The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina brought devastation and confusion to the Mississippi Gulf Coast region on August 29, 2005. A desperate need for leadership, collaboration, and coordination of relief and recovery efforts was revealed during a March 2007 strategic planning session involving 96 organizations, groups, agencies, and researchers…

Educational researchers are accustomed to institutional review board (IRB) requirements (e.g., protecting participants) with students often identified as the only "vulnerable population" for IRB purposes. However, as practitioner research has gained more prominence, the vulnerability of teacher-researchers themselves has begun to…

This essay is an attempt to continue the reflective element that was a part of a dissertation based on a study of the development of a culturally relevant curriculum in a tribal school. As a reflective retrospection on the anthropological research methodology, it examines the intersection of academic research traditions, the traditions of the…

Ethicists, researchers and policy makers have paid increasing attention to the ethical conduct of research, especially research involving human beings. Research performed with and by undergraduates poses a specific set of ethical challenges. These challenges are often overlooked by the research community because it is assumed that undergraduate…

The purpose of this study was to assess the level of competence needed for teachers of the visually impaired. The assessment was based on Professional Standard Competence developed by the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) for special education teachers in 2001. The researchers used questionnaires to acquire information about 190 South Korean…

This Digest introduces ethical considerations related to acquiring and analyzing online data and provides resources to support sound practice. Because online conversation is relatively new and unfamiliar, and takes place at a distance, participants may not realize or may not remember that their conversations could be made public. A researcher…

In this article, the author shares his experience working at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, and the lessons he learned about institutions and about academic researchers. Among the things he learned at the NIH was the attitude that biomedical scientists sometimes harbor toward their research subjects. Research is a…

There are few available resources for learning and teaching about ethical issues in neuroimaging research with children, who constitute a special and vulnerable population. Here, a brief review of ethical issues in developmental research, situated within the emerging field of neuroethics, highlights the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of…

This critical narrative ethnography focused on the aftermath of gang-related homicide of two Latino teenage boys, as articulated from the perspectives of their mothers. Grounded in critical race theory, this study situates the phenomenon of Latino youth violence within contexts of local oppressive political and historical conditions. This article…

This paper examines the processes whereby two researchers developed their knowledge in teaching a course for preservice teachers. We sought to explore the ways in which class assignments encouraged preservice teachers to develop their abilities to see classrooms from the point of view of nascent teachers rather than that of successful students.…

At the 2007 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, we presented a workshop entitled "How to do the Scholarship of Teaching." The workshop had three main goals: to introduce participants to the literature on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and to various SoTL outlets, to guide participants in the process of doing…

This paper analyzes the ethically important moments that helped build, then break, and then negotiate the relationship between researchers and schools during an ethnographic-type study conducted by the team of researchers from a prominent private university. I posit that the researchers' unskilled approach culminated in producing written…

Serious researchers of Indian communities should focus on actual community needs, be sensitive to community wishes and attitudes, and establish more precise identity with respect to communities with goals of distinguishing serious research from popular writing, minimizing useless research, and providing more leverage over funding sources and their…

A researcher who is also a college teacher reflects on the personal meaning of research and the relationship between researcher and subject. As teacher-researchers embark on the process of discovery, they engage in relationships with informants. Developing these relationships requires implicit moral and ethical responsibility, mutual respect, and…

The recent requirement for education on the protection of human research subjects mandated by the federal government has the potential to impact research in all fields, including education, significantly. At this point, all key personnel involved in research using human subjects are either required or strongly recommended (depending on the type of…