Europe itself has  become a meeting ground of developed and developing countries and universities in the developed countries provide teacher education opportunities and higher degrees pathways not only for the countries and communities in Europe that have emergent economies but also for those around the world.

This paper reports on the second stage of a project that examines the emergence of an academic partnership between educators of a so-called developed and a so-called developing country. The first stage, the case study of a specific teacher development project that involved western study, was reported at ECER in 2012 (Greenwood, Kabir & Alam; 2012). It surveyed the local and international context of the project, and analysed the ways in which the international study was successful and/or fell short. This paper reports a second stage, examining how a partnership began to develop beyond the formal period of study, and the ways in which it extends the original project’s research and wider learning agendas. In particular it addresses the challenges experienced of achieving of the developing country’s local goals through an overtly international study experience.

The broad research questions are:

• How a productive collaboration be fostered between researcher- educators from developed and developing academic context ?
• What kinds of strategies and negotiations are involved?
• To what extent are the goals of both parties achieved?

The growing dominance of neo-liberal monetarist policies on education in European and other western countries is well-documented. Despite advocacy of bildung (ECER, 2008) and emancipatory pedagogy  (Freire, 1998), financial resourcing of tertiary education in western countries is targeted towards economic opportunity. The entry of international students into higher degree programmes allows academic institutions  to capitalise their academic assets and trade them in the global market. (Greenwood, Kabir & Alam 2012). Complementary pressures are felt by countries that we call developing. Education is recognised as a key to economic and social change, and the established universities of western countries are looked to as the means for best equipping those teachers selected to lead educational development with the knowledge and skills they will require to do so (ibid). In broad terms the academic trade is important, and potentially useful, to both parties.  The challenge is to ensure its usefulness and make it fair.

The theoretical frameworks that form the basis of our critical analysis draw on Steiner-Khamsi’s (2012) critique of the politics of transnational educational transfer, critical responses to neo-liberalism (Peters, 2011), conceptualisations of indigenous constructions of knowledge (Smith, 2011), reciprocity (Greenwood & Te Aika, 2010), capacity building (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005).

An exploration of how the academic trade can be a fair trade aligns with the conference theme of creativity and innovation in educational research. It reports how both sides of the partnership are seeking useful innovations and are creatively developing collaborative projects. Moreover the research methodology  is one of participatory action research, itself an innovative and creative approach that allows for multiplicity of viewpoints and reports of process as well as outcomes.  

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