The role of the school-based mentor has become more central within Initial Teaching Education (ITE) over recent years and will become even more central to such programmes, with the introduction of new Department for Education requirements from 2024. This article evaluates a collaborative research project undertaken with school-based mentors…

A virtues-based approach to research ethics offers an alternative perspective to the rule-based approaches that dominate many current ethical regulations. For researchers engaging in insider research where ethical dilemmas can be complex and unpredictable, ethical decisions often need to be made on a case-by-case basis. This requires researchers…

In this article, we discuss the methodological implications of data and theory integration for Theory-Based Evaluation (TBE). TBE is a family of approaches to program evaluation that use program theories as instruments to answer questions about whether, how, and why a program works. Some of the groundwork about TBE has expressed the idea that a…

In this paper, we analyse what interdisciplinary integration looks like in a research project aimed at developing Probo, a social robot that can be used as an interface by therapists working with autistic children. With our analysis, we contribute to a piecemeal approach to theorizing about integration, which is sensitive to the diversity of goals…

When engaging in community-based research, it is important to consider ethical research practices throughout the project. While current research practices require many investigators to obtain approval from an ethics review board before starting a project, more is required to ensure that ethical principles are applied once the investigations begin…

Discipline-based education research (DBER) uses researchers' disciplinary background to inform investigations into university teaching and learning. The terms of student involvement in DBER are often dictated by the researchers, with student choice limited to whether or not they will contribute data. This is counter to the ethos of active student…

In recent times, there has been a surge of impact-oriented, transdisciplinary research programmes and projects integrating multiple disciplines, types of knowledge and practices. An essential element often mentioned in the literature to improve the performance of these programmes and support impact delivery is continuous reflection and learning…

This article challenges an over-reliance on language as the primary means to communicate knowledge by adopting a language"less"ness approach to maker pedagogies and maker literacies. Having conducted makerspace and design-based research for some time, we separately and together noticed a productive relationship between wordless…

Planning inclusive research should center meaningful engagement of co-researchers with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities to address issues that are important to their communities. There are a variety of approaches to planning research projects consistent with the guiding principles of inclusive research. We describe components of…

Student loneliness is a prevalent challenge across universities around the globe. Epistemological, ethical, and efficacious challenges characterise contemporary research on student loneliness. To address this, our team of 11 staff researchers implemented a students-as-partners initiative with 16 students from 12 universities across the United…

Background: People with intellectual disability are often defined as a vulnerable group. The feminist philosopher Jackie Scully argues that vulnerability is often associated with qualities such as immaturity, helplessness, victimhood, passivity and so forth. As research is a social activity, the qualities associated with vulnerability affect…

Researchers and research organizations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that their work contributes to positive change and helps solve pressing societal challenges. There is a simultaneous trend towards more engaged transdisciplinary research that is complexity-aware and appreciates that change happens through systems transformation,…

This paper explores the concept of adaptive research design, in which topic, theoretical framing, method, and data are "in principle" open to adaptation during the research process. The main premise is that adaptations in one element of the research process can trigger changes in other elements. Both positive and negative reasons for…

This article addresses the ethical and epistemological challenges of interdisciplinary efforts through the interactional lens of proximity. How can we ensure interdisciplinarity in unequal institutional, disciplinary, and geopolitical environments? What does it mean to do research when epistemological frameworks clash between fields and sectors?…

This article is written with the recognition that, as higher education studies evolve as a multidisciplinary area of inquiry, there is a need to reflect on the theoretical and practical concerns emerging from conducting higher education research. This is especially the case for early-career researchers who enter this relatively new field of study.…