Doing Research within Communities Stories and lessons from language and education field research

Doing Research within Communities provides real-life examples of field research projects in language and education, offering an overview of research processes and solutions to the common challenges faced by researchers in the field. This unique book contains personal research narratives from sixteen different and varied fieldwork projects, providing advice and guidance to the reader through example rather than instruction and enabling the reader to discover connections with the storyteller and gain insights into their own research journey. This book:

• provides advice, practical guidance and support for engaging with a community as a research site;
• covers the real-life theoretical, ethical and practical issues faced by researchers, such as language choice in multilingual communities, and the insider/outsider status of the researcher;
• discusses challenges posed by a variety of mono- and multilingual settings, from remote island communities to large urban areas;
• includes research from across the Asia-Pacific area, including Australia, New Zealand and East Timor, and also the US.

Doing Research within Communities is essential reading for early career researchers and graduate students undertaking fieldwork within communities.

1. Doing research within communities: Strands within and across the narratives – Kerry Taylor-Leech and Donna Starks
2. Human Rights: Journeys start with experiences - Pandora Petrovska
3. This doesn’t feel right: Selecting a site for school-based ethnography - Louisa Willoughby
4. Challenges in conducting ethical classroom-based research across cultures - Richard J. Sampson
5. What happens when a community withdraws? Managing relationships with an Indigenous community - Arapera Ngaha
6. Labeling community and language - Kara Tukuitonga, Donna Starks and Jason Brown
7. Taking an interest: Competence in and affiliations with the expected languages of schooling - Fiona Willans
8. Navigating the multilingual field: Language choice and sociolinguistic fieldwork - Kerry Taylor-Leech and Danielle Boon
9. Interpreter-mediated data collection: Experiences of talking to migrants through interpreters - George Major and Beth Zielinski
10. Being a part of and working with an overlooked linguistic community: - Genevieve Leung
11. Building relationships with whānau to develop effective supports for Māori Deaf children - Kirsten Smiler
12. Establishing connections: A tale of two communities - Ilana Mushin and Rod Gardner
13. Multiplexity in sign language research - Rachel McKee
14. Engaging with communities and languages in multilingual urban settings - John Hajek
15. Imagined linguistic identity: Reflections on an interview - Loy Lising
16. Becoming an adopted insider: A researcher’s journey - Judith Kearney
17. The narrative journey: Adapting research design to capture the voice of the community - Anikó Hatoss
18. Doing research within communities: Connecting practice to theory - Donna Starks and Kerry Taylor-Leech

Kerry Taylor-Leech is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Griffith University, Australia.

Donna Starks is an Associate Professor in Language Education at La Trobe University, Australia.