Introduction

Going into a master’s thesis process is akin to walking through a dark forest looking for a mountain you want to climb. You know the right mountain is out there, but it takes a bit of solitary exploring, along with occasionally running into others also stumbling around in the low valleys and dark forests, before you get a glimpse of the mountain range. There are many mountains in the range, and they are all attractive, yet you can only climb one at a time. You hike out of the forest towards the mountains and find some of them are more attractive than others, and towards those you walk. As you get closer, you realize that some attractive peaks are only accessible by scaling sheer granite walls, while others have extremely long walks through muddy bogs, and others would oblige you to cross glaciers. Which one to choose? In which methods are you willing to become proficient at to reach your desired peak? While you ponder these questions, potential guides show up, telling you they have been to the top of that mountain themselves and are willing to help you learn the necessary methods to get there, be they rock climbing or efficient hiking. The guides promise to ensure your safety and keep you on belay if needed, but you are going to have to learn the methods appropriate to scaling the mountain of your choice. There’s no guarantee of success but you will have all the support you need to summit and get down safely to base camp.

The anecdote above illustrates the various roles faculty members play in preparing our graduate and advanced undergraduate students to become applied researchers. In our commitment to this goal, we seek ways to help guide students successfully through these “dark forests” of mindsets and methods while at the same time giving them enough freedom to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from their own experiences of engagement. With this focus in mind, Active Learning for Real-World Inquiry serves as a compendium of active learning approaches to teaching research concepts, methods, and applications in both face-to-face and online learning environments. We invited faculty members from a range of disciplines and areas of practice in the social sciences to contribute activities they have used to help students envision or directly experience the process of conducting research in applied organizational settings or other social settings. As a result, this book brings together a collection of instructor-generated and time-tested active learning and teaching strategies to use in research methods courses in the social sciences. The concepts and activities presented by the chapter authors should be useful for instructors of research methods courses as they continue to hone their own instructional approaches. Also, the activities should be helpful to both undergraduate and graduate students who are preparing to do research in applied organizational settings or other social settings, whether it is research associated with a course assignment, a component of research course, or a capstone project, thesis, or dissertation. In addition, some of the submissions offer ideas about the organization and delivery of entire research methods courses, which may be of use to instructors and those who are thinking about how to design entire courses.

One of the most challenging aspects of teaching research is helping students unfamiliar with processes and protocols of rigorous and systematic inquiry to acknowledge, confront, manage, and overcome sources of anxiety and confusion about becoming a researcher (Earley, 2014; Harder 2010). When students begin the process of learning about research, they can lack self-confidence based on having limited knowledge, understanding, and experience (Nind, et al., 2020; Cooper et al., 2012). Finding adequate and helpful ways to assist students to gain confidence and overcome thoughts of being imposters is one of our most important tasks as “methods teachers” (Nind et al., 2020, p. 808).

Although there is limited research on the methodology of teaching research concepts and methods, some scholars have emphasized the importance of actively engaging students while they are learning how to do research (Cooper et al., 2012; James & Pollard, 2011; Lundahl, 2008). Brame (2020) notes that instructional activities that support active learning “focus more on developing students’ skills than on transmitting information and require that students do something—read, discuss, write—that requires higher-order thinking. These kinds of activities also tend to place some emphasis on students’ explorations of their own attitudes and values” (p. 1) and align very well with the learning outcomes and objectives of most research courses in the social sciences, especially those courses aimed at preparing students for research in applied settings. Teaching using an active learning approach usually means helping students to carry out research-related tasks and protocols rather than telling them how to do them or having them learn primarily through texts or videos (Allen & Baughman, 2016). These active learning activities may include role plays, games, journaling, teamwork, problem-based learning, simulations, collaborative projects, skills training, the use of real data sets, or even more service-learning-oriented approaches such as integrating research into a community project (see Harder, 2010; Lundahl, 2008).

According to Meyers and Jones (1993), the foundation for active learning is built upon two key assumptions about learning: “(1) learning is by its very nature an active process and (2) different people learn in different ways” (p. 20). Based on this foundation, students may be less-intimidated by research processes and better prepared to carry out their own studies when they actively engage in the learning process (Barraket, 2005). This may be especially true for students engaged in applied research in actual organizational settings where the stakes can be high and the impact of the research immediate and significant. Conducting research in applied organizational settings such as businesses, schools, community agencies, and healthcare settings can have significant real-life implications for the participants as well as the researcher, thus we believe it is important for researchers-in-training to have preparatory experiences that closely reflect the kinds of organizational dynamics, situations, and complexities that they would experience in conducting their research activities in the field.

Teaching research concepts and methods using active and experiential approaches has been related to improvements in students’ critical thinking (Barraket, 2005); satisfaction and enthusiasm in engaging in research (Freeman et al., 2014; Barraket, 2005); and increased confidence about their ability to apply research knowledge in the future (Allen & Baughman, 2016). Other studies have concluded that students value involvement in an actual research project as a means of deepening their learning about research (Lundahl, 2008; Marek et al., 2004). Furthermore, the narrative analysis from Nind et al. (2020) involving graduate students taking research methods courses underscored the importance of “doing things” (p. 804) during the learning process. In that study, participants reflected on the importance of applying actual research methods in practice as being pivotal to their growth and development as researchers when they were involved in generating their own data, taking on projects that are personally meaningful to them as well as writing, presenting, and teaching.

Authentic learning—a specific subset of active learning—is designed to connect what students are taught in class to real-world issues, problems, and applications (Pearce, 2016). According to Pearce (2016), “authentic learning is multi-disciplinary, skills-based learning in a real-life context, demonstrating to students that their learning is connected, relevant, and can have an impact upon the world around them, as well as their future selves” (p. 2). Authentic learning activities such as simulations, using real data sets, engaging in role playing, completing problem-based learning assignments, creating portfolios, or carrying out mini-research projects help to socialize and enculturate researchers-in-training into the role of a professional or academic researcher. By helping students stand in the shoes of a researcher, these learning experiences permit learners to practice skills in environments similar to those in which the skills will be used (Lebow, 1993; Newman and Wehlage, 1993). As well, authentic learning activities often involve complex tasks that are used to investigate ill-defined or messy problems over a sustained period (Reeves et al., 2002). According to Lombardi (2007), these kinds of activities help learners achieve four major objectives in learning: (1) to make connections between personal interests and those in the discipline; (2) to be more motivated to engage and persevere due to relevance of activity; (3) to facilitate absorption, retention, and transfer of skills and knowledge; and (4) to provide a sense of enculturation into the profession or discipline.

Despite the ubiquity of research courses in the social sciences, however, there are surprisingly very few books and articles dedicated to actively engaging students in learning about and doing research (Nind et al. 2020). Nevertheless, there is an excellent resource on teaching research using active learning approaches that has been published relatively recently, which nicely complements our book. Dawson’s (2016) book, 100 Activities for Teaching Research Methods, is a very helpful sourcebook of pre-designed activities, games, scenarios, and role plays that faculty members can use with their students to teach research methods in an interactive and stimulating way.  Active Learning for Real-World Inquiry builds on Dawson’s (2016) sourcebook by focusing on the contributions of a diverse community of scholars who have tested out the activities shared within this volume in their own teaching and professional context.

The authentic and hands-on activities in this book feature a blend of whole class, small group, and individual learning strategies that are appropriate for both face-to-face and online learning environments. Questioning strategies, scaffolding techniques, self-assessment exercises, work sheets, visualization techniques, project exhibitions, peer critiques, display posters and other approaches are offered to help students actively reflect on the process of research, to carry out research activities, and to provide them with feedback they can apply to the development and revision of their research proposals and plans.

Roadmap to the book

The main foci of the chapters are outlined below in order to provide the reader with a sense of where they might want to begin exploring the contents of the book. We have included submissions that help students actively think about their own engagement in the research process and help them plan their research studies from the start. The various activities presented here take students through the stages of developing and carrying out an applied research study: from deciding on a topic, developing a researchable question, carrying out the research plan, analyzing data, finding impactful ways to share research findings, and developing a feasible plan to act on the results. These activities address the key decision points in the research process and provide some illustrative ways to engage students in clearly thinking about these stages from the beginning and how to prepare themselves for engaging in real-world research. Some of the submissions also offer provocations about the design of entire courses or major components of a research course.

We invited our submitters to follow a similar format to achieve consistency between the chapters. Each author was asked to introduce their activity and provide a rationale for its role in supporting students in learning how to do research. Then, we asked the authors to provide an overview of the steps they took to implement the activity in practice so that a reader could potentially adapt it for their own purposes. Finally, we invited the submitters to offer some reflections on the lessons learned in conducting the activity and the potential impact of it on students’ learning.

The first collection of chapters in Section One focuses on engaging students in becoming applied researchers. These articles provide strategies and approaches for building capacity for self-directed learning as a researcher and examine the process of forming a researcher identity. Authors share ways in which visual exploration can be used to identify research areas of interest, how they have used social media to build research literacy and offer concrete strategies for kicking off a literature review. Throughout this section, there is a common theme of supporting students as they develop their own identity as a researcher and offering an associated toolkit to draw upon.

Section Two focuses on engaging students in developing research questions and problems, which is a key stage in the formulation of an incisive, relevant, and significant research study. Through activities that employ aspects of systems thinking, design thinking, and even adopting a mathematician’s mindset, the process of constructing a research question and identifying the research opportunity are examined.

Section Three focuses on strategies for engaging students in exploring research paradigms and methodologies. The authors of articles in this section discuss and provide hands-on tools for facilitating active learning through arts-based inquiry and using role play and interactive inquiry methods to explore qualitative and quantitative approaches to research, all aiming at helping students expand their frame of reference and include another point of view.

The chapters in Section Four showcase multiple ways of actively involving students in data gathering with an aim of providing multiple and diverse perspectives and strategies for engaging participants in a research project. Strategies for using photovoice, an interview matrix, social media, and other digital methods to gather data are shared. In addition, a mini-field research pilot study, as well as a journalistic field study approach, are outlined and explained.

Engaging students in data analysis is the focus of Section Five, which contains chapters that offer diverse perspectives on the topic. From how to develop a statistician’s mindset, getting into the mess of qualitative data analysis and adopting more of a business analytics approach to applied research, the chapters in this section provide the reader with a range of approaches to use as they teach the importance of data analysis.

Section Six focuses on a variety of methods and diverse perspectives on ways to engage students through supervision and mentoring. From ways in which using listening techniques can be used to strengthen the supervisory relationship, to a chronicling of how an online conference can be used as a tool to foster connection, these chapters offer multiple methods and approaches to supervision and mentoring. In addition, creative ways for supporting students in decolonizing research through an Indigenous scholar-in-residence and a reciprocal mentorship approach are shared.

The chapters in Section Seven, our final collection of contributions, focus on engaging students in research methods courses,  offering models of research methods courses, providing tools for mapping an action-inquiry capstone and discussing ways in which an entrepreneurial approach and facets of trans-disciplinarity can be embedded as part of teaching research methods.

In summary, Active Learning for Real-World Inquiry, has the following aims:

1. To assist faculty members in helping their students: (a) overcome the fear of doing research; (b) systematically and thoughtfully plan their studies; (c) develop a viable support system for their research; and (d) think about how to maximize the impact of their research findings;
2. To contribute to the scholarly body of work related to the application of active learning principles and practice to the development of applied research expertise; and
3. To serve as a teaching resource and handy reference in relevant research courses in colleges and universities.

We hope this book will launch a continued conversation about this work, and that as an Open Educational Resource (OER), it will be reused, remixed, and repurposed to fit various contexts. We encourage folks to share those remixes and use cases.

Many thanks to all who contributed and shared their experiences, good teachings, and wisdom as part of this work. Not only did the contributors take the time to write their chapters, but most also acted as peer reviewers, offering insight and critique in examining other authors’ submissions.

This work would not have been possible without the grant support from Royal Roads University which is situated on the lands of the Coast Salish peoples, and in particular the Xwsepsum and Lekwungen ancestors and families. We are very grateful to be able to be a part of this community.

References

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