testing
existing knowledge in an original way. Both these definitions are inher-
ent in Freedom Research. To this definition I would add the impact on
self, others and the wider social and educational systems and structures
as being a source of originality. Freedom Research will often be a chal-
lenge to the reader as it will not necessarily follow traditional forms of
textuality, but it needs to be given a space by the reader to show its
merits as a new means of generating and communicating knowledge.
This is not to say that anything is acceptable. Criteria of quality for the
research were discussed in Chap. 7 and should be applied to the con-
tent in the writing of the research report. I seek cogency, clarity, an
evocative account as well as criticality and synthesis of ideas generated
in the writing in terms of the thesis or journal article, as well, of course,
as a clear and convincing description of the Values dimensions of the
research.
The Freedom Research context needs to be one which can tolerate
critique of taken-for-granted assumptions. It will value the different, the
creative and the innovative. It will support all forms of research that are
based on Values and are ethically sound. It will value the researcher who
innovates on good grounds. It will tolerate difference.
Research, I hope I have shown, is Value laden, and to attempt to sup-
press this is to cast a shadow over the workings of power. Striving to
suppress values is culture specific and, arguably, a product of the
Enlightenment and it is surely time to highlight these hidden values.
One needs, however, to be more explicit about the values to which we
adhere and arguably it is social justice that needs to be uppermost in
our minds when thinking about research. Social justice is difficult to
define, but it has to do with equality within a context whereby what is
available is freely available to all in equal measure, should they have
need of it. This definition is as close as I can come to a definition but
words and ideas are slippery and there is always a case that does not fit.
I agree, however, that social justice is a means of ensuring that research
is beneficent, moral and just in its content, impact and the chosen top-
ics for study.
160 K. McArdle
The key principles of Freedom Research outlined in Chap. 1 are clear

and can be implemented through careful consideration of the values that
underpin one’s choices in a research context. These choices must be justi-
fied through argument to the audience of the research and the audience
must be prepared to scrutinise the value choices that underpin the
research. Freedom Research can only liberate the researcher if the argu-
ments are robust and substantiate the claims made. Freedom Research
does seek to liberate the researcher from barriers and orthodoxies that can
be constraining. These constraints are everywhere in the domain of
research and can be nuanced and subtle but they can, if allowed, frame
the way research is managed and implemented, to the detriment of the
ways in which knowing is conceptualised.
Furthermore, it is impossible to think of education without recourse to
Values. The realities of educational social structures and their inequalities
of power are apparent in education throughout the world and need to be
challenged, and this is surely where one needs to begin discussions of
Values. Educational research should also, I suggest, facilitate the practice
of education; education from my perspective seeks to facilitate transfor-
mation or change for the better in the lives of children and adults. Values
play a part in all our research activities not least our selection of research
topics. I have just made value statements about what educational research
should be about; education is necessarily partisan in what it seeks to
achieve. Hammersley (1999) describes how in a fundamental epistemo-
logical sense all research is necessarily partisan. One must commit, I sug-
gest, to one interpretation or another of what educational research should
be about, to inform practice. Otherwise, there will be an absence of a
theoretical framework.
Researchers are free, suggests Hammersley (1999), from a post-
Enlightenment view to promote quite different values through their
research from each other and there is not a basis for arguing that those
who pursue values to which we are opposed are wrong. We can declare
that they are wrong, but that declaration can carry no more weight than
their criticisms of our commitments. I suggest, however, as I did in Chap.
1, that benchmarks are needed for a consideration of values and these
must be explicit to avoid the danger of the atrocities that have been con-
ducted in the name of research in the past.
Gibbs (2010) asks some key questions about morality, a concept which
underpins discussions of ethics, values and virtues:
Aren’t evaluations of moral right and wrong basically subjective? Aren’t

they relative to the values and virtues approved of and inculcated into that
particular culture? And if there is no objectively ’right or more adequate
morality, then is not it of overriding importance not to impose our own
subjective morality on others. (p. 2)
Gibbs goes on to argue that there is a case for moral development. He

cites Kant as arguing that the moral point of view is the morality of
mutual respect and justice, of reciprocity and equality—not of one per-
son using (or abusing) others as a means to attain his/her selfish ends. A
self-centred act is objectively and intrinsically wrong. I can agree with this
and I suggest that most people will. Gibbs goes on to suggest that some
would argue however that a fully oral or virtuous person is typically one
who has been enculturated into the norms and values of his/her particu-
lar culture. Values of in-group solidarity, loyalty, tradition and confor-
mity, and respect for authority also, argues Gibbs, influence and impact
moral evaluation. I make no secret of the fact that I wish to influence and
impact through Freedom Research this moral evaluation. Kohlberg
(1958) is well known for his theoretical approach to morality, which pos-
tulates a development of cognitive judgement in a moral context. He
distinguished between the child in early years who tends to be focused or
centred on self. Moving through stages of thinking about reciprocity, we
can move towards mature moral motivation and this is what I hope this
book has achieved for the reader in the domain of research through meta-
cognitive reflection.
Hoffman (2000) proposes a model of empathy-based moral develop-
ment. A spark of human concern for others makes social life possible. This
is insufficient in my view for my purposes in that it does not embrace the
values, for example, of critical judgement, honesty in data management
and authenticity in representation of findings. I propose in this book an
internal and an external morality in a research context. Internal morality
may well be empathy based in term of doing-as-you-would-be-done-by
and protecting the well-being of others in the research process. External
162 K. McArdle
morality has more to do with the ‘rightness’ or quality of the knowledge

generated and communicated to others. I argue that there is a right way of
doing this as a benchmark for morality in research that embraces benefi-
cence, advocates avoidance of maleficence and promotes the quality of new
knowledge generated. This is not a new orthodoxy; rather it is a benchmark
of standards against which judgements of ‘rightness’ can be made. Rightness
remains here undefined and is the product of one’s moral maturity in
addressing ethics, values and virtues in research. I hope the reader has
developed his/her repertoire of ethics, values and virtue judgements.
Walsh (1999) cites intellectual values that no one can think to exclude
from their repertoire. These are as follows: care for relevance, and preci-
sion, depth and breadth of understanding. I would agree with this and
also with his contention that forms of individual and institutional self-
interest corrupt virtually any kind of research; these include ambition,
prestige, pride and power. I began this book with an introduction to
virtues, and these have a place in our consideration of values. I value
humility and this is the opposite of the self-interest vices and accordingly
is important and related to the virtues of honesty as opposed to self-
aggrandisement and a desire for balanced critical judgement as opposed
to prejudice and bias.
My concepts of internal and external morality are crucial to Freedom
Research. External morality refers to the ways in which one subscribes to
the morality of the research community. To ensure that all members of a
research team feel included and are represented in publications is an
example of the external morality that is embedded in a research culture.
External morality is regulatory in the sense that it establishes a framework
within which action is deemed to be acceptable. Frameworks of ethics
compel one to behave in certain ways as they have sanctions, but external
morality in Freedom Research goes beyond this and concerns how Values
impact on the research community, students and colleagues with whom
we work. Do students in higher education feel equal and valued for
example? Internal morality affects the character of our research and its
impact on others—the morality that underpins what we choose to do in
the pursuit of knowledge. There may indeed be a tension between the
two moralities and one needs to resolve this tension to produce work that
is morally just to all of humanity to the best to of one’s abilities.
Liberty
Freedom has been discussed in this book, but liberty is also important.
Liberty implies freedom FROM something such as constraint, subjec-
tion, tyranny and authority or a further freedom of choice. Liberty is
particularly important in a research context; I have proposed liberty from
the authority that accompanies research systems, structures and estab-
lished opinion. The writing of J. S. Mill on liberty is germane to the argu-
ments for Freedom Research. Writing obviously in his time, he considers,
in On Liberty, freedom of opinion and freedom of expression of that
opinion in the context of the mental well-being of mankind.
First, he argues, no opinion should be condemned to silence, as it may
be true. Denying this he contends is to assume our own infallibility. This
need to hear all arguments is fundamental to academic principles of free-
dom. In my experience it is not always so apparent in practice. For exam-
ple, I have encountered academic prejudice against the practice of
Camphill Rudolf Steiner Schools, who do some exemplary work with
children with complex special needs, particularly children on the autism
spectrum. Their association with a university was rejected by some aca-
demics, who chose to see their communities as ‘cults’ because of a belief
in their philosophy, known as anthroposophy, in reincarnation. If we
were to reject the knowledge of all those with whose spiritual beliefs we
did not agree, surely this could be called prejudice and it limits world
intercultural knowledge.
Second, an opinion may contain a portion of the truth. The prevailing
opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, J. S. Mill sug-
gests. Those who hold prevailing opinion sometimes seeks to create
dogma and represent this in their academic practice in educational
research. Rarely in my opinion is research dogma justified, and Freedom
Research seeks to break this down in the spirit of all knowing being sound
if it is ethically based. A simple example is the rejection of writing that is
informal in research in that it uses everyday speech patterns. Informality
will be marked low in assessments of students’ writing, for example. As
long as it is as accurate as possible and not intrusive, informality should
be allowed to persist as sometimes it is the more accurate and evocative
form of expression.
164 K. McArdle
Third, if the received opinion is indeed the whole truth, unless it is

contested vigorously and earnestly, it may be held as a prejudice.
Underpinning Freedom Research is my own opinion that the received
opinion is prejudicial to free and open participation in the research pro-
cess. In my experience, while working with education professionals, I
have met many mature-age students for whom the conventions are
intimidating and inhibit otherwise very able researchers and practitioners
from entering the community of researchers.
Facilitating Positive and Negative Freedom

At the beginning of this text, a difference between positive and negative
freedom was discussed. Throughout the book I have sought to identify
barriers or doors that are closed by orthodoxy and convention. Here I
seek to discuss the need for choices to be facilitated for the potential
researcher to step over the barrier or through the door. I discussed the
need for courage and this can be facilitated by the experienced autono-
mous educational researcher, who can facilitate courage and also confi-
dence, self-esteem and of course a sense of agency in early career or
beginning researchers.
First, the autonomous, mature Freedom Researcher can assist the
beginning researcher to identify orthodoxy and conventions as such,
rather than seeing rules and dogma that have to be followed. The mature
Freedom Researcher can also challenge dogma when it asserts itself to
prohibit suppression of freer ways of finding out about education. The
mature Freedom Researcher can accord the new and innovative approaches
to research the benefit of the doubt in assessments and not seek to see
convention followed faithfully. Doing this demands knowledge, confi-
dence and autonomy on the part of the experienced researcher and is to
be valued highly.
Generating self-esteem, confidence and agency are important for the
early career researcher. Creativity was discussed in Chap. 3 and many of
the principles of facilitating creativity apply to self-esteem, confidence and
agency, but these qualities require that the beginning researcher adopts a
posture towards his/her research characterised by trust in himself/herself
and in the authenticity of the research. This may be facilitated through

positive regard, encouragement and affirmation of the Freedom Research
and by consistent support for the approaches adopted.
The Implications for Practice

While practice has been implicit in all of this discussion of educational
research, I cannot leave the subject of educational research without,
indeed, a brief recourse to the literature on the implications for practice.
Educational practice is something made by people—a dynamic force for
both social continuity and social change (Kemmis 1995). Accordingly, it
is bound up with differing points of view and differing Values. Following
Kemmis, I suggest that a moral purpose of educational research is to
unmask the interests at work in contemporary education and to strengthen
and sustain education as a source of social movement as well as of social
order. This, of course, is a moral judgement, and exactly what education
is or should be needs to be considered by the reader, as it will influence
what he/she does with the research. Educational practice is also con-
structed and has its own orthodoxies, which demand scrutiny; and
through research by theorists or practitioners there is a way to achieve this
scrutiny, because research is a public activity. Carr (1995) argues that the
source of educational theory should not be limited to scientific knowl-
edge but should draw on various forms of knowledge, including history,
philosophy and morality. I would argue that the scientific knowledge in
education should also draw on these other forms of knowledge too.
Educational practice is about learning and teaching in a wide range of
contexts and with different people. Carr misses this point in referring to
developing pupils’ minds in the quotation below but makes the impor-
tant point that anybody engaged in educational pursuits already had
theories, and I would argue that these are frequently founded on values:
Education is not, of course, a theoretical activity but a practical activity con-

cerned with the general task of developing pupils’ minds through the pro-
cesses of teaching and learning. However, although it is unlike psychology or
sociology in that it is not concerned with the production of theories and
166 K. McArdle
explanations, education is similar to theoretical practices in being a con-

sciously performed intentional activity that can only be understood by refer-
ence to frameworks of thought in terms of which practitioners make sense of
what they are doing and what it is they are trying to achieve. (1995, p. 33)
Concepts, beliefs, assumptions and values underpin educational theo-

ries of practice, suggests Carr. I would argue that they are all part of a
moral framework that underpins what teachers choose to do. Theory and
practice are interlinked and cannot be separated in the way that some
‘blue skies’ and applied disciplines can be. Theory is only ever about the
way we do things in practice, even if it is a historical piece; implicit in
history is an attempt to understand the legacy for the present day. Practice
is about embedded theory, which in turn implies values:
[Thus], although educational researchers may, and usually do, study educa-
tion without articulating any philosophical beliefs or educational values,
this should not be taken to indicate that philosophy and values do not
permeate their work. All it indicates is the success of educational research
in concealing the moral and philosophical commitments to which it always
implicitly subscribes. (Carr 1995, p. 88)
The quotation above underpins the argument that this book began
with, that orthodoxies in education are everywhere, and that they conceal
moral commitments that demand, in my opinion, scrutiny, justification
and articulation in research. In Chap. 1, positive and negative freedom
were discussed—the need to remove barriers to Freedom Research and
the need to overcome the barriers that we might impose on ourselves. The
values that underpin our research will influence educational practice, and
the values of our educational practice will, in turn, influence our research.
Being autonomous means freedom to determine one’s own action or
state. Being an autonomous researcher demands that one has confidence,
which, in turn, demands that we know ourselves and that we can scruti-
nise, justify and articulate our ethics, values and virtues in a moral philo-
sophical stance. Freedom Research demands an openness to the hidden
values that underpin what we do; it is this knowledge of values that can
liberate us from the constraints and dullness of orthodoxy in educational
research.
Textual Reflexivity
Research is socially constructed and has many embedded discourses that
represent and determine what we do. Constructs themselves construct
the way we think and behave. Reflexivity demands that I make explicit at
least some of the discourses I hold dear and have represented in this text.
First of all, I make a personal statement. I am drawing on and am pas-
sionate about my thesis in this book, which is a product of research
supervision and practice over 30 years. I value highly the challenging of
orthodoxy as I have seen how it can limit and deny my students confi-
dence in their undoubted ability to conduct useful and relevant educa-
tional research. Many of my students have been mature-age practitioners
in an educational context and they find the orthodoxy intimidating and
disempowering. I value highly equality of opportunity and challenging
orthodoxy provides opportunities for different ways of thinking about
the world that are to be valued too.
I find on reviewing this book that the overlapping ideas of morality,
ethics, values and virtues have blended or merged into each other, which
seems to me to be an appropriate thing to have happened, as it mirrors
the complexity of the field of study and the relativity and contiguity of
the ideas I have sought to explore. I have provided definitions of each of
these terms in my desire, perhaps, to follow a certain orthodoxy but no
single definition is sufficient or defensible in a book that seeks to span
such a broad frame of reference. I choose however to follow Gibbs (2010)
in part, who frames a question to which I would answer ‘no.’ ‘Does
morality consists exclusively of fairness based right or wrong?’ I would say
it is this, in part for the internal morality, but the external morality would
consist exclusively of truth based on right or wrong. I have avoided using
the word ‘truth’ in this book, but here I am referring to the external
morality of the research, where the knowledge generated is honest.
A further subject for reflexivity on reviewing this text is to affirm that
I do not categorise myself as a postmodern thinker, though I hold to
many of its precepts such as the complexity and uncertainty of the world
in which we live and the need for multiple levels of explanation and
knowing. I follow Usher (1999) in his explanation of the need to take
account of researcher-as-knowers and their sociocultural contexts and the
168 K. McArdle
inseparability of the knower and the known as well as the means of know-
ing. He suggests, and I agree, that there is a loss of certainty in ways of
knowing; the orthodox consensus of how to do research has been dis-
placed by what I hope is a position which is uncertain but founded on
and acknowledging ethics, values and virtues. I am not troubled by the
uncertainty; I find it to be a healthy critical way of thinking about ontol-
ogy and epistemology, but I am of the view that morality needs to be
more mainstreamed in our research processes. I am not a paragon of vir-
tue and can think of times when my ethical practice could be better. I do
not assume that the reader can be wholly virtuous, but he/she can be
explicit about when these truly human failings occur and be explicit
about their impact on knowledge.
I also find that I am not necessarily consistent in my rejection of ortho-
doxies. Some are relevant and valuable and others are a barrier, in my
opinion, to Freedom Research. This does make me feel a little uncom-
fortable, but I think I am falling foul of an orthodoxy that suggests my
position needs to be completely consistent, or rather needs to be a meta-
narrative, whereas my truth and intentions lie in a vision of research that
has a structure and useful frameworks that define it as an inquiry process,
but that these frameworks and structures are socially constructed and
need to be challenged by the local narrative. Orthodoxies can be chal-
lenged if the grounds for this can be justified by recourse to values or
critical judgement. The baby needs to stay in the bathwater if we are giv-
ing it a bath.
References
Carr, W. (1995). For Education: Towards Critical Educational Inquiry. Buckingham:
Gibbs, J. C. (2010). Moral Development and Reality: Beyond the Theories of
Kohlberg and Hoffman. Boston, MA: Penguin Academics, Allyn and Bacon.
Hammersley, M. (1999). Taking Sides Against Research: An Assessment of the
Rationale for Partnership. In D. Scott (Ed.), Values and Educational Research.
London: Institute of Education, University of London.
Hoffmann, M. L. (2000). Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for

Caring and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kemmis, S. (1995). Prologue: Theorizing Educational Practice. In W. Carr
(Ed.), For Education: Towards Critical Educational Inquiry. Buckingham:
Kohlberg, L. (1958). The Development of Modes of Moral Thinking and Choice in
the Years Ten to Sixteen. Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, USA.
Usher, R. (1999). Overstepping the Limits: Postmodernism and the Research
Process. In D. Scott (Ed.), Values and Educational Research. London: Institute
Walsh, P. (1999). Value and Objectivity in Educational Research: The Need for
Nuance. In D. Scott (Ed.), Values and Educational Research. London: Institute
Index
A C
Action research, 42, 59, 77, 80, 89, Causality, 72
90, 100, 109, 130, 153 Childhood, xvi, 83–85
Adult(s), 3, 46, 47, 49, 63, 71, 79, Children, 3, 15, 17, 26, 36, 47–49,
83–86, 92, 99, 100, 115, 138, 54, 55, 64, 71, 77, 79,
139, 142, 160 83–86, 93, 100, 109, 115,
Aesthetics, 72, 91, 94, 123, 133 120, 134, 138–141, 160,
Analysis, xvi, 62, 96, 103–106, 161, 163
108–111, 117, 123, 143, 149, Communication, xiv, xvi, 73, 74,
154 97–99, 103–123
Aristotle, xiii, 24, 25, 30, 33, 129 Consequentialism, 128, 131
Associative theory, 72 Conventions, xv, xvi, 1–11, 55, 57,
Autonomy, xv, xvi, 2, 19, 23, 24, 61, 71, 112, 113, 118, 120,
34–36, 47, 59, 68, 78, 139, 164 122, 131, 132, 158, 164
Axiology, xiv, xv, 59, 62, 90, 134 Courage, xiv, 6, 20, 25, 26, 32, 34,
74, 100, 108, 133, 164
Craft, xvi, 94–96, 99, 100
B Creativity, ix, xvi, 7, 25, 63, 67–81,
Beneficence, 4, 6, 47, 122, 132, 136, 97–101, 130, 157, 164
152, 155, 162 Criticality, 27–29, 74, 157–159

Methods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69650-8
172 Index
D F
Data analysis, 96, 110 Freedom, ix–xii, xv–xvii, 15, 19–21,
Deontology, 25, 127, 128, 131 23–43, 45–64, 67–81, 86–90,
Design(s), research, xv, xvi, 51, 55, 59, 96–98, 100, 101, 104–106,
62, 63, 67–71, 90, 91, 129, 150 110, 120, 122, 123, 127–129,
Discourse, ix, 10, 16–20, 39, 45, 46, 131, 132, 134, 138, 142, 143,
48, 71, 81, 84, 86, 88, 109, 145–155, 157–166, 168
112, 113, 120, 121, 127, 137,
150, 151, 167
H
Hermeneutics, xvi, 103, 104
E
Education, ix, xi, xiii, xvi, 1, 3, 5, 7,
9, 15, 16, 20, 26, 27, 34, 35, I
39, 42, 48–53, 63, 64, 69, 73, Identity, xvi, 2, 19, 20, 24, 25, 36,
77, 79, 80, 83–87, 89, 93, 94, 45–64, 87, 89, 109, 120–122,
99, 120, 128–131, 138, 140, 136, 142, 158
142, 158, 160, 162, 164–166 Ideology, 6, 20, 27, 52, 77, 97
Educational research, x, xvi, 1, 3–5, Implementation, xvi, 4, 6, 83, 89,
9, 11, 25, 49–51, 56, 57, 62, 94–96, 100, 122, 127, 128, 151
64, 68, 72, 84, 89, 92, 93, 99, Interpretation, Interpretative, xvi,
107, 116, 123, 127, 128, 133, 28, 37, 38, 41, 42, 52, 74, 75,
137, 138, 141, 150, 157, 160, 91, 92, 96, 103, 104,
163, 165–167 106–108, 110–112, 117, 118,
Emotion(s), 72, 100, 101, 114, 123, 123, 131, 141, 148, 149, 160
129 Interviews, 18, 41, 55, 88, 103, 106,
Entrepreneurship, 97–101 108–111, 114, 119, 140, 148,
Epistemology, 9, 13, 23, 32–34, 56, 153
59–62, 90, 122, 150, 168
social, 13–16, 32, 33
virtue, 23, 32–34 K
Ethical judgements, 29, 131, Knowledge, 2, 5, 6, 10, 11, 13–16,
134–138 18, 24, 26, 27, 30, 33–37, 43,
Ethical methods, 135, 136 46, 49, 50, 53, 57–59, 63,
Ethical posture, 129–133, 135, 136 74–76, 79, 81, 84, 86, 87, 90,
Ethical rationale, 135 92, 95, 96, 99–101, 107, 109,
Ethics 112, 117–119, 122, 130, 134,
intellectual 138, 140–142, 145–151, 159,
virtue, 32, 129 162–168
Index
173
L Orthodoxy, ix, x, 1–11, 14, 16, 20,

Liberty, xvi, 2, 3, 163, 164 23–43, 51, 52, 55–57, 63, 67,
Literature review, 46, 113, 123 69, 71, 76, 83, 86, 90, 93, 97,
112, 120, 142, 147, 158, 160,
162, 164–168
M
Meaning, xvi, 1, 27, 28, 42, 53, 70,
73, 87, 88, 103–123, 131–134 P
Meta-ethics, xi Paradigms, xvi, 4, 21, 42, 56–62, 76,
Metaphor, 72, 73, 75, 88, 101, 109, 77, 91, 122, 150, 154
114, 119 Personality, 69, 74, 76, 77, 100
Methodology, xvi, 19, 39, 56, 59, Philosophy, xi, 6, 23–26, 34, 35, 53,
69, 74, 77, 83–101, 115, 119, 56, 72, 79, 83, 89, 119, 127,
122, 123, 127, 141, 150, 152, 147, 152, 163, 165, 166
155, 158 Poetry, 24, 73, 107, 114, 123
Methods, xiii, xv, xvi, 4, 20, 26, 29, Policy, 17, 49, 58, 61, 84, 92, 120,
39, 56–62, 75, 77, 83, 85, 86, 130, 140, 141
88–93, 96, 109, 115, 132, Positive freedom, 3
133, 135, 136, 141, 148, 149, Positivism, 56–58, 61, 91
154 Power, xvi, 13, 16, 18–20, 25, 38,
Morality, ix–xi, 2, 6–8, 23–25, 31, 46, 49, 52, 53, 79, 80, 84, 87,
47, 53, 128, 133, 136, 137, 88, 93, 94, 99, 107, 113, 116,
155, 161, 162, 165, 167, 168 117, 121, 123, 136, 137, 141,
external, 2, 155, 161, 162, 167 143, 153, 158–160, 162
internal, 2, 46, 155, 161, 162, Practice, 3, 5, 10, 15, 17, 30, 36,
167 38–40, 42, 47–49, 51–55, 57,
58, 63, 70, 71, 79, 80, 83–85,
90, 95, 96, 108, 112, 117,
N 120, 121, 127, 130, 133, 135,
Narrative, 41, 59, 73, 89, 90, 109, 137, 148, 151, 157, 160, 163,
114, 116, 117, 119, 154, 168 165–168
Negative freedom, 2, 3, 164–166
Q
O Qualitative research, ix, 6, 9, 38, 39,
Objectivity, 5, 19, 26, 38, 62, 106, 88, 91, 105, 106, 115, 137,
113, 116–118, 146, 149, 150 145–150, 153, 154, 157
Ontology, 46, 56, 59–62, 89, 90, Quality, criteria of, 5, 6, 150–153, 159
122, 168 Quantitative research, 9, 62, 107, 147
174 Index
R Theory, theories, ix, xiii, xvi, 13,

Reflection, 36, 37, 39–42, 48–50, 15, 24, 30–32, 36, 37, 42,
70, 92, 161 47, 51–56, 58, 63, 70–72,
Reflexivity, xvii, 37–43, 74, 101, 109, 74, 79, 80, 83, 84, 87, 89,
110, 119, 136, 153, 157–168 93, 105, 106, 113, 127, 133,
textual, 167–168 142, 148, 150, 151, 154,
Resilience, xiii, 63, 76, 77 165, 166
Respect, 2, 28, 33, 78, 108, Trust, ix, 20, 27, 31, 41, 78, 107,
137–143, 153, 161 108, 117, 119, 164
Rigour, xvi, 2, 6, 7, 10, 34, 39, 61,
62, 91, 153, 155
Robustness, xvi, 2, 6, 7, 10, 39, 61, U
62, 91, 106, 145, 146, 155 University, universities, 20, 50,
76, 80, 90, 94, 140, 142,
163
S
Sampling, 4, 93, 94
Schools, xi, xiii, 3, 15, 18–20, 25, V
31, 33, 36, 48, 50, 54, 63, 76, Validity, ix, xvi, 5, 17, 45, 61, 92,
77, 84, 94, 111, 128, 131, 113, 117–119, 123, 135, 136,
139, 140, 142, 163 141, 145–155
Science(s), x, 4, 9, 38, 39, 51, 57, 58, Values, ix–xvii, 2, 4–11, 15, 20, 23,
62, 85, 91, 107, 116, 117, 119, 24, 26, 29–33, 35–43, 45–51,
123, 130, 132, 137, 146, 151 53–58, 60–63, 71, 73–76,
Self-awareness, 37, 39, 42, 43, 45, 78, 83–101, 103–108, 111,
50, 157, 158 115, 117–123, 127, 129–133,
Self-evaluation, 158 135, 136, 138, 141–143,
Self-respect, 32, 33 145–149, 152–155, 157–162,
Silo thinking, 79, 80 165–168
Social construction, xvi, 10, 13, 17, Virtue(s), ix, x, xiii, xiv, 4, 6–8,
34, 47, 54, 114, 158 23–30, 32–37, 39, 45, 47, 54,
Social reflection, 37, 41 55, 62, 68, 83, 96, 99, 100,
108, 129–133, 135, 136, 138,
153, 155, 157, 161, 162,
T 166–168
Teacher(s), xiii, xiv, 15, 16, 18, 19, intellectual, xiv, 25, 27, 34, 36,
25, 35, 40, 41, 48, 49, 52, 54, 46, 129
55, 59, 64, 73, 89, 94, 99, moral, xiv, 25, 129
130, 135, 139, 166 Vulnerable groups, 85, 86, 116

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN

EDUCATION RESEARCH METHODS

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Palgrave Studies in Education Research Methods

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932985

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: © bortonia / Getty

Printed on acid-free paper

1 Introducing Freedom Research 1

2 The Social Context of Research and Inquiry 13

4 Identity and the Freedom Researcher 45

5 Creativity in Freedom Research 67

6 Educational Values and the Link to Methodology 83

7 Creating Meaning and Communication 103

8 Ethical Education and Research 127

9 Validity and Freedom Research 145

Freedom Research seeks to challenge, and to encourage others to chal-

also be of interest to those who review or write for journals, supervise

Value theory encompasses a range of approaches to understanding

which involves knowing how to apply general principles in particular

Pring (2004) distinguishes between moral virtues and intellectual vir-

as it refers to underpinning deeply held concepts of worth or value. I

This hierarchy should not be seen in any way as chronological in a

Chapter 1 of this book provides an introduction to the argument that

researcher, supervisor or senior staff member to facilitate Freedom

Aristotle. (1999). Nicomachean Ethics (T. Irwin, Trans.). Indianapolis,

This book concerns ‘Freedom Research,’ which is a term used to describe

© The Author(s) 2018 1

It is important to note that negative freedom involves doors being

absence of discriminatory practices, for example, in an educational

Positive freedom is the freedom from self-inhibition or is the ability to

There can be subtle and hidden norms which limit freedom in a

Particular ideas of neutrality, such as the maintenance of objectivity

Morality, Ethics, Values and Virtues

our actions. To be an autonomous researcher we need to be clear about

Educational research, if it adheres to this principle, is inherently benef-

attempt to reconcile these two sets of values (Ransome 2013). I have

Principles of Freedom Research:

1. Research as a discipline is created and maintained by a community of

That research is socially constructed is in my opinion without doubt in

there are accepted means of generating knowledge. I suggest that this is

© The Author(s) 2018 13

the participation of practitioners, such as teachers, teaching assistants and

senses to observe reality is contestable in that realities look different to

The Community of Researchers

safe, idiosyncratic approach is a symptom of this subtle and sophisticated

What to Do About the Social Unconscious?

to develop awareness or mindfulness of the social and political factors that

One of the purposes of this book is to counter the dominant discourses

1 . acceptance and internalising the dominant ideology and values;

I wish to draw attention to points (2)–(4). The first point in Adams’

levels interact and combine to produce a very strong cultural tradition,

© The Author(s) 2018 23

different. Aristotle subscribed to two kinds of virtues, moral and intel-

Virtues Needed for Freedom Research

Confidence or belief in one’s own abilities is required so that one can

Adopting an attitude of scepticism or reasoned doubt;

I find this description also to be useful and implicitly full of virtues,

Constructing arguments to justify freedom approaches to research is

• interpreting meanings in an argument (interpretive skills);

Translating this discussion on criticality back to the research project,

• Is the problem clearly defined and is its significance established?

• Is my work useful to educational practice? What are its strengths and

1 Introducing Freedom Research 1

2 The Social Context of Research and Inquiry 13

4 Identity and the Freedom Researcher 45

5 Creativity in Freedom Research 67

6 Educational Values and the Link to Methodology 83

7 Creating Meaning and Communication 103

8 Ethical Education and Research 127

9 Validity and Freedom Research 145

Morality, Ethics, Values and Virtues

The Community of Researchers

What to Do About the Social Unconscious?

Virtues Needed for Freedom Research

hat Should the Researcher Do and What

Social and Virtue Epistemology

self-respect is also a form of maturity of character. He concludes that,

Exploring Our Own Values and Virtues

ducational Sociological Questions

important. However, as Meighan and Siraj-Blatchford suggest, consulting

Freedom Research Design

The Beginnings of Design

Three Types of Creativity