On Saturday, May 17, 2025, if you arrive at 1613 of the Liberal Arts Building at 10 o'clock on time, the venue of the 179th Huaxia Course Forum, you will not be able to enter the venue. Students arrived one after another at 9 o'clock; at 9:30, everyone was sitting on the ground beside the podium and in the aisles, looking forward to it.

Lin Xiaoying from the School of Education of Peking University gave a lecture entitled "Discovering My Field - Talking about Research Methods" to the teachers and students present, without PPT, but with blackboard writing and interactive imprints and flows of ideas. Zheng Xin, deputy secretary of the Party Branch of the ICI, hosted the lecture, and Cai Shangzhi, Li Lin, Yang Xiaozhe, Yang Chengyu, Wang Yanling, Wang Zhe, Zhou Wenye, Zou Wen, Wang Bingru and others participated in it.

Report

Lin Xiaoying took the local wisdom of educational research as the center, and used the three key issues of qualitative research to string together the whole lecture, and talked about how to activate academic vitality with local experience.

The first is intuition and experience. "Intuition is the most important thing for a human being", but this instinctive perception of researchers is often neglected by traditional research methods. "Everyone is precious", Lin Xiaoying encourages everyone to "write": regain the ability to write a diary, do not do too much method training first, objectify what you have experienced into something that can be traced back, and thus transform intuition into your own experience accumulation. This is the starting point and foundation of research.

Second, theory and evidence/facts. Facts are often multifaceted, and experience is always fragmented. Theory is a tool for dealing with fragmented experience, providing researchers with standards and basis for judgment. To construct a theory, you need to propose concepts, which are expressed as coding in qualitative research and variables in quantitative research. You need to construct variables and refine coding to form concepts. Only through sufficient theoretical learning - learning to dialogue with theory, plus the accumulation of intuition and experience - learning and reflecting on the way to deal with the world, can you integrate evidence, facts, and fragmented things into theory and integrate them.

Third, universality and localism/locality. All research is local, and ethics are in people's hearts. We need to see real people, feel the pain of others, and feel our own pain. "Instead of studying the suffering in the distance, it is better to study your own pain first." Researchers should let the flow of life fully flow in and feel the temperature. As the "person" with personal situation, feel the concrete in real life. Take self as the method, and finish the day's work on the same day. Focus on your own intuition and experience, experience and analyze the universality of methods and theories, and make the research engaging and vivid.

Then, Lin Xiaoying told everyone to return to the most fundamental place of the discipline and protect the most essential "human plasticity" of pedagogy. After entering the scene, we need to use professional ability to give back the kindness and dedication provided to us by the society. During the observation process, we should give feedback to each other every day, change from observer to participant, speak frankly, and help solve each other's problems. Through research, we can build a world of ideas and become a beam of light in real life, illuminating some invisible corners.

During the interactive discussion, teachers and students shared their insights, confusions and thoughts, and Xiaoying responded one by one. The laughter of teachers and students occasionally passed through the crowd and echoed in the corridor on the 16th floor.

Before we knew it, the lecture came to an end, and many students shook hands with Xiaoying. Let this temporary farewell become the starting point for the next reunion.