84404 research outputs found
Sort by
The Ethics of Drawing Illness: Interdisciplinary Negotiations in a Participatory Graphic Narrative Project
No full textThis paper illustrates how the design of health-related comics contributes to reflecting on the methodological and ethical challenges of qualitative research. In line with Comics-Based Research (CBR), we demonstrate how creating a comic on medical topics emerges from continuous and iterative dialogue among multiple voices: patients, sociologists, artists, and physicians. On an ethical and methodological level, our study explores the creation of a comic book about pancreatic diseases with varying stages of severity and possibilities for cure and recovery. Constructing a comic in such contexts provides a new way of visualizing and understanding the illness experience. Representing traumatic memory in comics can profoundly affect readers and those whose memories are depicted, while also helping researchers to amplify the voices of individuals whose experiences have been marginalized or misunderstood. Our goal was to create a product that was both a graphic memoir based on true stories and a scientific and informative resource. However, the graphic novel was not merely a tool for disseminating research; it was the central focus of our project, with all aspects designed around this medium. This included the development of interview protocols and the selection of participants, ensuring that the process remained aligned with the principles of participatory and co-constructed storytelling
An International Framework and a Local Standardised Test: A Former Item Writer’s Autoethnography
No full textA recent trend dominating education worldwide is the enactment of external accountability frameworks and standards-based assessment. Likewise, in language education, international standards like the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) have been increasingly used for local standardised test development and alignment. However, there has been little research into the application of the CEFR in item writing, the activity of creating new items and associated materials, in local standardised testing contexts. To bridge this gap, this autoethnography shares my firsthand experience of writing items for a locally-developed, CEFR-aligned standardised English test in Vietnam. By combining evocative and analytic autoethnography, I aim to achieve two goals. My first goal is to offer insight from the perspective of an item writer into a prevalent but not unproblematic practice of borrowing international standards to develop local high-stakes tests. My second goal is to demonstrate, through vignettes, the advantages of autoethnography over other methodological approaches in investigating research contexts in which access to suitable participants is particularly challenging