Methodology and Research Design for the Project
The conceptual framework of supercomplexity where “contestability, challengeability, uncertainty, and unpredictability” (Barnett, 2000, p. 415) are common, was adopted to inform our study. Supercomplexity acknowledges fragility, where nothing can be taken for granted and where there is conceptual and emotional insecurity. Supercomplexity therefore seemed to be an appropriate research paradigm through which to explore how those working in teacher education describe and navigate their identities and professional experiences. Using a phenomenological approach (Cohen et al., 2018; Mertens, 2016), participants were drawn from Australia and internationally and recruited via email and through social media platforms. Each participant was invited to respond to a suite of short online surveys sent out at approximately 4-week intervals. For each survey, participants were asked to complete a single stem sentence prompt with some text (of no more than 50 words) and provide an associated image.
The prompts related to the troublesome, delightful, ambiguous, and hopeful dimensions of working in teacher education. Examples of responses to these prompts have been included throughout the Omeka site. In total, 126 responses were received (with responses from each Australian state and territory along with 20% of responses coming from outside Australia). This is a significant number of people involved in teacher education who wanted to share their perspectives.
By adopting arts-based methods and inviting participants to share a visual, as well as a written response, we wanted to enable participants to provide an insight into their emotional, lived experiences, in ways that might move beyond linguistic-cognitive approaches alone. Arts-based and visual research methods have grown in prominence in qualitative research as ways to explore peoples’ experiences and realities. These forms of research counter traditional and linear approaches (Butler-Kisber & Poldma, 2010; Leavy, 2015) and offer researchers the ability to draw from, and develop, multiple ways of generating and analyzing data. Similarly, by having a data scientist as a member of the team it has afford us with exciting and innovative ways to wrangle, interpret and represent the data.
Data Gathering
Because we wanted to involve participants from Australia and internationally, we developed a suite of online surveys (using Qualtrics) that we could attach to emails. The first survey (which collected demographic information) was embedded in an initial introductory email to the potential participants. In the email we outlined the research project and how participation would involve responding to the embedded survey and another 2 very short online surveys sent out at approximately 4-week intervals. For each of the follow up surveys, participants were asked to respond to two stem sentence prompts (about working in teacher education) with some text (no more than 50 words for each prompt) and provide an image to accompany each prompt.