Teachers
Antony Bryant is Professor of Informatics at Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK; Chief Researcher, The Education Academy, Institute of Educational Research, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. He has written extensively on qualitative research methods, being Senior Editor of The SAGE Handbook of Grounded Theory (2007) and The SAGE Handbook of Current Developments in Grounded Theory (2019); both co-edited with Kathy Charmaz. His writing on Grounded Theory includes Grounded Theory and Grounded Theorizing (Oxford, 2017), The Varieties of Grounded Theory (SAGE, 2019), and ‘Continual Permutations of Misunderstanding: The Curious Incidents of the Grounded Theory Method’, Qualitative Inquiry, May, 2020.
The Grounded Theory Method [GTM] is by most measures the most widely used research method across a wide range of disciplines. It originated in the 1960s in the work of Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, working together with Jeanne Quint at the University of San Francisco. GTM was a direct challenge to the research orthodoxy of the time in American social sciences, and this characteristic has stayed with the method. Many gatekeepers – editors, doctoral examiners, and assessors – readily profess their disdain for GTM, all too often based on outmoded ideas, faulty understanding or significant ignorance.
The GTM session for this year’s Summer School will offer an overview and outline of the method, together with some brief exercises to illustrate some of the key features. This will be complemented by a set of recommendations for further reading about the method, particularly its variant Constructivist GTM.
Vilma Žydžiūnaitė is a professor at the Department of Education Management and Politics at Vytautas Magnus University and the Director of the Educational Research Institute, and a Head Researcher. The Professor holds a bachelor’s degree in Nursing, a master’s degree in Education and a PhD in Education from Lithuanian universities, and a master’s degree in Nursing from the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, and a PhD in Nursing from the University of Tampere, Finland.
Her field of research focuses on leadership in education, in the academic context of higher education through the roles of researcher, teacher, and a head of an educational institution; on professional identity development and professional dignity; on the specifics of self-directed learning (self-regulatory and other subtypes of such learning). The professor is an expert in social research methodology – she has published several textbooks and study books, and articles on this topic.
She has published over one and a half hundred scientific articles and gave the same number of scientific presentations at international conferences. She has supervised sixteen doctoral students, who successfully defended their PhD theses, including not only educational area, but also sociology, management and psychology. She has supervised over fifty successfully defended master’s theses in education and social work. She is a member of the editorial board of several scientific journals, and she has scientific and administrative experience by working on more than thirty international research projects.
Professor has conducted nearly two hundred seminars on social research methodology for researchers, doctoral students and advanced scientists since 2014. She is a founded and a head of the School of Social Researcher.
Dr. Laura Purdy is a Senior Lecturer in Sport Business at Liverpool John Moores University (United Kingdom) and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Educational Research in Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania). issues in the sport industry that relate to organisational and stakeholder relationships (i.e., athletes, coaches, general managers, agents, administrators). In this work, she has explored concerns relating to contract development, welfare, employee advocacy and the impact of technology on employment sustainability and precarity in sport. To do this, she has drawn upon ethnography, autoethnography, and case study, generating data primarily via interviews and (participant) observation.
The endangered ethnography: Causes and consequences
This lecture will focus on the appeal and possibilities of ethnography whilst recognising the ethical and methodological challenges faced by ‘traditional’ ethnography (that which involves immersive long-term, cross-cultural covert/overt fieldwork in a ‘natural’ setting). Some of these challenges include institutional regulations, access to a ‘field’, safety of the researcher, and moral responsibility. Contemporary forms of ethnography are increasing in popularity as they resolve some of these issues (i.e., via the introduction of short-term fieldwork, virtual approaches, etc.), thus, it is proposed that the ‘traditional’ ethnography is endangered, and the consequences are considered.
Introduction to Ethnography
This three-hour seminar will introduce participants to the practicalities and challenges of undertaking ethnographic fieldwork. Towards this end, this session will focus on the art of fieldwork and possibilities for the generation of data. The seminar will also contain a discussion of non-traditional data representation (narratives, poetry, images, art, drama, etc).
Sanela Lazarevski has been a Course Director at Leeds Beckett University since 2002, with expertise in computing subject areas with a dedication to the TLA in Higher Education research. Her completion of a Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD), focused on students’ conceptions of independent digital learning in computing. Her current research interests lie both in the computing subject area around systems thinking and meta-data lifecycle, and with sociological approaches to understanding computing students’ conceptions of AI learning and pedagogies to support students.
Phenomenography is often referred to as a research approach that helps in gaining a better understanding of the qualitatively different ways in which people experience, conceptualise, perceive, and understand various aspects of, and various phenomena in, the world around them (Marton, 1986). This approach is best suited when you want to study collective conceptions about a phenomenon. This involves selecting a group of participants that represent variation, in order to extract a wide range of rich insights through phenomenographic interviews. Although the data analysis approach may be a lengthy process for the individual researcher, it is imperative to bracket their opinions at the data collection and analysis stages, ensuring the researchers’ opinions do not influence the interpretation of results. The seminar will introduce you to the world of phenomenography, identifying factors that will help you decide if this approach might be useful for your study. We will compare it to grounded theory and action research. Also, we will look at the key literature relating to phenomenography and I will offer some suggestions about strategies to collect and analyse the data. We will also look at the role of the literature review and how best to structure this type of thesis for this type of qualitative research.