NZARE Sympoisum accepted

The premier research conference in New Zealand is the annual meeting of the New Zealand Association for Research in Education. Therefore Niki Davis coordinated a symposium to meet and progress our collaborative action and research networking at the December NZARE conference. The proposal was accepted. Here are the details:

Collaborative Action & Research Network’s foundation and what happens next.

Abstract
In May 2009 we established the New Zealand Collaborative Action and Research Network (NZCA&RN) hub through the medium of an invited research symposium and associated Blog stimulated by Visiting Professor Somekh (2009), a founding member of the Collaborative Action Research Network. This networked learning community is in the form of “power networking” (Castells 2001) and designed to change the way we perceive, organize, manage and consume educational research within a diverse Action Research tradition complemented by sympathetic approaches, including those associated with Kaupapa Maori. In addition, NZCA&RN includes unusual strength in research in teacher education and in applications of digital technologies.
Our goal through NZCA&RN is to advance educational research and practice in New Zealand and internationally to map the diverse territory and identify the puzzles, dilemmas and contradictions among communities, practitioners, scholars and academic leaders and inform action. It was essential in this conception we honour the many ways of knowing and being within New Zealand, which is an increasingly bicultural nation, by opening the symposium with the understanding that Kaupapa Maori and diverse Action Research approaches, while different are not incompatible. Within both approaches researchers are expected, by their communities to have some form of critical and historical analysis of the role of research in a range of dynamic contexts and sites (Macfarlane 2009). Thus a metaphor which dominates is the braided river.

This symposium aims to expose the strong flows of our braided rivers of collaborative action and research networking. Together we will identify what is important and what should happen next.

Keywords: All sectors; Action Research; Kaupapa Maori Research; Digital technologies; Research networking; CARN

Paper titles:

1. The puzzles of practice: Initiating a collaborative research culture

Niki Davis, Jo Fletcher, Susan Groundwater-Smith, Angus McFarlane & Janinka Greenwood Universiteis of Canterbury and Sydney)

2. Animating Knowledge through collaborative networks

Noeline Alcorn, Bronwen Cowie and Jane Strachan (University of Waikato)

3. Practitioner Specialists build a community of praxis: a pilot project
Sue McBain and Elaine Mayo (University of Canterbury)

4. Digital technologies for innovative research networking including research to inform educational innovations in twenty-first century learning
Claire Aitkin (NMIT), Niki Davis (UC), and Margaret Lamont (VUW)

NZ CAandRN meeting in the University of Waikato

In early July, at the invitation of Noeline Alcorn and Bronwen Cowie, Niki Davis, national coordinator of the newly formed New Zealand Collaborative Action and Research Network was delighted to the University of Waikato and talk with colleagues there about e-learning and also about NZ CA&RN. Niki was invited to meet with the Dean of the College of Education and we took a picture to clelbrate. In the picture from right to left are: Bronwen, Alistair, Noelene, and Niki.

The University of Waikato is strongly considering joining the University of Canterbury and the University of Otago in sponsoring CARN. This would give us the foundation needed for a regional hub. All of the meetings went well, and we look forward to hearing more!