Methods for Community-Based Research: Advancing Educational Justice and Epistemic Rights

by María Paula Ghiso, Gerald Campano

Methods for Community-Based Research describes how Community-Based Research (CBR) is particularly suited to understand and take action on issues of educational justice.

The book shifts assumptions about who is considered a researcher, drawing attention to issues of power and the ethics of collaborations, and foregrounding how those who have often been positioned as the objects of educational interventions can—and have the rights to—play an active role in creating educational arrangements more conducive to their own flourishing.

The authors draw on a decade-long partnership across the boundaries of race, language, immigration status, and institutional affiliation to provide examples that illustrate the complexities and possibilities of this work. They distill principles, practices, and ongoing inquiries for researchers to consider across all aspects of the research process.

The book supports researchers in creating the conditions for collaborative inquiry into issues of educational (in)justice that are salient to community partners. It will be of interest to advanced undergraduate, graduate students and scholars in education, and other disciplines that utilize a CBR method such as healthcare research and anthropology, as well as scholars interested in qualitative methods and issues of social justice in research.

157 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 23, 2024

About the author

María Paula Ghiso, is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her scholarly interests include early childhood literacy in multilingual and transnational contexts. María Paula is a former New York City dual language teacher and has facilitated professional development on language and literacy learning in a range of contexts. She has published in venues such as Journal of Literacy Research, Equity and Excellence in Education, Research in the Teaching of English, and Teachers College Record.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about a collaborative effort on the part of the researcher to focus on accommodating and meeting the community where they are in collecting information and data, working with the community to determine what their needs are in prioritizing and solving community problems and working with the community to formulate the research question and investigation together. This was new to my research on research methods but it makes the most sense and I really enjoyed the examples provided as well. This is a must read for any researcher in education who needs specifics on how to understand that the community drives the research and trusting that the community is the most reliable resource of present day data. The community does not need researchers to tell them who they are; they need researchers to clarify what the science states about the oppressive practices being used against them and how to verbalize and validate their conditions so they can empower themselves to rise up and act. The author states, that researchers, "fail to fundamentally challenge the baseline policies and practices emerging from and reproducing axes of multiple forms of oppression."