Ongoing Inquiry Research Articles

Developing a practice-driven research agenda in implementation science: Perspectives from experienced implementation support practitioners.

Attention is being placed on the "ironic gap" or "secondary" research-to-practice gap in the field of implementation science. Among several challenges posited to exacerbate this research-to-practice gap, we call attention to one challenge in particular-the relative dearth of implementation research that is tethered intimately to the lived experiences of implementation support practitioners (ISPs). The purpose of this study is to feature a qualitative approach to engaging with highly experienced ISPs to inform the development of a practice-driven research agenda in implementation science. In general, we aim to encourage ongoing empirical inquiry that foregrounds practice-driven implementation research questions. Our analytic sample was comprised of 17 professionals in different child and family service systems, each with long-term experience using implementation science frameworks to support change efforts. Data were collected via in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Our analysis followed a qualitative content analysis approach. Our focal conceptual category centered on the desired areas of future research highlighted by respondents, with subcategories reflecting subsets of related research question ideas. Interviews yielded varying responses that could help shape a practice-driven research agenda for the field of implementation science. The following subcategories regarding desired areas for future research were identified in respondents' answers: (a) stakeholder engagement and developing trusting relationships, (b) evidence use, (c) workforce development, and (d) cost-effective implementation. There is significant promise in bringing implementation research and implementation practice together more closely and building a practice-informed research agenda to shape implementation science. Our findings point not only to valuable practice-informed gaps in the literature that could be filled by implementation researchers, but also topics for which dissemination and translation efforts may not have yielded optimal reach. We also highlight the value in ISPs bolstering their own capacity for engaging with the implementation science literature to the fullest extent possible.

Ethical leadership and organisational identification: the mediating effect of psychological contract —evidence from Sri Lankan apparel industry

Albeit a plethora of studies were undertaken across many countries, cultures, and industries, ethical leadership in the workplace remains a topic of ongoing debate and inquiry. This study aims to investigate the direct and indirect impact of ethical leadership on organizational identification in employees working in the apparel industry in Sri Lanka. Drawing on social exchange theory, the study further explores the mediating role of psychological contract in the impact of ethical leadership on organizational identification. The study adopted a survey research strategy and the data were collected from conveniently chosen employees working in the apparel industry with the aid of a self-administered questionnaire. The questionnaires were distributed among the respondents via online and a total of 414 responses were received. As a caveat, the fundamental statistical assumptions and the psychometric properties of measures were examined. The results showed that ethical leadership positively impacts organizational identification. The study averred a partial mediation of psychological contract in the impact of ethical leadership on organizational identification. The current study pushes back the frontiers of literature in the terrain of leadership and organizational studies and provides useful practical implications.

Mentoring relationships through technology in the third space

This study has its genesis in the ASCILITE Community Mentoring Program (CMP), in which the authors are active participants. This program runs primarily for the benefit of ASCILITE Members and involves partnering members from across the sector in professional mentoring relationships. The CMP is a vehicle designed to enhance specific knowledge, skills and capacities among the membership, where more experienced members work with those wishing to develop-up their expertise in agreed areas (ASCILITE, 2022). Mentoring has been recognised as an important professional development medium for academics and professional staff working in higher education. These relationships are seen to provide personal growth opportunities that contribute to an individual’s career development and professional identity (re)formation (Qi, in press). Individuals who engage in mentoring are generally team-players, able to function flexibly and in an agile fashion in challenging work environments (Fenwick, 2016; Fenwick et al., 2012). These attributes bode well in building mentoring relationships and sense of belonging. During the mentorship, mentees and mentors build upon their multifaceted competences needed for collaborative, critical and creative work. They take an inquiry-based and reflective approach to build and expand connections, interactions and relational endeavours to potentially align with their personal and professional agenda. They constantly negotiate and self-position in the mentoring space to transcend disciplinary boundaries (Manoharan, 2020). Here, we are conscious of a fundamental question which alludes to mentees and mentors in how they might traverse and relate to their respective professional contexts and concurrently their learning and development opportunities within the mentoring relationships through technology. More recently, Mentors and Mentees leverage the affordances of digital technologies to enhance access to each other, resources and learning across a multitude of contexts. In response to ever-diversified academia in Australasia, mentoring has been perceived as a deep, meaningful and reciprocal learning and developmental avenue. The hybridity of learning and development has created greater opportunities for richer learning experiences and ways to belong (Press et al., 2022). This study employs ‘Third Space’ as a metaphor to reimagine and analyse the relationships and learning of mentors in the mentorship as a co-developmental opportunity. The idea of Third Space derived from cultural theory explores spatial relationships (Padro, 2022; Whitchurch, 2012) and rejects the dichotomy of relationships. It however takes into consideration the contemporary, blended, socially enabled sites for participation and collaboration (Soja, 1996) intersecting with digital technologies. In this sense, mentoring is characterised by the hybrid nature of 21st century learning and development to seed opportunities for new ways of interactions and collaborations across disciplines, to help address the challenges of the modern university (Manoharan, 2020). To help the researchers understand the lived experiences and learnings derived from mentoring, this study has adopted a phenomenological approach that explore the nexus of learning, mentoring and digital technologies. The well-established ASCILITE CMP program then provides the ideal analytical lens into the Third Space, to address the following research questions: How do Mentors experience mentoring, and what do their relationships, learning and development look like? How and in what ways does the Third Space construct position a Mentor’s approach in framing their CMP mentoring activities? To what extent do digital technologies promote a sense of belonging for learning and development in the Third Space? How might mentoring be designed for the Third Space (re)shaped by digital technologies? These questions pose complex concerns. Our empirical study is not necessarily to resolve all these challenging issues. Our point of departure is to raise awareness of mentorship through ongoing critical inquiries, reflexivity and considerations that contribute to the higher education community.

On the wisdom of not-knowing: reflections of an Olympic Canoe Slalom coach

ABSTRACT Never has the domain of sports coaching been so inundated with secondary information. In high-performance contexts, for example, coaches are routinely presented with detailed reports specifying features about an athlete’s or team’s performance. Here, we question whether such detailed secondary information has led us to know too much, obscuring what the world has to share directly with us. To over-rely on secondary information is to narrow in on certainty, on cause-effects that are oft-espoused through de-contextualised ‘performance’ tests and metrics. This indirect approach eschews opening up to uncertainty, to ongoing inquiry embedded in primary experience. For where certainty risks closures, uncertainty opens to the possibility of carrying on with and alongside others. We explore this thesis through the reflections of an Olympic Canoe Slalom coach, meandering through three sections: (i) on paying attention; (ii) on knowing better; (iii) on guidance without specification. In presenting this thesis, we hope to encourage others – in sports coaching and beyond – to embrace an ethos of not-knowing, opening up to the ‘goings on’ of what interests them, actively attending and directly responding with genuine care and curiosity. Indeed, while embracing an ethos of not-knowing can be unsettling, vulnerably exposing oneself to changing power relations in a world perpetually on the move, it can facilitate primary experience of the surrounding ecology. The accompanying growth of responsiveness to one’s surroundings emerges from listening to what it has share, joining in conversation to find ways of carrying on. It is in this responsiveness, we contend, that a wisdom can be found; a wisdom of not-knowing.

Letter to Jim: Four Poems of Water and Soul

This letter to the author’s Jungian therapist discusses the process by which therapy and the practice of writing align in a mysterious connection between upwelling unconscious and the divine interaction with human creativity. The attendant four poems investigate the haunted spaces of the psyche where self-hatred and physical harm jostle with the insistences of soul. The frame of depth work, a writing practice, and thousands of hours spent physically engaged with the world’s waters were combined to create a wide and ongoing inquiry into the nature of the writer’s inner life and the invisible archetypal pressures that bear down on awareness. The resulting letter and poetry show a developed sense of the mysterious connection of things seen and unseen, and relatedness with an invisible, instructive framework that allows the writer to live within body, and express via word. The final judgment is that the author writes herself into being each day; that practice keeps her wide and sensitive, supple and alive.

Multiple worlds and strange objects: environmental education research as an additive practice

AbstractThe paper offers three examples of passionate immersion with strange objects and working with peculiar multispecies assemblages, such as the assemblage of a dove called Romeo and the technology to humidify a greenhouse called ‘Princess’, or the experiment of orienteering in forests for years, accounting for slips, scratches and tumbles as being taught by the forest — and prioritising these over the more commonplace educational narratives. The paper is structured in a nonconventional way in that most space is reserved for reports from these ongoing inquiries. The authors will each discuss how they situate themselves in relation to strangeness in research and how they proceed methodologically, locating their approaches as postqualitative. The questions each example addresses are:What is a strange object? How do we come across them? What do we begin to do/produce with them?The additive orientation described in the research stories is proposed to be an important constituent for new survival knowledge especially relevant for environmental education, addressing environmental problems as wicked, and demanding approaches that reach beyond methodological divides.

Through Thick and Thin

Through Thick and Thin

Drama integration across subjects, grades, and learners: insights from new teachers as inquiring reflective practitioners

Promoting equitable access to the arts may depend on structures that support teachers in integrating arts into core curricula. We describe an arts-integration design that spotlights attention within and beyond one teacher credential program to one arts field–drama–engaging 24 new non-arts teachers across grades and subjects who participated in a drama academy. Our project shines the light on contributions of early-career teachers to generating conceptions derived from immersion in drama and inquiry into classroom practice. We focus on teachers’ developing repertoires of drama-based pedagogy (DBP) practices for use among wwdiverse learners, and on engagements in ongoing inquiry and reflective cycles. Drawing upon teachers’ reflections and classroom inquiry projects from a multiyear experience, we mapped teachers’ drama conceptions and practices in three interactive tiers: foundational, core, and critical literacies. We illustrate themes with teachers’ reflections and reports of practice, including a vignette of a Mexican-American/Chicana teacher with children ages 9–10, a number of them native-Spanish speaking emergent bilinguals. The study informs teacher efforts in diverse classrooms to integrate and sustain classroom drama. Drawing upon insights and themes from results, we offer policy implications and recommendations for others wishing to design for and learn from innovative drama integration efforts.

Evaluation policy and organizational evaluation capacity building: A study of international aid agency evaluation policies

AbstractResearch and theory on evaluation capacity building (ECB) and organizational evaluation capacity have been developing at a good pace over the past decade. On the other hand, there is a paucity of research on the nature and consequences of organizational evaluation policy. Evaluation policies are developed and implemented ultimately to inform and shape evaluation practice and its consequences. It is therefore natural to consider the interface between evaluation policy and ECB. The present exploratory descriptive study examines 52 evaluation policies from bilateral and multilateral aid agencies to explore connections between evaluation policy content and ECB principles and considerations. The results shed light on some interesting relationships; they are discussed in terms of evaluation use, evaluation purposes, and organizational leadership. The study also resulted in a revision of Trochim's (2009) definition of evaluation policy and a refinement and expansion of his eight‐category taxonomy. Implications for ongoing inquiry are considered and practical implications are offered to organization members and evaluation policy developers.

Figuring and Drawing

A standing challenge in undergraduate Computer Science curricula is the teaching and learning of computer programming. Through this paper which is an essay about programming, we aim to contribute to the plethora of existing pedagogies, approaches and philosophies, by discussing a specific feature of our approach in teaching principled programming to undergraduate students, in their first semester of studies, namely the utilization of pictures, both text-based and raster-based graphics. Although the given course has evolved substantially over the thirty years of its delivery regarding the programming languages (Miranda, C, C++, Java) and paradigms (functional, imperative, object-oriented, combination of procedural and object-oriented) used, the discussed visual feature has been maintained and steadily strengthened. We list abstraction, problem decomposition and synthesis, information hiding, reusability, modularity and extensibility as key principles of problem solving and algorithmic thinking. These principles are closely aligned with the advocated computational thinking techniques of problem decomposition, pattern recognition, pattern generalization and algorithm design. We aim for our students to familiarize themselves with all the above principles through practical problem solving. Our ongoing inquiry has been whether the problem domain of pictures is contributing valuably towards this aim. Moreover, an added-value is that students get a glimpse of computational complexity in a visual, empirical way. The presented work is not related to visual programming, since the students write their programs textually and not graphically; it's the output of their programs which is in visual form. Our approach though is loosely related to the classical paradigm of turtle graphics. However, our focus is Computer Science majors, who should be able to design and build turtles and other objects and not just use them. Indeed, the programming principles course helps them to do both and also to appreciate the multitude of algorithmic ways for producing the same visual output. Currently the given programming principles are approached both from a procedural, process-based and an object-oriented, concept-based perspective and the course uses the Java language. Through the presented example problems, we aim to show the appropriateness of the visual domain of pictures for supporting the learning of principled programming. The problem domain of pictures is abundantly rich with potential examples to draw from. Moreover, as reported in the literature, female students may show higher interest towards visual problem domains in programming classes, in relation to other problem domains. We plan to investigate this conjecture in the context of our broader aim to encourage more females to follow university studies in computer science; in this paper only a cursory finding is presented, that bears some relation to what is reported in the literature.

A qualitative inquiry on self-management decision making among rural African Americans with type 2 diabetes

While cancer survivors experience many long-term health effects, there is limited evidence on the potentially heterogeneous memory aging of older cancer survivors. We identified memory aging phenotypes of older US cancer survivors, and determined sociodemographic and health-related predictors of membership. Data were from 2,755 survivors aged ≥50 in the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (1998 – 2016). Self-reported first incident cancer diagnosis (except non-melanoma skin cancer) and memory (composite immediate and delayed word-list recall score, combined with proxy-reported cognition) were assessed at biennial interviews. Memory aging phenotypes were identified using latent growth curve (LGC) models, with baseline being time of cancer diagnosis. Logistic regression evaluated predictors of group membership. 5 distinct memory aging groups were identified: low memory (n=165, 6.16%); medium-low memory (n=459, 17.1%); medium-high memory (n=733, 27.4%); high memory (n=750, 28.0%); and very high memory (n=571, 21.3%). The low memory group received less chemotherapy compared to the other groups (20.0% vs. 25.5%, 31.7%, 36.8%, 41.5%%, respectively), and had the shortest mean survival time after diagnosis (1.08 vs 2.10, 2.76, 3.37, 4.31 years, respectively). Older age at diagnosis (OR: 1.71, 95%CI: 1.61-1.82), being male (OR: 4.10, 95%CI: 2.82-6.51), having a history of stroke (OR: 4.62, 95%CI: 2.57-8.30) and depression prior to diagnosis (OR: 1.19, 95%CI: 1.05-1.34) were independently associated with being in the low memory group vs. the medium-high memory group. We identified distinct memory aging phenotypes among older cancer survivors. Further research should evaluate the influence of pre-cancer memory and how these phenotypes differ from the general population.

A qualitative inquiry on self-management decision making among rural African Americans with type 2 diabetes

Living in a rural area has been recognized as a unique health disparity associated with higher rates of chronic disease. It is further compounded for those who are the most structurally vulnerable complicating access to care and negatively affecting health outcomes. Barriers to type 2 diabetes (T2DM) self-management remain a growing concern, particularly among minority communities living in underserved geographical areas. Much of the self-management research focused on compliance with medication regimens and modification of lifestyle choices. A less well-understood but arguably more critical aspect is the social factors in disease management decision-making. Purposive sampling was used to identify rural African Americans (n = 34). The mean age of participants was 65.9 years (SD = 12.3), and T2DM diagnosis was 15 years (SD = 12.4). The study utilized the consensual qualitative research methodology and the "Sort and Sift, Think and Shift" approach to identify themes. The participants reported an alternative way of integrating glucose monitoring through a "feedback loop" of body sensing. The longer they live with the condition (i.e., knowing my body), the more they can interpret whether they are hypoglycemic or hyperglycemic (i.e., deciphering the cues) to create and navigate their disease management strategy (i.e., body sensing). Self-management decision-making is a complex developmental process that includes disease trajectory and cultural and environmental factors. Findings from this study may provide a conceptual framework for ongoing inquiry and may provide insights to help T2DM educators and clinicians fully understand the complexity of long-term disease management among rural African Americans.

Through the Looking Glass: Assessing and Enhancing the Effectiveness of Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice to Understand the Achievement Gap in British Columbia's Inner-City Schools

This paper emerges from a 2016 conceptual study borne out of an ongoing practitioner inquiry in which I, as a practicing K-12 inner-city Canadian teacher, tried to understand, on a theoretical level, why the children at my inner-city school in Vancouver consistently underperform in an academic sense in spite of being provided with additional learning resources. The achievement gap that exists between British Columbia’s inner-city children and their more affluent peers cannot be adequately explained by differences in finances alone, but it has sociological roots, which I explored in this study. To understand the achievement gap, I chose to filter it through Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice (1992) and evaluate the effectiveness of his theory in being able to effectively explain the who, what, where, when, why, and how of this problem for me as an inner-city educator. Methodologically, I utilized the qualitative approach of hermeneutics (Gadamer, 2013) to fuse my horizon with that of Bourdieu so as to develop a deep understanding of his Theory of Practice and its core concepts of cultural capital, habitus, field, and symbolic violence, and their implications for inner-city school children. Hermeneutics permitted me to uncover multiple layers of theoretical evidence that I used ultimately to make an inductive argument that finds in favor of using theory of practice to understand academic underperformance among British Columbia’s inner-city school children. This paper is a presentation of the theoretical merits of Theory of Practice as an analytical lens for practitioners who wish to understand the achievement gap. This paper also explains how the efficacy of Theory of Practice can be enhanced when it is coupled with Lareau’s (2013) scholarship on class-based parenting practices. My second paper provides practitioner-scholars who are exploring this topic with recommendations as to how best to use Theory of Practice for maximum benefit.

In plain sight – from Juukan caves destruction to just development

This commentary will outline the circumstances leading to the destruction of the Juukan Caves by Rio Tinto in May 2020. Secondly, it explains how the existing complexities of the legal framework designed to protect Indigenous cultural heritage resulted in the “legal” destruction of the Juukan Caves. The third part considers whether this incident may encourage positive changes in the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and resource companies which is reflected in law and governance. Recommendations from an ongoing public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the destruction may begin this process of healing for the impacted Aboriginal community providing some pathways for change.

Leapfrogging Healthcare Service Quality in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Utility-Trust Rationale of Mobile Payment Platforms

ABSTRACT Can mobile payment platforms (MPPs) elevate Sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) healthcare service quality (HSQ)? In a region home to more than one billion people yet beset by a paucity of services and infrastructure, mobile devices and platforms are rapidly gaining ground. Rising healthcare needs and costs along with the fact that more than 60% of SSA lives in areas nearly 1.5 miles away from paved roads that lead to hospitals and banks, accessibility to traditional financial services remains a serious concern. As Sub-Saharan hospitals increase billing access via mobile payment platforms, there is little understanding of whether and how mobile payment platforms influence healthcare service quality (HSQ). Drawing upon economic utility and trust perspectives, this study develops an integrative model to examine mobile payment platform utility’s impact on patient trust, commitment, and HSQ perceptions. The model is empirically tested using a survey of 527 patients from the West African country of Nigeria. Results reveal a distinct amalgam of MPP utility, trust, and commitment as antecedents to HSQ perceptions, thus generating important insights and contributing to the ongoing inquiry of how digital platforms in developing countries can influence socio-economic development. Overall, the results support the study’s hypotheses and underscore the important role of MPPs.

Pre-adolescents narrate classroom experience

Abstract This study applies sociocultural narrative theory and method to integrate children’s perspectives into research on classroom climate. Sociocultural narrative theory explains how individuals use expressive genres to make sense of environments, how they fit, and what they would like to change. This study incorporates such theory and method into a qualitative research design, applying quantitative analysis techniques to understand trends in student attention and expression. The main goal of this study is to examine whether and how students enact and express socioemotional and spatiotemporal (climate) sensitivities with their use of regular narrative elements. This study employs plot and character analyses to understand 22 sixth graders’ narrations of best and worst classroom experiences. These analyses reveal diverse patterns of focus on classroom events. Differences in the young narrators’ attention highlight areas for ongoing inquiry, with implications for mixed methods studies of classroom climate and related developmental research.

Researcher positionality: the Liquid Inbetweener

ABSTRACT In this think piece, I make the case for a new conceptualisation of researcher positionality. Despite interrogating myriad depictions of insider/outsider positionings, finding one bespoke to my own needs as a researcher has been elusive. Consequently, dissatisfied with conclusions drawn from tired debates; I have carved out a new space. As part of an ongoing inquiry into headteachers’ active promotion of Fundamental British Values, in a rarely researched association of New Christian Schools (NCS), I have often felt trapped within my field, somewhere in between traditional notions of insider/outsider stances. However, as I have now embraced, rather than rejected, the duality of this status, I invite you to consider my proposition for a fresh interpretation of researcher positionality; that of the Liquid Inbetweener.

Civil engineers need to act now on the wider lessons from the Grenfell tower fire tragedy

The ongoing inquiry into the 2017 Grenfell tower fire in London has exposed major shortcomings in the UK construction industry. John Carpenter, former secretary of the Standing Committee on Structural Safety, says civil engineers need to start putting these lessons into practice now.

Critical companionship: Some sensibilities for studying the lived experience of data subjects

What are the challenges of turning data subjects into research participants—and how can we approach this task responsibly? In this paper, we develop a methodology for studying the lived experiences of people who are subject to automated scoring systems. Unlike most media technologies, automated scoring systems are designed to track and rate specific qualities of people without their active participation. Credit scoring, risk assessments, and predictive policing all operate obliquely in the background long before they come to matter. In doing so, they constitute a problem not only for those subject to these systems but also for researchers who try to study their experience. Specifically, we identify three challenges that are distinct to studying experiences of automated scoring: limited awareness, embeddedness, and ongoing inquiry. Starting from the observation that coming to terms with one's position as a data subject constitutes a form of learning in its own right, we propose a research strategy called critical companionship. Originally articulated in the context of nursing research, critical companionship invites us to accompany a data subject over time, paying critical attention to how the participant's and the researcher's inquiries complicate and constitute each other. We illustrate the strengths and limitations of this methodology with materials from a recent study we conducted about people's credit repair practices and sketch a set of sensibilities for studying contemporary scoring systems from the margins.

Embracing community-building in online classes to promote academic integrity

Given that universities have transitioned to emergency remote teaching, academic integrity becomes a subject of ongoing inquiry. Students taking an English Preparatory Program (EPP) in universities aim to gain sufficient proficiency in English to continue with their courses in their departments. In an online teaching context, coping with requirements of the EFL (English as a foreign language) curriculum becomes a challenge for the students as students are deprived of their communities where they collaborate, interact and learn from each other. In this sense, teachers need to refocus not only on subject matter, but also ethical mores of academe and it is often simple day-to-day practices that build the community and establish a climate of integrity. While academic integrity has been researched extensively, more research is still needed about developing a learning community in online classes as a way to promote academic integrity. This investigation seeks to explore daily teaching practices towards community-building and analyse elements of the curriculum that work in favour of academic integrity in the context of emergency remote teaching. Six teachers and eighty EFL students (N=86) in an EPP of a state university in Turkey participated in the study. This case study drew upon an exploratory sequential mixed methods approach. The triangulation of the findings was carried out through a combination of various data sources. Qualitative data were collected through content analysis of course syllabi, assignment documents and policy statements, classroom self-observations; and focus groups with teachers and students. Quantitative data were gathered through a short survey with questions specifically designed for this context. Another aim of using the survey was to promote awareness on academic integrity among students. The results from multiple sources revealed that community-building not only facilitates positive collaboration in online classes, but also creates room for mutual trust and reduces chances of academic misconduct. Exploring results from the research can help faculty design measures to prevent academic dishonesty and eventually shape institutional policies. The positive implications for classroom practices of community-building towards academic integrity are discussed.