At the Crossroad - Challenges and Possibilities in Becoming a Researcher in Times of Collaboration

Author(s):

Gudrun Holmdahl(presenting / submitting)Annika Åstrand(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

22. Research in Higher Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

22 SES 08 B, Reflections on Teaching and Research Methods

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-25

09:00-10:30

Room:

NM-Theatre O

Chair:

Ana Mouraz

Contribution

This article focuses partly overlooked aspects regarding organisation and implementation of postgraduate education and more specifically, doctoral studies under collaborative projects with both research and development claims. The purpose of the article is that by the author's own experiences – both senior lecturers in education - contribute to increased knowledge of what it can mean to study for a doctorate in the field of educational science on these partly new conditions, and what implications it may have for the research and related scientific perspective which is thereby constituted. Previous research indicate that collaborative projects where different logics is to be integrated generally are held insolely positive and generative terms (Danermark & Kullberg, 1999; Dahlstedt & Hertzberg, 2011; Öijen, 2013), while that type of complex arrangements may involve both challenges and possibilities when it comes to developing an independent and critical approach (Mendoza, 2010). The integration of different logics characterizing collaborative projects, and its partly dissimilar claims, will have significance for the research questions that will be asked and the results thus made possible.

If development has long been an imperative associated with various welfare efforts, the concept of collaboration during at least the last two decades has emerged as the rhetorical companion to it and a sort of key to success in this type of context. In several commission reports and policy documents with a bearing on the education sector, it is stated that there is a need for increased collaboration between universities and schools, and that educational research should be expanded to contribute to results, applicable to teacher training and educational professionals (Levinsson, 2013). The collaborative project which we during our doctoral studies were involved in, can be seen as an expression of such a rapprochement between research and school, a research structure not least a commission report from the late 1990s (SOU 1999: 63) is considered to have contributed to (Erixon Arreman, 2005; Levinsson, 2013; Öijen, 2014).

The increased emphasis on development and collaboration during the past two decades links to value shifts within the social scientific knowledge production in general. Concepts of Mode 1 and Mode 2 (Gibbons, 1994) describe, what researchers in the 1990s saw as an ongoing and partly desirable movement from an established and traditional view of science and research practice (Mode 1) with raised, elitist and less community oriented aims, to a more demand-driven, democracy-promoting, community-oriented science and research practice (Mode 2). Research on collaboration, however, has pointed out that "although collaboration is organised in order to solve problems, we must be aware that the interaction also generates problems that one have not previously had to contend with”(Danermark & Kullberg, 1999, p.10, our translation).

Collaborative projects imply the involvement of several stakeholders, which contribute to the complexity (Danermark & Kullberg, 1999). The complexity can be about more or less conditional, formal and temporary relationships between different sectors of society, agencies and professions, whose time limited frameworks, models and organisational conditions, partly differ (Danermark & Kullberg, 1999; Dahlstedt & Hertzberg, 2011; Mendoza, 2010). With reference to this complexity, research on collaboration, highlights that the participants are clear about and confident in their professions or professional affiliations. Based on this our research questions are:

What might it mean for aspiring or junior researchers in the field of educational science to build a critical scientific approach in the junction between the different logics that collaborative projects are characterized by?

What implications, in terms of potential challenges and possibilities, are at hand in such postgraduate arrangements and how do these converge to shifts and displacements of the role of educational research in general?

Method

The starting point for the study is two researchers (the authors) stories of the time as doctoral students in a multi-year school research and school development project - School Development as Change of Local Organizations (National Agency for Education, 2002) – a collaborative project with multiple partners involved, a complex arrangement as described above. In the study we combine auto-, duo-, and performance-ethnographic method, as with its creative and analytic approach makes it possible for us to anchor our own stories, based on the reflected and reflexive experience of being trained as researchers (Redman-MacLaren, 2015), in dialogue with surrounding context (Denzin, 2014). An important argument for the auto-ethnographic orientation is that it opens up and legitimizes autobiographical portrayals of diverse (life) experience, (life) conditions and (life) destinies. Performative writing is a kind of intuitive writing where the text often refers to the emotionally charged moment, driven by the critical and pressing issues (Denzin, 2014; Pollock, 1998 in Denzin, 2014). In line with this, great emphasis is placed on personal experience - not least physical - that encourages the writing in which bodily experiences can be expressed in terms of text - often poetically coloured - and where the boundaries between academic and literary as well as other forms of aesthetic portrayal often does not need to be as sharp (Spry, 2011). Thus, investigation objects in this study are we ourselves and our reflected and reflexive experiences, during a period of our lives, being trained as researchers. By using empirical fragments of policy documents from that time, as well as from our own field notes, logbooks, etc., written during our time as doctoral students, and performance-ethnographically interpreted today, we illustrate how being in the junction of different logics and relations in a collaborative project may have implications for the identity and confidence as a professional researcher. In this study we use ourselves as a meeting place for an inward and outward gaze as a means to interpret cultural experience (Neuman, 1996), in our case, the experience of being trained as researchers in a complex arrangement. This means that, as researchers we speak in first-person-voice (Bochner & Ellis, 1996) and consider our preconceptions as an opportunity rather than a source of error (Holmberg, 2007). As far as we know, this way of relating to personal experience has not had a prominent place in science of education or in research on post-graduate training.

Expected Outcomes

The analysis shows that the arrangements as such of doctoral studies is not a neutral issue, but rather of great importance both in terms of the identity work that studies of this kind means, and in terms of the junior researcher's career and views on the possibilities and limitations of science.. Based on our own interpreted experiences of becoming researchers in a collaborative project, we regard the complexity of the collaborative structure both as a possible stimulus and as something risky. On one hand there is an advantage of being included in, having to act diplomatically and to relate independently critical to different logics within a collaborative project. On the other hand, such a situation may be perceived as too intricate and precarious for prospective researchers who are not yet clear about or safe in their profession. Today's education policy discourse with an emphasis on collaboration, development and dialogic knowledge production according to the triple helix (cf. Mode 2 and 3) likely means more demand-driven, collaboration-based postgraduate education arrangements ahead. With a judicious handling, this may result in a postgraduate training which thanks to complexity of relationships and involved logics , enables development of an autonomously critical approach as well as insight about scientific possibilities and limitations. However, research about doctoral students within projects shows they are at a greater risk of falling into various conflicts of loyalty and lock-in situations, which has implications for the construction of their professional identity, research, future career and vision of scientific possibilities and limitations (Mendoza, 2010; TAHE, 2014). Collaboration researchers have pointed out that the differences between the different logics in a collaborative project need to be identified, respected, and become something the partners involved learn to live with, to a collaboration to be constructive and sustainable (Danermark & Kullberg, 1999).

References

Dahlstedt, M. & Hertzberg, F. (2011). Skola i samverkan: miljonprogrammet och visionen om den öppna skolan. Malmö: Gleerup. Danermark, B. & Kullberg, C. (1999). Samverkan: välfärdsstatens nya arbetsform. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Denzin, N. (2014). Interpretive Autoethnography. (2nd ed.)Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications Ellis, C. & Bochner, A.P. (Eds.) (1996). Composing ethnography: alternative forms of qualitative writing. London: Sage . Erixon Arreman, I. (2005). Research as power and knowledge: Struggles over research in teacher education. Journal of Education for Teaching, 31(3), 215-235. Gibbons, M. (1994). The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies [Elektronisk resurs]. Sage Publications. Holmberg, L. (2007). Communication in palliative home care, grief and bereavement: a mother's experiences. Diss. Malmö : Malmö högskola, 2007. Malmö. Levinsson, M. (2013). Evidens och existens. Evidensbaserad undervisning i ljuset av lärares erfarrenheter. Doctoral thesis, Göteborg Studies in Educational Sciences 339. Göteborg: Acta universitatis gothoburgensis. Mendoza, P. 2010). Academic capitalism. A new landscape for doctoral socialization. In: P. Mendoza & S.K.Gardner On Becoming a Scholar: Socialization and Development in Doctoral Education [Elektronisk resurs]. (pp.113-133) Stylus Publishing, LLC. National Agency for Education (2002). Skolutveckling som förändring av lokala organisationer. Stockholm: Skolverket. Neuman, (1996). Collecting ourselves at the end of the century. In C. Ellis & A. Bochner (Eds.), Composing ethnography. Alternative forms of Quality writing London: Alta Mira Press Pettigrew, A.M. (1979). On studying organizational cultures. Administrative Science Quarterly Vol. 24, No. 4, Qualitative Methodology (Dec., 1979), pp. 570-581 Redman-MacLaren, M. (2015) Becoming a researcher: An autoethnographic account of a doctoral researcher re-presented in poetry, Journal of Poetry Therapy, 28:3, 207-214, DOI: 10.1080/08893675.2015.1051293 SOU 1999:63a och b. Att lära och leda – En lärarutbildning för samverkan och utveckling. Lärarutbildningskommiténs slutbetänkande. Stockholm: Utbildningsdepartementet. (TAHE) The Association of Higher Education. Expertgruppen för kvalitetsfrågor (2014). Ledning för kvalitet i forskarutbildningen. Stockholm: Sveriges universitets- & högskoleförbund (SUHF)/Expertgruppen för kvalitetsfrågor. Spry, T. (2011). Body, Paper, Stage. Writing and Performing Autoethnography. Left Coast Press, Inc.

Author Information

Gudrun Holmdahl (presenting / submitting)

Karlstad University

Karlstad

Annika Åstrand (presenting)

Karlstad university

Dep. of educational Studies