Qualitative Conversations

Qualitative Conversations belongs to the Qualitative Research Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. One episode notes that the group was established in 1983 to discuss the ethical, methodological and philosophical elements of qualitative research. Nobody owns the microphone. The show has no regular host, and a podcast committee organizes each episode, so a different person leads each time. Elizabeth Pope, a member of that committee, leads a conversation on teaching research methods in education with Amy LaPointe-Torosky, Vicki L. Baker and Jeffrey C. Sun. Bowden Robertson, a PhD candidate at the University of Alabama, moderates a panel about a conference on culturally sustaining pedagogies in the teaching of qualitative research, funded through the Spencer Foundation. Tim Wells, a postdoctoral research scholar at Arizona State University who usually coordinates episodes and edits audio, is guest host for another episode. The talk keeps returning to the classroom. The guests in the Pope conversation describe a book built from contributed lesson plans. As reviewers and section editors, they checked closely how each plan connected theory and practice. The culturally sustaining pedagogies panel asks how standard qualitative coursework could be reimagined. One panelist came to education from art history and calls the field's layered jargon an accessibility problem for students from other disciplines. Accessibility also appears in the title of 'Episode 45: From Candy to Concepts: What Candy Sorting Reveals About Making Research Methods More Accessible'. The second main thread is critical participatory inquiry. In 'Episode 44. Research With, Not On: Inside Critical Participatory Inquiry', Melissa Haber-Ozer of the University of Missouri, Megan Call Cummings of Johns Hopkins University and Giovanni Dazzo of the University of Georgia describe practical tools. These include step-by-step guidance on co-creating consent forms, advice on designing community consultations where communities help write the research questions, and reflexive activities meant to work for graduate students, faculty and practitioners. Dazzo is also the guest in 'Episode 42. Jori Hall Interviews Giovanni Dazzo'. Jori Hall, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who chairs the SIG's Egon Guba Award, asks about the dissertation that earned him the 2023 QRSIG Outstanding Dissertation Award. His answer goes back to childhood, when he was part of too many research studies and felt like a subject, not a participant. Heard next to the participatory inquiry episode, that memory gives the phrase 'Research With, Not On' a personal meaning. A graduate student speaker event about qualitative research roles in traditional and non-traditional spaces includes a mathematics education researcher who wrote narrative inquiry into a grant. It also includes a reflection on the urgency of children's education compared with the slow, careful work of qualitative coding. The episode with Mariia Vitrukh, an Arizona State University doctoral candidate, covers her dissertation on the learning of Ukrainian students who moved away from war areas and kept studying. It also recounts that an episode she hoped to record in 2021 never happened, because a few months later Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The tone throughout is collegial: guests thank each other, recommend each other's work and invite listeners to get in touch. A listener gets methods talk from inside the field, about how qualitative research is taught and who it is done with.