No Hero Narratives: The Ethos of SERA
The Special Education Research Accelerator (SERA) was built to support large-scale, collaborative research in special education.
For us, the most important part of this idea is not the platform or the procedures. Those things matter, but they are not what make SERA work. What matters most are the people and the relationships among them: researchers working with one another as peers, sharing ownership and credit for the work, and building projects that reflect the contributions of everyone involved.
The power is in the multiplier. When researchers come together around shared questions, the collective effort becomes something much larger than any one person or team could accomplish alone. That is how we can undertake studies that would be difficult, slow, or impossible for any one research group to complete.
Crowdsource Science illustrates this idea in practice. Over 30 researchers across 16 states worked together to collect classroom observations, transcripts, instructional materials, and student work from 56 teachers in 36 schools, work no single research group could have assembled on its own. The result is not just a series of papers, but a shared resource that others will be able to use long after the original studies are complete. See the Crowdsource Science infographic for more information.
The commitments that make this model work are straightforward:
- We treat research as collective work.
- The work happens among peers.
- We share ownership of the research process.
- Credit follows the work. When funding is available, the money does too. Authorship, recognition, and resources are distributed equitably among the people doing the work.
- The work should outlive the paper. We share data, materials, protocols, documentation, findings, and other resources whenever we can do so responsibly.
- We build projects that benefit the field, not only the original research team.
- No hero narratives. Large-scale research is made possible by many people, and the credit should reflect that.
These commitments will continue to shape the questions we pursue, the partnerships we build, and the products we create and share.
The power is in the multiplier. Credit follows the work. The work should outlive the paper. No hero narratives.
Together, these ideas capture what SERA is trying to build: research organized around shared questions, conducted by people working as peers, with ownership, credit, resources, data, and other products shared across the team and beyond it.
If this is the kind of research you want to help build, we welcome you to join us.
Click here to view a full list of SERA Research Partners. If you are interested in becoming a SERA Research Partner and learning more about our upcoming studies, please submit a message through our Contact Form and a member of the SERA Team will reach out to you!