Ethics General ethical issues

Ethical issues arose in the ways in which the relationships between the researcher and participants were constructed. The researcher has an ethical commitment to treat participants and the information they gave in a responsible manner. At an institutional level, these relationships were encapsulated in the Ethical Guidance and the associated approval processes required. Institutional guidance was in alignment with the guidance given by the British Educational Research Association, BERA (2004), and Scottish Educational Research Association, SERA (2005). The responsibility of the researcher was not only to follow this guidance, but to put the ethical guidance into practice in such a way that participants were assured of the probity of the researcher and the confidentiality of the information that they gave.

process. Additionally, this section of the thesis dealing with ethical issues was presented to the Departmental Research Committee in December 2009 to request retrospective ethical approval, which was granted.

Ethics of working with student teachers

Initially, the primary relationship between the participants and the researcher was that of student teachers and tutor on a PGDE course. Consequently, there was a disparity in the power relationship between the student teachers and the researcher. Care was taken to ensure that the student teachers were aware that participation in the interviews was voluntary and that they were free to withdraw their consent at any time. The student teachers were also made aware that participation or non-

participation would have no effect on the final grades for the PGDE course. This was particularly important on a PGDE course where tutors made assessed visits to student teachers while they were on teaching practice. During an assessed visit, a tutor observed a lesson and after the lesson, discussed the strengths and weakness of the lesson with the student teacher. This process was always a nervous one for the student teacher for a number of reasons. Most student teachers find the process of being observed while teaching to be stressful. However, there was the additional stress that the tutor would grade the student teacher‟s lesson. This grade had a direct effect on whether or not the student teacher would successfully complete the PGDE course and therefore be able to begin to work as a probationary teacher.

Tutor visits to student teachers on teaching practice would have been a useful method of gathering data for this research. However, it was considered that this approach would be unethical because the purpose of tutor visits was to assess the student teachers teaching. Attempting to combine course assessment with a research exercise would have been unacceptable. The student teachers may have felt pressured into allowing the tutor visit to be used for research in case the tutor was biased against them when the assessment part of the visit came to the fore. Adding research to the purposes of the visit would also have added to the inevitable pressure

tutor was concentrating intently on the student teacher‟s teaching with the aim of initiating a professional discussion about the lesson immediately after it had finished. Adding an additional layer of observation which was only relevant to the researcher would have been difficult practically and also unprofessional.

The student teachers received inputs about teaching electricity from a second physics tutor. In practice, this meant that the researcher was not asking the student teachers to comment on work which they had carried out with the researcher. This process depersonalized the interview about teaching electricity as much as possible under the circumstances, with the effect that the interviewer was not requesting the student teachers to comment on her teaching.

Ethics in interviews

Gillham (2005) identified a number of ethical issues associated with interviewing, including confidentiality, anonymity, security, publication, data lifetime and

exceptional use of data – for example video recordings. These ethical issues are not necessarily peculiar to interview-based research, but may also occur in other forms of research.

The student teachers were assured that participation in the interviews was totally voluntary. The purpose of the interviews was explained and that anyone who chose to participate would be anonymous in any reporting of the research at conferences, in a thesis or in journal articles. The student teachers were also assured that anything that was said would remain confidential. The interview recordings and transcripts were held securely and not made available to others. Data lifetime was not

mentioned explicitly, but in accordance with the institution‟s ethical policy, data will be destroyed after the completion of the research. Use of the interview recordings was not mentioned explicitly, but again in accordance with the institution‟s ethical policy, the recordings were only used by the researcher or by secretaries transcribing the interviews.

Additionally, because of the disparity in the power relationships between a tutor and a student teacher, student teachers could be considered to be a vulnerable group, where particular care needed to be taken not to exploit this relationship. In practice, positive relationships between student teachers and tutors were established during interactive teaching on-campus. The student teachers contributed fully to

discussions in class and were generally willing to disagree with tutors. Consequently, it was assumed that the student teachers would agree to be

interviewed, or not, without feeling pressurised to do so. In practice, 15 out of 29 student teachers agreed to the initial interview which supports the contention that the student teachers felt free not to be interviewed.

On each occasion when a student teacher or teacher was interviewed or re- interviewed, they were given an information sheet about the research; asked to complete a consent form and given a copy of the consent form. Copies of these can be found in Appendices 4.3 and 4.4. In cases where teachers had requested a subsequent interview occur at the school where they were working, permission was sought from the Headteachers before the interview took place. A copy of the letter sent to Headteachers can be found in Appendix 4.5.

Some authors, such as Kvale (2007), suggested that interviewees should be offered a pre- and post-interview briefing. This was thought to be unnecessary for this research because the student teachers knew the interviewer and were aware of the purpose of the research. An additional reason for not offering a debriefing session was that the interviews dealt with straightforward professional knowledge and did not deal with emotionally sensitive or contentious issues with the potential to upset the interviewees.