this way, SoTL is no longer only a movement of engaged practitioners moving towards evidence based teaching practices, working to legitimise, to share and go public with their investigations and do so in a rigorous and systematic manner. SoTL is now being used as evidence for individual promotion and also for evidence of institutional excellence.
There are, therefore, instrumental and external pushes for staff to engage with SoTL; UK HEIs are increasingly setting targets around how many of their teaching staff should have achieved Fellowship status through Advance HE, one requirement of which is engagement with SoTL literature and practice, and promotion criteria have been developed to encourage a route through student education and pedagogical research. Therefore, a number of academic teaching staff may find themselves being pushed into SoTL with little intrinsic motivation and understanding around how SoTL can feed into their student education practice and little sense of purpose or direction. Without this understanding, the usual considerations, particularly around ethics, that would take place when undertaking disciplinary research can sometimes be lost through a sense that SoTL is less rigorous, more personal and a part of ‘normal’ teaching practice.
The ethics of SoTL
The ethics of SoTL, as with SoTL itself, remain undefined and a somewhat grey area. By attempting to define itself as different to traditional research, and separate from Educational Research, it is tempting for scholars to proceed without the same rigorous consideration for ethics as is now required before conducting research. This is exacerbated because many SoTL projects are localised and, by definition, should be part of normal teaching and learning practices. However, as MacLean and Poole argue: ‘Teachers who act also as scholars of teaching and learning in the practice of their discipline must consider the ethics of their dual roles in situations in which their students are also their subjects of research’ (MacLean & Poole, 2010: 1).
Most exploration of the ethics of SoTL has focused on this dual role in relation to students. Martin (2013) emphasises the need to consider students as ‘human subjects’. In the same article, Martin reproduces a statement of ethics for SoTL created and presented by Gurung et al. at the 2007 ISSOTL conference in Sydney, Australia. In this they outline three major principles. These are:
• Respect for Persons: Students (the research participants) should be treated with autonomy and must be free to decide whether or not to participate in a research study unless archival data are being used or if results are not to be presented publicly.
• Beneficence: Instructors (researchers) must recognise the need to ‘maximise possible benefits and minimise possible harm’.
• Justice: Students (research participants) should be the people who most benefit from the research. It would be unethical to research a particular group in excess if that group is not the group that will benefit from the knowledge generated through the research.
(Gurung et al., 2007 in Martin, 2013: 62–63).
The British Educational Research Association (BERA) have also produced a comprehensive guidance document around the ethics of educational research (2018). While wider ranging in scope, it does also encompass more localised practitioner research, and follows similar principles of respect for all involved. However, whilst comprehensive in areas to consider and principles to follow, it works on the assumption that those engaged in this type of research are epistemologically social scientists, and that their local ethics approval committee will also be accustomed to consideration of ethics from this standpoint. As Martin (2013) points out, this is not necessarily the case for those involved in SoTL, where their Faculty ethics committee may be more accustomed to consideration of, for example, medical ethical research principles.
Within SoTL and BERA’s guidance, the main focus for potential benefit and harm is on the students as research participants. However, once a project extends beyond the researcher’s own classroom, it is also necessary to pay attention to the potential benefit and harm to colleagues and an institution. As a colleague, it is important to consider the impact different relationships might have on the data gathered, and that comments from peer participants may be more unguarded than with an unknown researcher. In addressing an issue that is potentially problematic for many colleagues, a SoTL project is likely to result in some data that is difficult to report whilst remaining collegial and supportive. Here, I would argue, it is necessary to carefully follow the second of BERA’s principles, that a researcher ‘should respect the privacy, autonomy, diversity, values and dignity of individuals, groups and communities’ (BERA, 2018: 4).
Most importantly, the ethical goal of any SoTL project, as with any other form of research, is ‘to maximise benefit and minimise harm’ for all involved. Within my own project, I always strove to work towards these principles. All participants were volunteers and were fully informed of the aims and purpose of the project. Written consent was obtained for use of all non-public documents (for example student work; class materials and assessments) as well as for the use of interview transcripts. On occasion, participants asked for certain comments to be ‘off the record’; this request has been respected at all times. Finally, the interactions I had with participants were approached as opportunities for benefit to all, maintaining a sense of investigator-participant reciprocity.
There were multiple occasions, however, when I needed to wrestle with my conscience and question where my own ethics lay. It quickly became clear that my investigation was not benign; that there were a range of tensions and emotions at play. There were conflicts around whether my actions might harm students in protecting staff or vice versa. I hope I have navigated these tensions with sensitivity and given a representative voice to competing perspectives without causing undue harm in the process.
My journey into scholarship
I have provided this background context to situate myself within the wider UK higher education landscape. As an EAP practitioner, ‘operating on the edge of academia’ (Ding & Bruce, 2017), there is no one clear route into ‘the academy’, and scholarship or practitioner research, at least in terms of going public, has not ranked highly in the commitments of most practitioners to date. Reasons for this are myriad, but largely connected to teaching workload; qualifications; precarity and structural conditions (see Ding & Bruce, 2017; Hadley, 2015 for further discussion).
My own route into scholarship perhaps exemplifies this position, and maps onto the changing landscape of UK HE in terms of measures of teaching and excellence as outlined above.
I became an EAP practitioner in 2000, during the first real boom phase in international student recruitment to UK HEIs. I was recruited because of my qualifications and experience as an English language teacher, having worked for a number of years in private language schools in a variety of countries. These qualifications are typical of those requested for entry into teaching EAP – a Diploma in English Language Teaching (DELTA) – with little or no focus on EAP specifically. I was initially employed on an hourly paid contract. In order to qualify for a more permanent position, I studied for a post-graduate degree in language teaching. However, there was, and remains, no requirement to demonstrate expertise or understanding of EAP specifically. There is an assumption that this is something that is developed ‘on the job’ (see Ding & Campion, 2016; Campion, 2016).
Beyond completion of my Masters degree, my scholarship was desk based in terms of reading the research of others around the teaching and learning of EAP, and then attempting to apply this research to my own classroom practice. As my Centre grew in size, I was asked to take on programme leadership responsibilities, so was able to expand my understanding of EAP beyond my own classroom. From there I also developed an interest in supporting others in their own professional learning. Other than a few presentations at one-day conferences, the impact of my scholarship was internal and was largely entered into in order to prevent a personal feeling of becoming stale and stuck in the cycle of four-term, year-round teaching (Bond, 2017a).
In
