Pasha Dashtgard, PhD, Director of Research, Research Assistant Professor(SPA:PERIL)
What research methods course(s) do you teach?
I teach a Qualitative Research Methods course, cross-listed in order to allow for undergrads and graduate students.
How long have you taught the course(s)?
I taught this course last year as well.
How would you describe your approach to teaching research methods?
I design my course to highly emphasize in-person learning. So half of my class period is lecture, the other half is applied learning. That can be small group discussion, writing and then sharing out to the class, co-creating an interview protocol for a guest professor/researcher, or practicing interviewing each other. I also try to bring in my own research experiences and data from previous qualitative research projects in order to demonstrate the concept I’ve just lectured on.
What is your favorite part about teaching a research methods course?
I really like the discourse analysis sessions, because it feels so relevant to contemporary qualitative research. It’s 2025…you need to know how to analyze memes, you need to know how to analyze tik tok videos, AI-generated images, and forum posts.
What is your favorite teaching text to use?
For the visual discourse analysis, I really enjoyed teaching Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. It gives qualitative researchers the language of aesthetics and semiotics to understand how to analyze visual data.
What tips/recommendations would you give to an instructor teaching a research methods course for the first time?
Research is for doing. So give your students opportunities to actually design a research project, collect data, and analyze the data. The real life application of theory and skills learned in the classroom teaches you things you would not learn had you not actually done it yourself.
