Amaarah DeCuir, Ed.D (SOE)
What research methods course(s) do you teach?
I teach two research methods courses in the EdD program within the School of Education. Our program is unique in that it is both rooted in antiracism and designed to meet the needs of education practitioners, policymakers, and leaders. I was fortunate to be involved in the development of the research methods courses when the program was launched, and I have contributed to the design of three of our methods courses that are each required for our students. Since the program’s founding five years ago, I have taught EDU 710, Applied Antiracist Research Methods II and EDU 880, Dissertation of Practice Seminar. EDU 710 is a semester-long course designed to introduce students to antiracist research across qualitative, quantitative, and action research methodologies. EDU 880 is organized as a research seminar to support antiracist research development through wellness practices, writing support, and data analysis development.
How long have you taught the course(s)?
I have been teaching research methods since the Fall of 2020 when we enrolled our first cohort of EdD students in the School of Education.
How would you describe your approach to teaching research methods?
I teach education doctoral students how to conduct research, which is a different posture than stating that I teach research methods. This means that I strive to create student-centered classrooms that meet the emotional, academic, professional, and social needs of doctoral students in an online degree program. Let me offer a real-lived example of how I embodied this in EDU 710 in the Fall semester of 2020, the first time we ran this class for our EdD program. After the first class session, after casually mentioning academic theories that shape and inform research, my students shared that they didn’t know about antiracist academic theories. In that moment I made a commitment to them that I have kept for the past 5 years – I introduce my students to 10 research theories over the semester in addition to the required curriculum for the course. I do this because I want our students to create rigorous, impactful, meaningful research that disrupts racism and oppression and advances equity and justice. To do this well, they need to practice working with academic theories. So, my advice to other colleagues across disciplines is to strive to teach your students first. Learn what they need to do great research in your field and teach that along with the standard research methods content so that you can support your students’ capacity to do great research.
What is your favorite part about teaching a research methods course?
In our program, students bring research interests across all sectors of education, and some even seek to research business, nonprofit, or government institutions. I love learning through my students about the issues of inequities and injustice facing people and communities in their areas of interest. It has deepened my knowledge of social, political, and cultural realities around the world. And when I can help students see how research methods can help them examine the impact of their interventions in the areas they seek to study, it provides a common language to bridge the knowledge gaps between us. Together, each class can build a community of research support that can prepare students across divergent areas of interest to do remarkable work in their dissertations of practice.
Are there any resources (general or domain specific) that you have found helpful in teaching?
I continue to enroll in graduate research seminars taught by faculty from other institutions to help me learn new teaching strategies for research methods. My favorite resource is The Qualitative Report, https://tqr.nova.edu/. I use a portion of my professional development funds to enroll in seminars on new research methods that I was never trained in, or methods that I have never used in my own work. Although I am typically in these spaces with other graduate students, it is an excellent opportunity to hear the questions they pose and how the instructors respond. I have begun to bring current events into my research methods courses, I am more effective drawing upon nonexamples to help instruct, and I have access to a wider variety of classroom resources to support student learning and engagement.
What is your favorite teaching text to use?
I find that Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s text, Decolonizing Methodologies, https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/decolonizing-methodologies-9781350346086/ is a powerful classroom resource. Each chapter in this text offers readers both a description and an explanation of how to conduct rigorous research that affirms indigenous knowledges of the communities one seeks to serve. This text also teaches the researcher how to reimagine the relationship between researcher and community to create spaces grounded in mutual trust, justice, and shared priorities. These research practices are deeply relevant to the work of our EdD students who often design studies where they seek to intervene in racist, oppressive, and unjust education environments to center the needs and priorities of marginalized students and their communities.
What tips/recommendations would you give to an instructor teaching a research methods course for the first time?
Take a critical look at how you were taught research methods in your own graduate programs. For many of us, we may admit that we learned more about research outside of the classroom than we did within a textbook or in faculty lectures. Some of us may also recognize that our research methods courses made us doubt our ability to conduct research because we were constantly overwhelmed with quantitative formulae and lacked real-life examples of qualitative research practices. If this was your experience, then boldly reimagine what a research methods class could do to support students’ efforts to embrace a scholarly identity in your discipline. This may include talking to colleagues about how they learned research to gain strategies and new ideas from other institutions. It may demand that you be vulnerable with your students and present data collected and analyzed from your own research studies, sharing the errors and lessons learned in your own doctoral journey. And consider how your course may help open the pipeline for scholars from marginalized backgrounds in your field, so make high-quality research accessible to students in your course by designing a class that is collaborative, safe, and invites diverse perspectives into a discussion of research methods.
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