Tuesday 17 December 2013

Writing together

We are interested in the process of collaborative research amongst a large group of individuals (18) across a series of sites (8). In our case this collaboration is made more challenging due to the fact that we work in academic development in South Africa. Whilst it is increasingly viewed as necessary that academic developers undertake research on teaching and learning and their own practice, there are still universities that do not see this as necessary or valuable. Some of us in the team have been working collaboratively for a while now, but some are working collaboratively for the first time, and find this daunting.  There is also a group with very little research experience altogether - this makes for an interesting collaboration. We have found that each 'group' takes something away from the collaboration. Three years after the inception of the project, we have decided to write a second reflective group paper on our experience, with a working title, Identity, emotion and expertise: reflections on a large group, multi-site collaborative research project. We worked on this paper at our most recent meeting in Pretoria on 26 November 2013. Here we are at work planning the paper:




There were ten of us at the meeting, and another four on Skype.  Those present at the meeting (in the photo below) are:

Back: Clever Ndebele (Venda); James Garraway (Cape University of Technology)
Middle: Vuyisile Nkonki and Patricial Muhuro (Fort Hare); Jo Vorster (Rhodes); Chris Winberg (CPUT); Vivienne Bozalek (Western Cape); Jean Farmer (Stellenbosch)
Front: Nicoline Herman and Brenda Leibowitz (Stellenbosch)




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