Research in Education

This article reflects on debates about research-teaching synergy. There has long been a debate regarding the synergy between research and teaching, but there is no consensus on how this enhances teaching and research at higher education institutions. The article aims to conceptualise the term research-teaching synergy and highlight challenges, arguments, and disputes that dominate the debate. It accomplishes this by reviewing a substantial body of literature covering more than three decades of intellectual debates and studies related to the research-teaching nexus. It also discusses the application and integration of research into teaching in higher education, particularly in university settings, and its impact on improving the learning environment. One of the arguments for the significance of integrating research and teaching/learning focuses on the potential benefits for undergraduate students, instilling hope for the future of higher education. This approach, known as the ‘student-focused strategy,’ can improve the quality and outcomes of students’ learning experiences. The article argues that despite the contentious issues related to the research-teaching nexus, the literature reveals that most academics consider a strong link between research and teaching as a necessary component of their job satisfaction, and there are many reasons to promote this nexus at the institutional and faculty levels.

Allan Hassaniyan

Revisiting the debate about teaching-research nexus relevance

重新审视教学与研究关联性之争

The past decades have seen a plethora of TV reality talent shows emerge. The viewing population likes nothing more than seeing a ‘class’ of bakers, sewers, potters or dancers develop their skills and face the scrutiny of judges before being whittled down to a winner. The popularity of these shows says something about the national psyche but, aside from the entertainment value, may also carry conceptions of teaching, learning, assessment and feedback. By applying a metalinguistic thematic analysis to judges’ feedback, this paper seeks to examine how one UK show in particular, ‘ Strictly Come Dancing,’ presents feedback and, using a feedback framework, how this is understood. This feedback framework is notable for the links made to self-regulation, an area that continues to influence UK education policy. This paper will argue that when popular TV shows such as Strictly Come Dancing are viewed through a pedagogical lens, they reveal models of feedback which are not necessarily valued. Furthermore, analysis reveals the spectacle of normalised and broader educational neoliberalism policy reflected back at us.

Caroline Elbra-Ramsay

‘You should not be that good in week three:’ what can Strictly Come Dancing tell us about feedback and performativity in UK education policy?

“第三周你不该这么出色：”《舞动奇迹》能告诉我们英国教育政策中的反馈和表现性吗？

Mixed research is a methodology of growing importance both within and without education. This type of research forces researchers to reconcile conflicting ways of justifying and understanding research with results that have the potential to be forward pointing for all researchers. As mixed research has grown, mixed research has gained an increasingly solidified identity which is increasingly associated with the pragmatic paradigm. This paper seeks to describe and criticise pragmatism as a paradigm for mixed research. We identify six features of pragmatism which we argue render it unfit for purpose. 1. That it is a “paradigm of convenience” 2. That it takes a consequentialist view of good research. 3. That it takes a consequentialist view of truth. 4. That it assumes the answers to epistemic questions is “somewhere in the middle” 5. That it priorities the research question, rather than ontology or epistemology 6. That it treats itself as a prerequisite for mixed research. We argue that in prioritising flexibility and practicality over principles, pragmatism loses the ability to offer guidance to researchers. Furthermore, many of the issues with pragmatism arise from a conflation of paradigm and method. I.e., by thinking that there are quantitative and qualitative paradigms. We conclude that traditional paradigms are better served to act as a paradigm for mixed research.

Timothy Hampson

Jim McKinley

Problems posing as solutions: Criticising pragmatism as a paradigm for mixed research

问题伪装成解决方案：批判实用主义作为混合研究的范式

In this paper, we present a novel approach to defining, teaching, and assessing creativity by examining its origins and delineating the processes involved. The rationale for introducing this framework developed from studying existing thinking and questioning the current metrics for measuring creativity, which we posit are unfit for purpose. We reach this conclusion because rather than accepting the existing focus on outcomes, we perceive creativity as a process based on different types of logic. Drawing upon the earlier work of De Bono and Kolb, we explore the creative process through the lenses of humour and systems engineering to reveal and develop a range of demonstrable skills and key techniques that can be learned, taught and assessed. By using the identified system inputs of creative logic, dialectic conflicts (dualities), alternate narratives, and abstraction, we ultimately present a possible framework for evaluating creativity without relying on subjective assessment. This methodology and framework can be applied in all educational contexts, from cross-curricular mainstream learning to a focus on excluded and hard-to-reach learners.

Andrew Rockliffe

Jane Mckay

Dualities in creative thinking: a novel approach to teaching and learning creativity

创造性思维中的二重性：一种新颖的教学与学习创造力的方法

Young people’s ongoing, necessary confrontation with painful and distressing realities exacerbated by ecological precarity in diverse contexts has profound implications for formal education systems. Additionally, educational policy in many contexts has been slow to respond to the urgency of addressing climate change, nor has most policy robustly conceptualized a vision for climate justice education. Centering the voices of three young climate justice activists (ages 16–20) in Canada through a qualitative study, this paper explores possible educational responses that recognize the embodied consequences of climate injustice and inaction on youth mental health and well-being. Through their encounters with activism in collective, justice-centered movements, these young people articulate how their commitments to creating more life-affirming and equitable realities by challenging current economic and political structures and discourses are integral dimensions of their efforts to be and feel well (hopeful and purposeful) in a context of pronounced uncertainty and distress. Despite these possibilities, youth participants describe the overwhelming and complex emotions they are grappling with as they face dispiriting projections for the future. These growing challenges are an opportunity to reconsider common “apolitical” and individualized approaches to citizenship, climate and environmental education. Findings suggest that supporting youth to act thoughtfully and impactfully in transforming cultural, economic and political structures and systems that reproduce harm can be a way to nurture meaning, purpose and hope. Additionally, youth participants advocate for integrating robust resources and support within formal education institutions to assist in collectively processing the emotional and psychological impacts of climate injustice. At the same time, findings suggest that the participating youth did not yet integrate conceptions of ecological interrelationship or interconnection in their approaches, offering possible avenues for further pedagogical development.

Maria Vamvalis

“We’re fighting for our lives”: Centering affective, collective and systemic approaches to climate justice education as a youth mental health imperative

“我们在为生命而战”：将情感、集体和系统性方法置于气候正义教育的核心，作为青年心理健康的当务之急

This article presents the Collaborative Climate Laboratories (CiCli-Labs), a participatory research methodology that bridges citizenship, science and politics. This methodology is grounded on young people’s knowledge and experience about their communities and seeks to develop a strategy for co-designing climate solutions with local stakeholders. Carried out in schools, the CiCli-Labs engage scientists, activists, business owners, and politicians in discussing climate problems identified by young people. By bringing together different positionalities that emerge from people’s diverse social roles, the CiCli-Labs aim to foster conditions for democratic citizenship and climate justice, embracing the necessarily conflicting yet binding dimensions of politics that can produce transformative and reciprocal learning. Additionally, it responds to the growing demand within educational research for community-based approaches capable of tackling the shortcomings in promoting youth agentic power in participatory designs, often marked by one-off events and youth-washing practices. The CiCli-Labs’ methodology builds on community profiling, through which students identify climate-related issues that work as catalysts for broader dialogues with local actors, challenging traditional adult-centric power dynamics. The methodology evolves through a sequential design based on the adaptation of participatory tools and methods: i) Climate Problem Tree; ii) Climate Social Cartography; iii) Pros-and-Cons Circuit; iv) Solutions Funnel; v) Climate Speed Dating; vi) Hands on Earth and Eyes on Clouds. The methodology was implemented in eight schools in northern Portugal, involving more than 300 students (grades 8 to 12). We discuss the rationale and practicality of the CiCli-Labs while mobilising empirical illustrations of the methodological process and participants’ perceptions about it, thereby contributing to furthering the problematisation of democratic research practices with young people.

Carla Malafaia

Juliana Diógenes-Lima

Bruna Pereira

Eunice Macedo

Isabel Menezes

Collaborative climate labs: A youth-led methodology for co-creating community responses to climate change

协作气候实验室：一种由青年主导的方法，用于共同创造社区应对气候变化的方案

2024 marked the centenary of the 1924 Declaration on the Rights of the Child. The adoption of this declaration by the League of Nations provided the launching pad for the establishment of a global children’s rights movement which resulted in foregrounding children’s wellbeing at key global fora during the 20th century. While the concept of children’s rights has expanded in the 100 years since the adoption of the declaration, some of the key tenets of the conceptualisation of children’s rights within this declaration remain evident in dominant children’s rights discourses today. Specifically, there remains a clear distinction between children and adults which situates the state of adulthood as being everything that those within the childhood phase of life lack – autonomy, maturity, competence, and knowledge of the world. These systems are not only evident in educational settings and the approaches adopted by governmental and non-governmental agencies (national and international); they are also identifiable within the higher education sector, most notably in Western Europe and North America, through, for instance, ethics governance procedures or procedural ethics frameworks which are best characterised by research ethics committees/IRBs. The inclusion of such a vision of childhood in university ethics regimes which, then, informs ethical standards that need to be met by researchers seeking to undertake research with children is problematic because not all cultures, including some within Western European and North American contexts, make the same distinctions between the state of adulthood and the state of childhood and consequently, they do not automatically associate incompetence, immaturity and dependency with childhood. This raises more, not less, issues. Therefore, this paper seeks to explore the linkage between dominant children’s rights discourses and procedural ethics frameworks and problematise their understanding of childhood, especially concerning the concept of competence, in contexts where other conceptualisations of childhood exist.

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh

Troubling understandings of childhood competence in research ethics governance processes: Implications for research with children and their families

研究伦理治理过程中对儿童能力理解的困扰：对儿童及其家庭研究的影响

As young people near the end of compulsory schooling they are faced with decisions about what future education, training and employment they will pursue. This paper argues that imagined future education, training and career prospects can have largely under-recognised socio-spatial dimensions. This claim disrupts received notions around careers decision-making as distinctly rational, based on academic strengths, skills, or talents. This spatial argument follows from a theoretically-informed analysis of interviews conducted with 15 young people living in England. Sampling was opportunitistic and the design flexible to enable me to explore the use of different methods which could foreground reflections on space and place. Interviews employed visual methods (including photo voice) to prompt young people to talk about their conceptualisations of places and spaces as well as future education, training and career considerations. Focusing in particular on three participants’ reflections, I suggest that through a process of emplacement young people are constructing thirdspaces, a concept proposed by Soja. This process both supports aspiration formation and disrupts imposed structures or labels that might otherwise be deterministic of particular post-16 pathways and subjectivities. For three participants, I consider the ways their conceptions of spaces are implicit responses to cultural expectations, limitations and structures. These three participants are presented as developing what Yosso has called spatially-informed navigational and resistant capitals. Claims are made in the context of an analysis framed by an interpretation of agency in terms of the identity and implied subjectivities. The process by which a young person emplaces themselves in a possible future and the construction of imagined thirdspaces could be untapped cultural resources informing young people’s post-16 decisions and planning which could lead them to build future pathways they themselves value.

Abbreviation
Journal Impact	1.36
Quartiles(Global)	EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH(Q2)

ISSN	0034-5237, 2050-4608
h-index	20

Publication Information	Publisher: SAGE Publications Inc.，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 2007，Proportion of original research papers: 90.91%，Self Citation Rate:0.00%， Gold OA Rate: 40.91%

Research in Education

Journal Citation Format

A journal article with 1 author

A journal article with 2 authors

A journal article with 3 authors

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Books Citation Format

Thesis Citation Format

Web sites Citation Format

Patent Citation Format

Staying up late manually editing references? ivySCI automatically matches journals and helps you generate references with a single click.

Share Submission Experience

Revisiting the debate about teaching-research nexus relevance

‘You should not be that good in week three:’ what can Strictly Come Dancing tell us about feedback and performativity in UK education policy?

Problems posing as solutions: Criticising pragmatism as a paradigm for mixed research

Dualities in creative thinking: a novel approach to teaching and learning creativity

“We’re fighting for our lives”: Centering affective, collective and systemic approaches to climate justice education as a youth mental health imperative

Revisiting the debate about teaching-research nexus relevance

‘You should not be that good in week three:’ what can Strictly Come Dancing tell us about feedback and performativity in UK education policy?

Collaborative climate labs: A youth-led methodology for co-creating community responses to climate change

Troubling understandings of childhood competence in research ethics governance processes: Implications for research with children and their families

How spatial considerations figure into aspiration formation and agency