Abstract
The objective of this paper is to better understand how to bring the experience of applying for research ethics approval closer to the practice of research planning. The hypothesis is that, while experienced scholars understand the ethics writing process, early career scholars find that understanding is harder. We adopt experiential narrative methodology to explore individual understandings of the ethics writing process as case studies providing insight into relationships between academic and institutional process. We adopt this approach since experiential narrative allows academics to explore social processes while providing professional development. Building narratives of the experience of applying for research ethics approval, we present six personal accounts from the perspectives of the research ethics committee chair, a senior supervising academic, two early career academics and two doctoral candidates. The paper describes our experience through individual and collective experiential narratives, engaging the narratives of scholarship, intellectual context, participant and power relationships, and professional growth. Extending a previous argument that deeper engagement with ethical curricula will transform students, we demonstrate the effect of deeper engagement upon early career scholars, and demonstrate that the bureaucratic writing embedded in the research ethics proposal can be harnessed to mentor both early and later career writing and scholarly development.
Highlights
While we draw on the scholarship of the field to frame our work, the specific goals, strategies, and interactions that characterize that work are shaped by a deep appreciation for the contexts in which we practise. [Taylor, 2010: 1]Taylor’s observation is a straightforward expression of the need for new approaches to reflecting upon research, in a context where academic disciplines continue to shape knowledge making, albeit drawing upon cross-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary epistemological traditions
Despite the notion that the bureaucratised writing, so typical of the academy, which demands that academics “write [not] to persuade but to impress and gain approval within a hierarchy” (Brett, 1991: 520), and which manifested itself in Elliott-John’s “pre-occupation with and ... over-emphasis on ‘acceptable’ writing for the academy [exerted] a powerful influence over [her] ability to write anything at all in terms of what could be deemed ‘scholarship’”, we demonstrate that the very bureaucratic writing embedded in the research ethics proposal can be harnessed to mentor early career—and later career—writing and scholarly development
This tacit colonization is the basis for the ethical power of narratives, experiential or otherwise. [Colne & deBeyer, 2009: 45]. This is very much a collaborative narrative inquiry, in the sense of Radi et al 2008. They suggest a duality of meaning of “narrative”: “a story version of the events for the [narrator] and a narrative as a lived experience between the researcher and the [narrator]” (Radi et al, 2008: 112)
Summary
While we draw on the scholarship of the field to frame our work, the specific goals, strategies, and interactions that characterize that work are shaped by a deep appreciation for the contexts in which we practise. [Taylor, 2010: 1]. The present study emerges from the ethical and intellectual value that even those academics who publish little, or who do not write reflectively to any great extent, have a core of their professional practice—Lea and Stierer’s “everyday writing”—that provides a springboard for any mentor to work with in supporting his or her peers or candidates. In drawing on this practice, the present study explicitly links pragmatic experience and narrative with a negotiated, broadly interpreted theoretical tradition. Such a framework for reporting and reconstructing personal narratives, according to Colne and deBeyer (2009: 45), exerts a greater power: “during the moments of encounter with a story we are “colonized” by narrative worlds that determine who we are to be for the duration of the experience”
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