Designing Education Research for Variation in Participants’ Needs, Abilities, and Interests

Author(s):
Jacquelyn J. Chini, Ph.D., (she/her)
Associate Professor, Physics Department
University of Central Florida

Participants will take up questions posed by Pugach, Matewos & Gomez-Najarro (2020) to consider the potential for considering disability as a part of diversity in education research and in their own research project. We will describe our development of a tool for critically examining the environments we design (e.g., education research spaces) to identify which categories of abilities (i.e., physical/mobility, visual, hearing, cognitive, health, and emotional/mental health) are privileged and which are simultaneously taxed, and how we have used the tool to analyze our own research project to identify exclusionary practices (i.e., requiring participants to participate in synchronous, spoken interviews) and designed more inclusive options (i.e., allowing participants to participate by asynchronously responding to interview questions in writing). Participants will use the tool to analyze their own research projects to identify instances of exclusionary practices and brainstorm how to incorporate more inclusive practices.