Introduction

This collection of short research guides was created by doctoral students in Indiana University Bloomington’s School of Education. Each research guide was made by students in the on-campus and online course, EDUC-L700: Seminar in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education, offered by the Department of Literacy, Culture and Language Education. This assignment was designed to help students–who are current and future education researchers–familiarize themselves with research methodologies that they may not have had a chance to study in a formal course. This book is a compilation of research guides created by students in the Spring 2018, Fall 2018, and Spring 2019 iterations of the course, supplemented with information about why it was important to compile these guides in an openly licensed Pressbook.  In essence, this is a book written by doctoral students for doctoral students.We hope that others will use this work for their own research and exploration or even adapt it to help students learn about research methodologies firsthand.

Each Research Guide offers a short introduction to the methodology, followed by critical annotations of major works describing how to use the methodology. Other sections include critical annotations of recent dissertations that use the methodology and lists of helpful resources such as websites, databases, videos, and research software. Some sample topics include Conversation Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, Multiple Case Studies, and Nexus Analysis. More topics may be added later.

The creation of this book and the curation of all of the research guides into a single publication was made possible by a course redesign implemented by the instructor, Beth Lewis Samuelson, and librarians Julie Marie Frye and Sarah Hare. The redesign had two objectives: (1) make the research guide assignment more meaningful and immediately applicable by creating the option for students to share their work openly and publicly and (2) help students understand openness (including Creative Commons) and master information literacy concepts related to evaluation and authoring in order to enter the information ecosystem not only as readers but also as creators and authors.

In order to accomplish the second goal, the instructors created “chalk talks” to present information literacy concepts visually and to inspire in-depth conversation about related issues such as intellectual property, information ecosystems, and academic publishing. Chalk talks are educational videos where an instructor explains a concept vocally while a sketch presents information visually. The goal of shifting to a chalk talk model is that students see information presented in a variety of ways. It also challenges instructors to illustrate concepts, often requiring that they use metaphors or analogies that help students make connections. These chalk talks are shared within this book in order to give readers a holistic understanding of the course’s context.

The redesign and this publication were made possible by generous funding from the IU School of Education’s Teaching with Technology Grant and the IU Libraries Information Literacy Course Grant.