Luigina Mortari

‘Living’ ethical dilemmas for researchers when researching with children

Abstract This article will explore some of the ethical dilemmas that confront researchers when they seek to invite childrens participation in research. It firstly tracks the historical landscape of ethical research and will examine the influence of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) on participatory research with children. Drawing on this background, the article will explore three main themes relating to the ethical participation of children: ethics as protection, the ethics of justice and the ethics of care. We look to contemporary literature in order to ask whether ethical guidelines specifically narrate ethical dilemmas in participatory research. The following are also explored: What is examined and explained as being ethical dilemmas when engaging with children? How does the literature explicate ethics as an explicit consideration in conducting research with children? Where is the ethical sensitivity in participatory practice? The article will conclude by identifying some of the ‘hidden’ dilemmas that need to be openly debated in the literature in order for participatory efforts to move forward.

Learning Thoughtful Reflection in Teacher Education.

The notion of reflection has become an object of attention in education, but the research on this topic is often reduced to mere reflective practice. A relevant part of educational literature portrays reflection as a wholly beneficial practice for practitioners, but also for researchers. In the nursing field, in particular, reflection is largely practised and deeply examined. Reflection is specifically encouraged in teacher education, where ‘how-to’ manuals are widely used to explain strategies for turning teachers into reflective practitioners. In some cases, a specific kind of reflective approach is proposed, such as critical reflection. From the analysis of this technical literature, I observe that a wide range of approaches for fostering reflection have been applied, but little research evidence shows how effective these approaches are. Taking this problem into account, this article presents a research study on reflection. It first introduces a specific and unusual concept of reflection – that of phenomenological conception – and then goes on to develop an empirical investigation that enacts a phenomenological method of inquiry and is aimed at exploring the potential of the use of journal writing as a tool for enhancing reflection, and documents the data that emerged. The research was developed in a university context where the student teachers were asked to ‘reflect on the life of the mind’, in order to learn how to take a reflective stance. The student teachers wrote entries in a reflective journal in which they were requested to describe the lived experiences of the mind as they came to their reflective attention. The data emerging from the experience were made sense of through a qualitative method of analysis. The findings of the research are useful for designing an effective method for enhancing reflective practice.

Reflectivity in research practice: an overview of different perspectives

The article grounds on the assumption that researchers, in order to be not mere technicians but competent practitioners of research, should be able to reflect in a deep way. That means they should reflect not only on the practical acts of research but also on the mental experience which constructs the meaning about practice. Reflection is a very important mental activity, both in private and professional life. Learning the practice of reflection is fundamental because it allows people to engage into a thoughtful relationship with the world-life and thus gain an awake stance about one’s lived experience. Reflection is a crucial cognitive practice in the research field. Reflexivity is largely practiced in qualitative research, where it is used to legitimate and validate research procedures. This study introduces different perspectives of analysis by focusing the discourse on the main philosophical approaches to reflection: pragmatistic, critical, hermeneutic, and finally phenomenological. The thesis of this study is that the phenomenological theory makes possible to analyze in depth the reflective activity and just by that to support an adequate process of training of the researcher.

The agency of things: how spaces and artefacts organize the moral order of an intensive care unit

This article focuses on the constitutive role of space and artefacts in delineating the moral order of a specific context. Building on the premises of a post-humanistic phenomenology, it proposes a theoretical contribution to a critical understanding of communication as a complex phenomenon distributed between human and non-human semiotic agents. Drawing on ethnographic research in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), the article empirically illustrates this point. It analyses how the interior architecture and some ordinary objects (e.g. the glove box and the alcoholic dispenser, the monitors and the handwritten clinical record) delineate the range of the “right things to do” and participate in telling which philosophy of medicine is at play in this ICU.

Thinking silently in the woods: listening to children speaking about emotion

The emotional side of the mind, which expresses itself through emotions, sentiments and moods, plays an important role in human existence because it conditions our own way of being in the world. On this premise, a qualitative research with children was undertaken in order to facilitate the expression of the emotions. The participants were children of four- to five-years-old attending a kindergarten school and six- to seven-year-old children attending a primary school. From the data it emerged that young children are capable of recognizing the emotions in other subjects, revealing themselves capable of empathy. The findings of the research support the notion that young children are competent thinkers and communicators about issues which require deep reflection.

Educating Ourselves to Think with a View to 'Ecologically Inhabiting the Earth' in the Light of the Thought of Hannah Arendt

Cognitive representations play a fundamental role in governing the relationship existing between the natural world and the human world. It is important, therefore, to analyse some ideas which, in our culture, condition in a non ecological way the relationship which have with the natural world. This is the premise for the development of an ecological education. In this perspective, the thought of Hannah Arendt revealed itself as fundamental. An interpretation of the arguments developed in her fundamental works (Arendt, 1987; 1989) permit the tracing of the genesis of some mental attitudes which have contributed to the development of a culture indifferent to the environment in which we live and, further, permit new categories of thought from which to begin to reform environmental education.

Words Faithful to the Phenomenon: A Discursive Analysis Method to Investigate Decision-Making Processes in the Intensive Care Unit

The article presents the developing of a tool aimed to analyze the decision-making (DM) processes in critical care contexts. It was developed in a study conducted through a phenomenological approach. By analyzing the discursive practice through which physicians in an intensive care unit (ICU) arrive at decisions, we construct a discursive profile of each ICU involved, to improve the ICU team members’ knowledge of the complexity of their DM processes. To do so, we develop a system of analysis capable of capturing discursive actions faithfully. Our method facilitates a system of analysis that highlights the role of the various discursive acts in conversational flow, starting from the needs in an ICU setting, which are spontaneously recognized from the data, to the almost simultaneous processes of description and understanding. This has led to the creation of a tool follows the phenomenological-grounded route.

Analyzing How Discursive Practices Affect Physicians’ Decision-Making Processes: A Phenomenological-Based Qualitative Study in Critical Care Contexts:

An intensive care unit (ICU) is a demanding environment, defined by significant complexity, in which physicians must make decisions in situations characterized by high levels of uncertainty. This study used a phenomenological approach to investigate the decision-making (DM) processes among ICU physicians’ team with the aim of understanding what happens when ICU physicians must reach a decision about the infectious status of a patient. The focus was put on the identification of how the discursive practices influence physicians’ DM processes and on how different ICU environments make different discursive profiles emerge, particularly when a key issue is at the center of the physicians’ discussion. A naturalistic approach used in this study is particularly suitable for investigating health care practices because it can best illuminate the essential meaning of the “lived experiences” of the participants. The findings revealed a common framework of elements that provide insight into DM processes in ICUs and how these are affected by discursive practices.

Guided Participatory Research on Parallel Computer Architectures for K-12 Students Through a Narrative Approach

The approach to computer science (CS) education is typically geared towards the knowledge of the principles behind information technology, but there are social indicators that it overlooks some important educative aspects such as thinking competences and social attitudes. Such aspects play a fundamental role when bringing CS education to the K-12 level. In order to enable a truly educational experience, we propose to bring specific CS research problems within reach of K-12 students, because the active knowledge construction process that takes place during research requires children to be engaged with all of their knowledge, skills and attitudes. This poses the challenge of overcoming the knowledge gap of students, which we address by means of a synergistic cooperation of CS experts and educators. More specifically, we propose the narrative approach as the key enabler for CS participatory research with K-12 students.

Alcune riflessioni sulla ricerca qualitativa. Intervista di Luisa Saiani a Luigina Mortari

Luigina Mortari, nota a livello internazionale nell’ambito dell’epistemologia e della ricerca qualitativa, e stata intervistata per raccogliere le sue opinioni su alcuni aspetti della ricerca qualitativa: quando una domanda di ricerca puo essere considerata rilevante; quali sono gli aspetti irrinunciabili nella metodologia ed i problemi etici negli studi qualitativi