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Auto/biographical narrative research that touches on 'sensitive' areas can elicit accounts that researchers may find distressing and threatening to their emotional and psychological health. In this paper we offer a 'confessional tale' through which we consider our experiences of investigating a sensitive and painful topic from the perspectives of the Principal Investigator who was intimately acquainted with the field of study because it affected her own family, and of the Research Associate who had no prior experience of the substantive area. We discuss how we dealt with our distress and pain and offer some novel suggestions that other educational researchers using qualitative approaches might adopt to help ensure that their research is ethical in that the wellbeing of researchers, as well as participants, is safeguarded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on narrative interviews from a study exploring the perceptions and experiences of children and young people who have a parent with young onset dementia, this article explores the ways in which the condition impacted their life courses. Dementia is degenerative, terminal and has an unpredictable timeframe that affected young people's time perspectives, life planning and the ways they conceptualized their lives. This article contributes to the literature around young people's life courses by illustrating how the concept of liminality can inform understandings of the impact of parental illness on the life course. Using a constructionist perspective we explore the impact of parental dementia on life planning in relation to education/career, mobilities and personal lives. For some, the future was a source of deep anxiety, whilst others were preoccupied with the present and unable to contemplate life beyond their parents' illness. On the whole, participants felt their lives were in 'limbo' until their parents' death. The data indicate that nuanced approaches towards the life course are required in order to better understand 'being in limbo' and to inform support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that having a parent with any illness or disability can have an adverse effect on individuals’ experiences of education and on their educational progress. Advances in medical knowledge are leading to more people under 65 being diagnosed with young onset dementias and, concomitantly, to more children and young people who are in education having a parent with this diagnosis. Hardly any research has asked these young people directly about their experiences, but the limited evidence suggests that there will likely be significant emotional, mental and psychological damage with enduring impact on their lives. This article, drawing on findings from a unique narrative, auto/biographical study involving 24 British 6 to 31‐year‐olds, focuses on the consequences of parental young onset dementia for educational careers. These dementias are untimely progressive terminal illnesses with unpredictable trajectories and timelines, throughout the course of which physical, cognitive and emotional functions and abilities are inexorably lost. Participants’ experiences show that living with a parent with young onset dementia, whilst negotiating the education system, can be extremely hard. Difficulties are exacerbated by the condition's distinctive characteristics, the current lack of any cure and anticipatory, pre‐death grief. Lack of public awareness and understanding, both of young onset dementias and of dedicated resources and support services, also result in many feeling isolated and ignored. We make suggestions for positive provision and actions that educational institutions can make to begin to meet the particular needs of these young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of young people who have a parent with dementia is rising as a result of improvements in diagnosis of young onset variants and demographic shifts. There has, however, been very little research focusing on this group. Accounts elicited as part of the Perceptions and Experiences of Young People With a Parent With Dementia described the period, usually some years, leading up to a diagnosis of a dementia and then the progress of the condition post diagnosis. These narratives were characterized by confusion, uncertainty, trauma, and distress as the young people struggled to make sense of the significant and often extreme, behavioral and attitudinal changes that were symptoms of the illness. This article describes and discusses how the young people experienced and navigated the temporal messiness and consequent biographical disruption arising from parental dementia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that the grief experienced by the family members of persons with dementia has a distinctive nature that differentiates it from sorrow attendant on most other ill health causes. Over a variable period of time, the way in which dementia manifests in cognitive and physical changes tends to be experienced as a series of serious losses, each of which can be a source of grief leading to significant stress and emotional, mental, psychosocial and physical ill health. Research to date has focused on spouses and adult children: here we seek to add to the literature by re-presenting the grief-related perceptions and experiences of children and young people who have a parent with a young onset dementia. We draw on findings from a narrative auto/biographical investigation to describe what dementia grief was like for study participants and to make suggestions for resources and support for those in this position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the U.K. context where the emphasis is (quite rightly) on living well with dementia, on positivity and enabling approaches, it can be difficult for researchers to investigate and report negative experiences. Failing to re-present perceptions and experiences as they are lived, however, does a serious disservice to the research endeavor and can prevent policy and service development and positive change. In this article, we present some stories told by participants in an Alzheimer’s Society (United Kingdom) Funded project uniquely investigating the perceptions and experiences of children and young people who have a parent with dementia. Sometimes the stories were not easy to hear, especially when they challenged dominant master narratives around dementia. We discuss our view that when the young people we spoke with told us how things were for them, we were ethically bound to respect and disseminate their accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cannella and Lincoln argue for a critical approach to the social sciences which ‘requires a radical ethics, an ethics that is always/already concerned about power and oppression even as it avoids constructing “power” as a new truth’ (2011, 81; emphasis in original). Referencing Spivak, they call for research relations which ‘address contemporary political and power orientations by recognising that the investigator and the investigated (whether people, institutions, or systems) are subjects of the presence or aftermath of colonialism’ (2011, 83). Such recognition fuels growing dissatisfaction with the formalised ethical review procedures required in,inter alia, North America, Australasia and the UK. This paper draws on an investigation of how students on a professional doctoral programme taught by a UK university in three Anglophone Caribbean territories perceived ethics review procedures. This programme emphasises decolonising methodologies and pedagogies, whilst recognising that these can be ‘perceived as yet another instance of imperialistic, colonial imposition’ (Lavia and Sikes 2010, 90). The paper seeks to re-present a critical research ethics in which ‘societal structures, institutions and oppressions become the subject of research (rather than human beings) [with a view to] avoid further creation and subjectification of an or the Other’ (Cannella and Lincoln 2011, 88). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the journal is presented which the editors discuss an article regarding the narrative approach to ethical research by Julie White and Tanya Fitzgerald, an analysis on the ethical issues in a project funded by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) by Renée DePalma, and a discussion on the exercise of academic freedom.

The ways in which the media searches out, depicts, and writes about teacher--pupil sex-related topics have implications both for researchers working in the area and, sometimes more seriously, for the people who participate in and contribute to that research as respondents. In this article, the authors discuss, and provide an example of, the composite fiction strategy they developed and decided to adopt primarily for purposes of protection when writing up a project that investigated the perceptions and experiences of teachers (and those of members of their families, their friends, and colleagues) who had been accused of sexual abuse of pupils, which they said they had not committed and of which they were eventually cleared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper raises some questions about academic authorial honesty under the headings of Plagiarism (including self-plagiarism), Theft, and Collusion. Compared with the medical sciences, the social sciences in general and education specifically, lag behind in terms of critical attention being paid to the problem of plagiarism, the peer review process and academic authorial ethics. The ubiquity of the Internet, the ever intensifying demand to publish or perish, and maybe, a general shift in perceptions of what constitutes 'bad' plagiarism and collusion which challenge traditional notions of what constitutes authorial honesty, mean that the time may be ripe for a consideration by academic writers and journal editors of how they regard and deal with the whole area. This paper makes an early contribution to the discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The climate of moral panic that pertains around child abuse is such that any research that touches on children and sex is almost seen in itself to be abusive, with identity and career consequences for those who engage in it. In November 2005, an article that I had written some years earlier, Scandalous Stories and Dangerous Liaisons: When Female Pupils and Male Teachers Fall in Love, was misreported and misrepresented in the press and, during a period of 5 days, I became the focus of media attention throughout the world but particularly in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This article deals with my experiences of being at the heart of a moral panic and raises questions about research ethics and about academic freedom and voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to some authors (Thomas & Loxley, 2001), 'inclusion' has become something of a cliché, even being 'evacuated of meaning' (Benjamin, 2002). In England, teachers and teachers' assistants are required to implement inclusion but, in the absence of any universal definition of what the term means, the way in which they enact it varies depending on their understanding of this concept. In this paper, which was originally given as a performance text, we will be re-presenting data collected in the course of narrative and autobiographical investigation of mainstream teachers and teaching assistants' experiences and understandings of inclusion. Through these re-presentations our aim is to illustrate and bring about an engagement with the range of perceptions and conceptualizations portrayed. These demonstrate the tensions and resistances between systemic and personal elements in their understanding of inclusion. Our focus is primarily methodological in that we explore what 'narrative and the performance turn' (Denzin, 2003) have to offer to research which seeks to investigate practitioners' articulations and understandings of educational inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relatively few studies have explored the motivations of students in pursuing a professional doctorate. The study reported in this article is based on data from 29 students pursuing professional doctorates. The findings indicate a diverse range of motivations for taking this route: a 'need' for theory, deeper insight into practice for some but frustration with practice for others, the influence of 'critical incidents' in the past, the attraction of a challenge, and a variety of extrinsic factors. The authors present and discuss these data, drawing on previous work and attempting to move the debate further. They contend that the variety and diversity of doctoral students following the 'professional' route has important implications for the curriculum, the pedagogy and the assessment of professional doctorates for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses several articles that are in the current issue of the "British Educational Research Journal." Each of the articles in the issue discuss, either directly or indirectly, methodological issues in teaching. The first article presents a more deep examination and critique of the traditional and modern grounded theories. Another article discusses how work environments can be studied and used as a predictor of teacher burn out. The study focuses on a relatively new area because it specifically examines beginning teachers, as well as using longitudinal design to study the evidence.

What it is like to be an academic working in a ‘new’ university in the 2000s depends upon specific contexts and individual biographies. Even so, it is the case that change, contingent upon local and national policy initiatives, is endemic in the higher education sector and has had some impact upon most people working there. This article explores some of the work‐related perceptions and experiences of a group of staff working in a School of Education at a ‘new’ university with a view to gaining a sense of their understanding of what being an academic means to them. These people, who had, initially, been hired essentially as lecturers, were facing increased demands to become ‘research active’. Not only did these demands lead to increased workloads, they also had implications for professional and personal identities, and, consequently, for how people felt about, and undertook, their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sexual Offences Act, 2003 criminalised all sexual activity in England and Wales between teachers and pupils under 18, irrespective of the fact that the general age of consent is 16, and even if the parties concerned were in a consensual relationship. Accounts of pupil–teacher romantic and sexual relationships are usually presented, in the media, through a discourse of scandal and exploitation. This paper draws on accounts of heterosexual attraction and consensual sexual relationships between female secondary school pupils and their male teachers as stories that have been told, by the people involved, in a positive fashion. The paper considers the ways in which sexual activity and identity are controlled and regulated through discursive practices and invites questioning of orthodoxies and norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tells an autoethnographic story of the ways in which a specific tourist experience-visiting a "girlie" bar in Bangkok-led me to reflect afresh on themes, issues, and concerns that have always been central to my work as a researcher and academic, namely, storying lives, autobiography and/or biography, identities and careers, giving voice, Othering, representation, social justice, and making the familiar strange. Most of all, however, the experience strengthened my commitment to the need to recognize the way in which the strange is familiar and to "acknowledge how much `out there' is like, `in here" (Neumann, 1996, p. 182). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers some of the decisions that researchers take and raises issues around researcher reflexivity, identity, values and ethics. It focuses attention on researchers and reflects on how the research they do, the topics they investigate, the methodologies they espouse, the methods they use and the writing/reporting styles they adopt, can have implications both in terms of their career development and with regard to their personal integrity and moral positioning. It is something of a truism to state that the sorts of research that get done depend upon the decisions researchers make. However, the relationship between research completed and in the public domain and individual researchers' choices is by no means a simple or straightforward one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the symposium titled Educational Research and the Necessity of Theory." The papers in the symposium arose out of the concern that educational researchers in Great Britain have neglected, and continue to neglect, and even deliberately avoid, theory. There are two opposing groups when it comes to theory. There are those of found it scary and frightening and there are those who are excited by it and believes that "theory floated their boat." The author believes that theory is an essential aspect of educational research and other research in social sciences.

Introduces the articles published in the December 2005 issue of the "British Educational Research Journal."

Narrative research writing often seeks to create a sense of feel and place. The aim is to convince an audience that the researcher has 'been there' and that they could have been there too. This article presents a story about a visit to a secondary special school for boys judged to have emotional and behavioural difficulties, and then goes on to discuss issues around 'othering' experienced by the author when writing it. The problems of first visits and the way in which personal identifies influence perceptions of research settings are considered with reference to othering. The article concludes with the suggestion that, when the intention has been to work 'against Othering, for social justice' (Fine, 1994:81), maybe one has to recognize that some concerns can probably not be relieved, and to 'simply attempt to do the best [I] can' (Smith and Deemer, 2000: 891). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms of the attention that they have attracted from researchers, and in comparison with teachers of other subjects, religious education specialists would seem to be a neglected and marginalized group. This paper looks at some of the reasons why this might be and also describes a study that is using a life history approach to explore what it is like to be a religious education teacher at the turn of the millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Anecdotal evidence suggests that many qualitative researchers have had the experience of discovering that their informants had told them lies. This is quite different to those instances where faulty memory, subjective perception, partial or erroneous knowledge, a desire to give the researcher what they think they want, or even where a 'personal myth' comes in to play, because a lie is a conscious and deliberate intention to deceive. What should researchers do when they discover that they have been misled? What are the implications for qualitative methodology and its practitioners in the light of the criteria for good practice outlined in the Tooley Report? This article draws on two examples of informants who lied, in order to explore some of the questions and issues that can arise. It suggests, tentatively, that generic criteria may not always be sufficiently sensitive to cope with complexities of social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a case study using the introduction of life history methods as a strategy for facilitating transition from pupil to teacher in initial teacher education (ITE). Students' responses to the strategy; How the ITE courses might be geared towards the development of teachers; Information about reflective teaching; Methodology of ITE and life history.

This article presents summaries of the articles contained in this issue of the journal, including an article that analyses the activities of teaching assistants in English upper primary classrooms and their effects, an article that presents research data from ability grouping in secondary schools, an article that examines the effects of the National Literacy Strategy on early reading achievement, an article about school violence and reactive and proactive ways to manage violent incidents, and three articles devoted to qualitative methods and conceptual analysis in education research.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Strand and Demie on pupil mobility and attainment and another by Boyle and Bragg on English primary education.

The author outlines the topics discussed within the issue which focused more on technological innovations in education in Great Britain. He also discusses the range across sexual, religious and ethnic differences and identities. Issues pertaining to the exploration of national differences in pedagogy, unpacking interactive teaching in England and Russia are also emphasized. The author stressed that classroom interaction with the use of technology is essential to learning.

The article comments on the 2005 British Educational Research Association (BERA) conference held at the University of Glamorgan. The speech of BERA President Geoff Whitty reflected on the inevitability of conflict in education policy making. Research in education is popularly conceptualized ad understood by politicians. Educational research is a complex and multifaceted area which attempts to understand diverse and sophisticated approaches. The improvement of schools through assessment and audit has been the avowed aim of education policy under the New Labor and Conservative governments.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Paul Connolly about factors affecting the General Certificate of Secondary Education and another by Janet Ainley, Dave Pratt and Alice Hansen about the paradox experienced by mathematics teachers.

Introduces the articles published in the August 2005 issue of the "British Research Educational Journal," citing the publication of each article in the order of acceptance. Measurements of educational achievement; Transparency about unavoidable error in assessment results that may influence public trust and confidence on such measurement methods; Implications for education.

Introduces the articles which have been published in the June 2005 edition of "British Educational Research Journal."

Editorial. Introduces the April 2005 issue of the "British Educational Research Journal." Examination of three key texts which constitute the building blocks of the new orthodoxy; Illustration of the difficulties with respect to the ontological and epistemological problems inherent in understanding the differences between association and causation in social and educational research; Role for social science and educational research in theory generation and testing.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Kay Greasley and Peter Ashworth on "deep" and "surface" learning and another by Marios Vyronides on education in Cyprus and how the system is effected by cultural and social capital.

This paper draws on research which took an auto/biographical and narrative approach in order to investigate mainstream teachers’ and teaching assistants’ experiences and understandings of inclusion. Throughout the 2003/04 academic year, three researchers made three visits to one primary and one secondary school to talk with individuals and groups. The research involved the stories collected as ‘data’ and our stories as researchers. This paper draws on both sets of stories and considers the researchers’ experiences of ‘doing’ and being involved in narrative research, as well as affording some glimpses into the stories of inclusion that they collected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information about the December 2004 issue of the journal "British Educational Research Journal."

Introduces the articles on educational research published in the June 2004 issue of the "British Educational Research Journal."

Editorial. Introduces the August 2004 edition of the "British Educational Research Journal." Emphasis on the mobilization of some sort of Dad's Army in relation to social problems and dilemmas; Revisitation of the past educational research when issues of differentiation were given a much more pessimistic reading; Expression of the relevance of education research to policy and practice that the Government has either been slow to recognize.