Strengthening Postsecondary Student-Facing Practices: A Constructivist Grounded Theory of Practitioner Research

Introduction: Recent postsecondary expectations for increased research alignment across all areas have left staff feeling underprepared and unsupported in this change. Developing partnerships among student, staff, and faculty researchers provided one way to create supportive opportunities. However, few theories of practitioner research are approachable for non-faculty. Further, while there is theory and academic literature supporting cross-role academic collaboration, there are minimal in-practice models on how to conduct research alongside their already overfull workloads.

Goals and Methods: The goal of this study was to examine the following research questions: (1) How does research acquisition occur for staff? How do staff maintain professional agency while implementing research within their daily practices? Additionally, we wanted to advance critical inquiry and justice research aligned to postsecondary staff. The researchers utilized a grounded-theory approach to co-research a one-year transformation process. Data sources included prolonged observation, interviews, focus groups, and artifacts through purposive sampling (Charmaz, 2017; 2020). Participants included students, staff, and faculty pulled from across 12 grant-funded, staff-run postsecondary programs with large amounts of data. We keenly focused on reflexivity, language and discourse, coding, and developing concepts to increase the likelihood of our methodological approach leading to critical perspective pathways throughout the study. We conducted analyses via a constant comparative process within initial, intermediate, and advanced coding and categorization stages alongside memoing, and theoretical sampling. From in-depth analyses the researchers built a storyline. We grounded rigor in researcher expertise, co-researcher experience, methodological congruence with the research questions, and methodological procedural precision.

Results: Our research resulted in a deeply researched, data and analysis driven theory of practitioner research including centered stakeholders, cross-role collaborations, and community engagement relevant to educational policy, practice, research, and justice-based leadership.

Conclusion: This constructivist research process facilitated cross-role trust, knowledge co-construction, and a new approach toward increased inclusive research practices.