Pérez-Izaguirre, Correa Gorospe, Chaves-Gallastegui, Aberasturi 2021

1. Ethical challenges researching
higher education students’
learning lives: Reflections from
Collaborative Autoethnography
(CAE)
ELIZABETH PÉREZ-IZAGUIRRE, JOSÉ MIGUEL CORREA GOROSPE, EIDER CHAVES GALLASTEGUI, ESTIBALIZ ABERASTURI
APRAIZ
UNIVERSITY OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY (UPV/EHU)
CONTACT: ELIZABETH.PEREZ@EHU.EUS

2. Why are ethics in educational
ethnography important?
Ethics in research is a topic of continuous debate (Romm, 2020).
How do we as researchers face the tensions that arise during fieldwork?

3. Some issues to look at
Reflexivity in educational ethnography (Miled, 2019).
Tensions during data collection (Pérez-Izaguirre, 2021).
Including participants in our research (Nind 2014, 2016).

4. The aim
To analyse situations in which researchers face ethnographic fieldwork
tensions in the southern Basque Country.
Context: TRAY-AP project led by the University of Barcelona (UB) and the
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) that aims to bring forth and
narrate the learning lives of higher education students.

5. In this study, researchers and students are collaborators who defy traditional
power relationships between researchers and participants and adopt an
inclusive perspective (Nind, 2014, 2016).

6. Learning lives
Learning lives is a notion characterised by a biographic perspective in
learning, where the subject gives meaning to their own living journey and
what they learnt from it (Jornet & Erstad, 2018).
Learning lives are subject-dependant and marked by emotions, sentiments,
and individual responses to specific stimuli (Erstad & Silseth, 2019; Sefton-
Green & Erstad, 2017).

8. An overview of two cases
Marina is a third-year student enrolled in a Humanities discipline. When she
narrated her own learning trajectory, one of the researchers felt identified
with her. This enabled a better understanding of Marina’s learning life, but
also made the researcher wonder whether she was over interpreting Marina’s
history based on her own.

9. An overview of two cases
Another researcher presents the case of Pablo, a fourth-year Engineer student.
Pablo revealed that he had been diagnosed with a developmental disorder.
How to face such element in order to understand Pablo’s learning life was one
of the tensions that the researcher had to face.

10. Conclusion
The main tensions were related to the emotions raised after connecting with
the students: self-reflection of the collaborator’s tales.
Based on the idea of inclusive research by Nind (2014, 2016), this paper
advocates for an honest research that considers researcher’s subjectivities
and highlights reflexivity as a basic element in research, which has direct
consequences on the research ethics that we will designate as inclusive, as
this includes collaborator’s perspective.

11. References
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