Workshop 1
Title: Real Talk: Developing possibilities for teaching social research within and beyond the classroom
Scope
Attendees will experience an immersive walk-through of our podcast, in development: ‘Real Talk: Social Research Explained’, by hearing audio clips and encountering our feedback from a student focus group. We can harness being in a live environment amongst peers drawn from the education sector, at the IICE, to share our own motivations and reflection on this project and to provide attendees with the opportunity to ask questions and to collectively tease out ways to facilitate learning about social research. We want to address the myth of exclusivity and unpick complexity in social research by tackling the language used in the field. We want to make research accessible to students at third level and to convey the real and exciting potential for them as researchers. Our purpose is to get to the heart of what research is about and what research is for and to communicate this in a format that works for the student learner, within and beyond the classroom. We appreciate the application of the medium of a podcast to learning in multiple settings. We can draw upon our experience in research, supervision and dissertation module leadership at third level in the progression of this project.
Motivation
We are interrogating our teaching methodologies for teaching methodologies. We have been working on the pilot phase in the development of a teaching tool for social research at third level. We are creating podcasts on social research with accompanying infographics to bring research methods alive, moving beyond traditional teaching formats. Making the podcast ‘Real Talk: Social Research Explained’ is a process which requires us to work reflexively. We draw upon our past experiences and confront our positionality as sociologists, seasoned in the language of the field, in our conversational recordings. We recognise the barrier that complexity, fuzzy boundaries, and sometimes inflated language in social research, can create for first time research students.
Objectives
1. Organise a forum at IICE to discuss student feedback and student needs for learning about social research using podcasts.
2. Present our emerging thoughts on this project and showcase podcast recordings.
3. Convene a question and answer session to facilitate dialogue between attendees and presenters and permit consideration of potential directions for work of this kind.
Organisers: Tom Farrelly and Dr Catherine Molyneaux, Munster Technological University, Tralee, Ireland
