Abstract

Ethical practice in education research is routinely taught as part of postgraduate initial teacher training programmes, often with reference to BERA’s (2018) guidelines. This is assessed within written summative assignments. Forster (2013) asserts that, while asking trainee teachers to demonstrate ethical knowledge “is largely an artificial task… it is better to have a constructed form of assessment than to overlook the field altogether” (p. 58). Reading list texts such as Bell and Waters (2014) cover ethics in suitable detail but do not provide explicit instruction about how to write up these considerations. This poses a quandary for teacher educators: how can we ensure an inclusive approach to developing the conscience and ethical code of practitioner researchers for both assessment and professional purposes?
The research question at hand is therefore “how do trainee teachers address ethical issues in their school-based research assignments?”, with the aim of understanding how the trainees currently interpret and report on ethical issues. This will also act as a process evaluation, the outcomes of which will be the development of a module sub-unit on reporting about research ethics for trainee teachers.
Having already gained ethical approval, assignments from past cohorts of students undertaking module EDPM01 in the international initial teacher training realm will be used as de facto secondary data. Assignments will be downloaded for sifting and selection of the section(s) of the work in which ethics are explicitly addressed. A corpus of these ethical response paragraphs will be created in order to carry out thematic analysis using NVIVO qualitative data analysis software.
This roundtable research chat is an opportunity to gain relevant insights and input from attendees that may have a bearing on the direction of the research.

References
Bell, J., & Waters, S., (2014). Doing Your Research Project: A Guide For First-Time Researchers. McGraw-Hill Education: Milton Keynes.
British Educational Research Association (BERA), (2018). Ethical guidelines for educational research. 4th edn. Available at: https://www.bera.ac.uk/researchers-resources/publications/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-2018 (Accessed: 01 May 2023).
Forster, D., (2013). ‘Reading the im/possibility of ethics in pre-service teacher professional experiences’. Edited Proceedings 43rd PESA Conference 2013: Measuring Up in Education, Melbourne, Australia. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1062510.