A talk for the British Library Research Network
Dr Francis Gilbert (Goldsmiths) with Debbie Bogard (British Library)
Wednesday 3 December 2025 Online
In early December (2025), I was delighted to co-lead an online professional development session for FE lecturers as part of the British Library’s Research Network. Working with Debbie Bogard, we introduced an accessible, imaginative, practice-focused guide to doing research as an educator.
We framed the session through Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, using original manuscripts and early editions as a metaphor for how research really works. As our opening slides suggested, real inquiry is messy, scratched out, revised, curious, and full of rough edges. Research is not an elite, unreachable activity. It is something teachers already do every day when they notice patterns, pose questions, try things out, and evaluate what happens.
This principle runs through all my recent research. Whether working with writers, teachers, or young community researchers, the same truth keeps resurfacing: research begins not in institutions, but in lived curiosity and affect.
1. Research begins with curiosity, not with permission
We invited participants to identify questions that “keep resurfacing in your professional life”. These might be personal, pedagogical, or political. This reflects what Dobson and I found in our recent autoethnographic study of feedback and redrafting. We argue that creative development begins not with technique but with the emotional force of meaning:
“Creative writing is personal. Aspects of the writer’s self are embedded and transformed through the creative writing process” (Dobson and Gilbert, 2024, p. 4).
This affective dimension of inquiry is also at the heart of Tessa Muncey’s classic work on autoethnography. She reminds us that memory, identity, and research are inseparable, writing:
“Although memories are fragmentary, elusive, and sometimes ‘altered’ by experience, this does not necessarily constitute lying” (Muncey, 2005, p. 70).
For FE lecturers, this is liberating. It means your professional questions do not need to be neutral to be rigorous. They need to be situated, accountable, and ethically reflective.
2. Mapping questions rather than perfecting them
We encouraged colleagues to sketch their question visually as a branching diagram that exposes tensions, unknowns, and contradictions. This “map of Wonderland” helps researchers talk about their inquiry clearly and later justify it to ethics panels and wider audiences.
This approach connects directly with our New Materialist work on creative research assemblages, where we argue that research does not move in neat lines but in shifting, affective networks:
“Creative writing research methodologies can be understood as bespoke ‘research-assemblages’ that combine creative practice across multiple modes and materials” (Gilbert and Macleroy, 2021, p. 400).
A research map is not a narrowing device. It is a way of making complexity visible.
3. Methodology simply means how you answer your question
Many FE lecturers told us they found the word “methodology” intimidating. We reframed it as a practical question:
How will you actually try to answer what you are asking?
We explored:
small surveys, interviews, reflective journals, text analysis, creative and arts-based methods, and literature reviews.
This mirrors the Parklife project, where young people became co-researchers into improving their local parks through poetry, photography, collage, films, and walking interviews rather than conventional questionnaires alone. Their creative methods generated what we described as:
“powerful affective flows, whereby creative outputs moved councillors, park managers and community groups into action” (Gilbert and Stewart, 2025).
In this project, poetry directly contributed to new lighting, water fountains, revised litter schedules, and a community garden. Method did not dilute impact. It created it.
4. A literature review is a map of the forest, not a hurdle
We guided lecturers through how a literature review actually works: identifying patterns, contradictions, and silences across existing research. It helps to answer two fundamental questions:
Where does my inquiry sit?
Why is it needed?
In our creative writing research, literature reviews repeatedly reveal one powerful absence: time for redrafting. As Dobson and I show, neoliberal accountability systems prioritise product over process, marginalising the very conditions writers need to develop:
“Time and space for redrafting creative writing are marginalised, with focus placed on the written product rather than the writing process itself” (Dobson and Gilbert, 2024, p. 1).
Literature does not fence teachers in. It helps them see what is missing and why their questions matter.
5. All data has a provenance, so question it
We emphasised that data is never neutral. FE lecturers rely on attendance figures, dashboards, surveys, assessment outcomes. But every dataset raises deeper questions:
Who collected it?
What is missing?
Whose voice is silent?
Muncey makes this ethical challenge explicit when she writes that the method of telling a story is often more politically charged than the story itself:
“The method I used was as important, if not more so, than the story I had to tell” (Muncey, 2005, p. 71).
Even archives are not neutral. The British Library itself demonstrates how every document emerges from particular histories and power relations. Provenance is part of research literacy.
6. Reliability and validity are practices, not barriers
We explained reliability as consistency and validity as whether something genuinely reflects lived reality. Even small-scale FE research can meet both criteria through transparency, triangulation, and ethical care.
In creative writing, this takes a different form. We argue that productive feedback is not simply technical but relational. Writers develop when they internalise what Bakhtin calls the superaddressee, their evolving sense of audience and meaning:
“It is the internal dialogue with the superaddressee that develops the writer over time, giving them control over the writing process and facilitating redrafting” (Dobson and Gilbert, 2024, p. 2).
Reliability here lies in sustained dialogic attention, not numerical generalisation.
7. Research can be creative and transformative
We encouraged lecturers to think beyond the formal report. Research might be represented through podcasts, poems, short films, exhibitions, storyboards, and multimodal artefacts.
In the Parklife project, a cut-up poem about a local murder was read aloud by a young researcher at an advocacy event. Park managers and councillors were visibly moved and committed on the spot to improving lighting and safety. This is what New Materialist research calls a line of flight, a moment where affect produces real-world movement (Fox and Alldred, 2015).
Similarly, in our digital storytelling research, we show how creative practice itself becomes theory:
“Rather than representing research data through art or writing, the process of art and writing becomes the research and the theorising” (Gilbert and Macleroy, 2021, p. 3).
Conclusion
Our final message was clear. Research is an act of professional courage. It is not box-ticking. It is not only for academics. It is how teachers ask better questions of their practice, their institutions, and their learners.
We closed with six essentials:
A question
A field of existing research
A method
Ethics
A contribution to knowledge
Transparent referencing
With these foundations, and with the support of the British Library Research Network, FE lecturers can build practitioner inquiries that do not merely describe education, but actively reshape it.
References
Dobson, T. and Gilbert, F. (2024) Becoming the falconer: productive feedback for the redrafting of creative writing. New Writing.
Fox, N. and Alldred, P. (2015) ‘New materialist social inquiry: designs, methods and the research-assemblage’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 18(4), pp. 399–414.
Gilbert, F. and Macleroy, V. (2021) ‘Different ways of descending into the crypt: methodologies and methods for researching creative writing’, New Writing, 18(3), pp. 253–271. Gilbert Macleroy – Creative wri…
Gilbert, F. and Stewart, A. (2025) Parklife project: creative research with young co-researchers. Goldsmiths, University of London.
Muncey, T. (2005) ‘Doing autoethnography’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 4(1), pp. 69–86.
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