Advancing the methodological frontiers of research into teaching in higher education

When it comes to advancing knowledge, pedagogy as an object of study is ‘hard-to-know’ (Nind, Curtin, and Hall Citation2016, 3). By extension, there are significant challenges in researching teaching in higher education. Different pedagogies lead us in different methodological directions. For example, in researching teaching, investigators might be addressing something conceptualised as an art, a craft or a science, and this changes what counts as worth knowing and how the researcher might know it. As Nind, Curtin, and Hall (Citation2016, 50) discuss, how we position pedagogy impacts decision-making, including: ‘What do we, as researchers, look at? Where do we look? How do we look? What is visible and invisible from different points of view?’. Much of the everyday work of teaching in higher education is so familiar to researchers that how it is experienced and enacted, even how it is articulated (see Nind, Curtin, and Hall Citation2016 for these distinctions) recedes into the dangerous waters of assumed common sense. Such familiarity can draw researchers to particular methodological approaches that can become common in the sense of Brinkmann’s (Citation2015) ‘Good Old-Fashioned Qualitative Inquiry (GOFQI)’ and such familiar common sense that they barely require mention in empirical-type journal papers (Wald, Harland, and Daskon Citation2024).