Building a Research Culture Among DIET Faculty An Initiative of District Institute, Azim Premji F...

Research Culture: What is it and how it can be created

Creating an environment that promotes and encourages a quest to understand, challenge and improve the status quo is vital for any system, including the public education system. In education, such an ecosystem fosters capabilities for inquiry, that is, ‘asking questions, collecting evidences through a series of observations and seeking answers by reviewing these evidences; further, these evidences are integrated into practice for a change in practice’ (Carter, Rivera, Gallagher, & Cato, 2018). To enable efficient pedagogy in classrooms, teachers need practices that have proven to be effective in ensuring learning. In order to identify such practices, research is needed. Implementing and adopting evidence-based practice is a crucial component of the research culture. Learners, teachers, and administrators should continuously engage in research.

Research in the public education system helps in identifying the progress of children’s learning, contributes to changes in the practices/pedagogy of teachers, and helps assess if the schemes of the Department of Education are implemented as envisaged and their effect on learning outcomes and other intended variables. In short, it checks the health of an educational system. To clearly understand each dimension of education in our massive public system, it is imperative that various educational institutions and all stakeholders involved in education develop a mindset of inquiry through research engagements.

Research is generally associated with faculty in colleges and universities or PhD programmes. A widespread myth that generally surrounds research is that only a few ‘exalted’ persons can engage in research, not school teachers or the DIET faculty. A pre-requisite for creating a research culture is to demystify research – this involves the belief that everyone can engage in research and that engaging in research does not require exceptional theoretical knowledge. While knowledge is certainly useful, the absence of it need not be a stumbling block in the conduct of research. Because research is considered something heavily theoretical and academically oriented, there is a great amount of fear and reluctance to engage in research, which is why demystifying research becomes a priority.

A research infrastructure is a necessary enabler to create a culture of inquiry through research. The infrastructure includes continuous workshops on various aspects of research, including data analysis software, access to resources (e.g. tools), reading and writing workshops, mentoring and hand-holding researchers, and dissemination support, to mention a few.

Need for research orientation programmes

The above points indicate that developing a research culture is gradual and the public education system must work consistently and continuously with teachers, teacher educators and educational administrators. Recognising this, in Elementary Education, the District Institution of Education and Training (DIET) has mandated the district-level conduct of studies, undertaking action research and field-level testing to provide academic support and find solutions to the problems at the grassroots level. The mandate consists of a set of topics on which teachers can opt to conduct studies. The topics are broad, allowing the ‘teacher researcher’ to pick a specific topic of their interest within the broad categories. The mandate has resulted in two scenarios. In one scenario, the studies are largely driven from ‘above’ by resource institutions, with the involvement of teacher educators limited to data collection. In the other scenario, where the DIET faculty undertakes studies, the quality of the studies is a major concern because of issues, such as a mismatch between the research question and the methodology, research planning not informed by data and/or existing evidence, and presentation of findings without discussing their implications and inadequate knowledge of referencing and dissemination. These problems highlight the need for research capability enhancement programmes and the opportunity to begin building a research infrastructure.

The orientation programme under discussion here was intended to orient DIET faculty to develop their research capabilities through a series of orientation workshops sandwiched throughout the process of conducting research. Starting with a basic workshop on the research question, working through sample selection, developing tools, data collection and analysis and interpretation, presenting the findings and ending with the publication of research output.

Scope and process

The District Institute (DI), in collaboration with the office of the Additional Commissioner of Public Instruction (ACPI), Kalaburagi, designed a six-month course on building research capacities of the DIET faculty of all six districts of the North-East Karnataka (NEK) division. The intent was to develop a perspective of research as both an institutional undertaking and a self-driven professional activity for capacity development and to develop decision-makers to improve educational processes.

The six-month course used a hands-on approach to research and was designed to help the faculty engage step-by-step in the different aspects of research. For instance, an orientation to the types of research questions was followed by each participant discussing their specific research question. In the subsequent workshop, they presented their sharpened research questions verbally. The session on tools was followed by the participants developing the tools for their study. Their tool was then critiqued in a subsequent workshop. The participants could access one-on-one mentoring and handholding during the process. This helped in developing a research infrastructure.

In 2020 – 21, about 30 DIET teachers from six districts of the Kalaburagi division participated in this research programme. In slightly over six months, most participants had completed their study. They were then supported in writing down their research. At the end of the programme, about 30 research papers were presented at a conference.

Outcomes of creating a research culture

First and foremost, the research engagement helped develop a feeling that the participants could do research. Many reported that the grip of fear about research has loosened considerably. Demystifying the notion of research and its process helped participants develop confidence in raising questions and reflecting on their studies.
The course motivated participants to reflect on their research questions in the context of the realities of their surroundings using the lens of inquiry. For instance, in a study on the status of libraries in panchayat offices, the participants realised that in a geographically spread region, the location of the library is of paramount importance in influencing its use, as also the occupation of the parents of students who attended or did not attend the library.
Participants also understood the importance of using a systematic approach to the problem rather than selecting the tools (used by some other researcher) and retrofitting the research question.
The six-month orientation programme was appreciated by the officials of the Department of Education. The appreciation resulted in the creation of a research cell in CTE (College of Teacher Education) in Kalaburagi by the ACPI office to continue this process as an institutional mandate. As a result of this, a second batch of DIET faculties engaged in the same process in the year 2022 – 23.
Creating a research culture requires an enabling environment in the institutions. The environment should be supportive and encourage participants to do their research because, for participants having to deal with multiple job responsibilities, research tends to take a back seat. To provide an enabling environment, a special nodal officer from the ACPI office was assigned to coordinate the entire process, organise review meetings to get the status and solve issues related to the research process. The presence of the ACPI in the research orientation programme to learn and to motivate others played a critical role in contributing to the research infrastructure. This was one of the key factors in effective course completion, active participation of research participants and their efforts at aiming to come out with high-quality studies.
Another factor that contributed to enabling the research environment was factoring in the multiple responsibilities of participants and the challenges thereof. To help participants balance their work and engage in research, the course was tailored to provide a gap of 25 to 30 days after each unit for research participants to read, approach their mentors, and interact with stakeholders to get more information on issues related to their research question.
After every unit of research, they had to be given constant support to sustain the spirit of research, ally their fears and stay motivated. Thus, the DI assigned one member per district across the NEK division to handhold the DIET faculty in their research topic. The participants could seek clarifications, discuss their doubts, borrow, read and later discuss their readings and so on. Some participants opted to withdraw from research because they were not clear and confident about their research topic, or because they could not handle multiple responsibilities. In such cases, the DI member helped them to reconnect with the research questions and extended all necessary support.
Based on the assumption that small groups help sustain the motivation for research, several small groups were created based on research interests and/or geographical locations. The participants discussed, debated, and provided inputs to each other for their studies, thus helping one another complete the research.
Although subject-matter experts (SMEs) at Azim Premji University guided the participants through their research, several one-on-one teleconferences were held with individual participants based on the needs they expressed. Such teleconferences helped a few participants to ask questions that they otherwise were hesitant to ask in large groups.
Financial support is necessary for sustaining a research culture. It enables participants to travel to different places to collect information from stakeholders, purchase software required for data analysis and publish the report in a systematic format. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the DIET faced a huge financial deficit leading to a shortage of funds for research. The collaboration with DI helped the DIET team to overcome this challenge. The DI bore the expenses of face-to-face training at the time of data analysis, report writing and organising the conference for dissemination of findings. So even though there were no funds with the DIET, this collaboration helped to continue the research journey till the end.
Another component of building a research culture is empowering participants to write their reports and make presentations at conferences. Throughout the course, the emphasis was on critiquing and providing constructive feedback and respecting others’ views even when there was a difference in opinion. These features were reflected in the participants’ presentations and the responses of other researchers to the participant’s presentations.
As a part of the research infrastructure, participants need a forum to present their studies and share their insights. To facilitate the sharing of research findings, a conference was held in September 2021, where a total of 30 lecturers presented the insights from their research papers. The findings presented at this conference covered various topics, such as issues in teaching pedagogy, usage of technology in education, usage of libraries, educational clubs in schools, awareness about the Preamble of the Indian Constitution and so on.

Challenges

Creating a research culture at the institutional level has certain challenges. There is a need for a nodal officer or coordinator with the right perspective towards research to remain in their job role through the course of the research programme. Due to departmental changes in the coordination, the second batch could not continue until the end and the course was discontinued.

The uninterrupted participation of the participants throughout the course is also a challenge due to various other DIET responsibilities. Continuous participation is essential for the course because each unit relates to another unit in a spiral mode, if one unit is missed then participants need to put more effort and time to catch up the momentum with other members – which seldom happens. Creating a research culture in this way is person- and time-intensive. It is not just the participants, the contact person at the DI should also have the research perspective.

A third challenge is that issues like plagiarism, referencing, citation, and ethical practices could not be discussed at length because the research process itself took a lot of time. Future programmes should specifically factor in time for these.

Overall, however, the creation of a culture of inquiry is a necessity for challenging the status quo in the education system – for coming up with new or different answers to existing problems so that strategising ways of dealing with the challenges becomes a key component of the research infrastructure.

Conclusion

If research culture must be developed in any educational system, three features are critical: (a) demystifying research and developing a positive attitude toward it (b) encouraging participants to engage in research by providing research-related inputs and © creating infrastructure for hand holding by providing nodal officers and a contact person at the DI, mentoring, small group discussions, teleconferences with specialists, resource support, and a platform for disseminating research findings. Underlying the entire process is an atmosphere of encouraging questioning, providing constructive feedback and on the whole, nurturing the researchers and research studies.

Building a Research Culture Among DIET Faculty An Initiative of District Institute, Azim Premji Foundation, Kalaburagi