Abstract
Growing recognition of the complexity of children’s lives has led to strong advocacy in education research literature for greater collaboration between researchers from different paradigms to address the ‘wicked’ problems that face contemporary children and families. There is little literature, however, exploring how collaboration works in practice. This paper, drawing on researcher reflective narrative, and using Cultural Historical Activity Theory as a heuristic framework, describes and critiques the formative stages of an educational research collaborative group of five early and one mid-career early childhood education researchers (the authors), from two universities, and with quite different epistemological and ontological understandings. It outlines, from an insider perspective, some of the outcomes, challenges and tensions associated with participating in the research group, and concludes by providing some implications for policy and considerations for those contemplating forming a collaborative group.
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Notes
Informed by (Rizvi and Lingard 2010), here the term policy is used in a broad sense to mean texts which variously communicate the position of the State, set agendas and steer the understandings, actions and behaviours.
‘Community of practice’ in CHAT incorporates ideas of situated learning first proposed by Lave and Wenger (1991).
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Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the support of the Excellence in Research in Early Years Education Collaborative Research Network project that provided the opportunity for us to come together and learn from one another. In particular we would like to thank Professor Donna Berthelsen for her thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper and Professor Linda Harrison for her on-going mentoring. Our thanks also go to the anonymous reviewer for their critically constructive and supportive review.
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Wong, S., Murray, E., Rivalland, C. et al. Relationships matter: some benefits, challenges and tensions associated with forming a collaborative educational researcher group. Aust. Educ. Res. 41, 243–259 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-013-0127-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-013-0127-7