PARTICIPATION IN A LARGE GROUP,

MULTI-SITE COLLABORATIVE

RESEARCH PROJECT

Heltasa Conference UFS

18 – 21 November 2014

Brenda Leibowitz (UJ)

Jean Farmer (SU)

James Garraway (CPUT)

NicolineHerman (SU)

Jeff Jawitz (UCT)

Wendy McMillan (UWC)

Clever Ndebele (Univen)

Jo Anne Vorster (RU)

Susan van Schalkwyk(SU)

Chris Winberg(CPUT)

Research Setting: The problemSA Research Context:

– Incentives

– Incentives for collaboration

– Unequal playing field

– AD researchers have a stake in research

– AD personnel not always ‘entitled’ to spend time on research

– Yet for AD collaboration vital – to bolster the field

Research Setting: The opportunity

Research project: Structure, Culture and AgencyNRF Funding8 institutionsFirst project of its type in SAApproximately 18 researchers over three yearsIntentions:• to explore/produce/learn• to arrive at recommendations to

inform practice

Prior Research

• Collaborative

research valuable

• Various success

factors analysed (Leibowitz et al, 2012)

• It requires attention to issues of identity and interactional features (Leibowitz, Ndebele and Winberg, 2013)

• ‘Collaboration’ and ‘collaboration’ (Lesi, Ross and Holden (2012)

Approaches informing studies

• ‘‘Collaboration’ and ‘collaboration’ (Lesi, Ross and Holden (2012)

• Situated learning/Community of Practice

• Framework of structure, culture and agency (Brew et al 2012; Kahn et al 2012)

• Significance of the group as ‘corporate agency’: “The capacity of a group of people to act together in pursuit of a common agenda” (Kahn et al 2012)

Data Collection

1. What have been the outputs and outcome of your participation for you thus far?

2. What have the challenges been for you in achieving these or any outputs or outcomes?

3. What has facilitated your participation? (In your work context/institution? By the project itself? By you?

4. What has hindered your participation? (In your context/institution? By the workings of the project itself? By you?)

Interpretation

• Search for a framework

• Coding

• Retroduction

• Writing – in process

Outcome

• Intimidation

• Pressure

• Learning

• Production:– Second tranche of funds

– Twelve publications

– 21 Conference publications

– Eight institutional case study reports

– A blog

Structure: External

• Support from line managers (✔):– My direct line manager, the Dean, has facilitated my

participation. He has been an enthusiastic supporter of my involvement in the project, and never queries when I indicate that I will be out of the office working on this project.

• Resources (✔)– I have money (from another project) for a research

assistant that I am using to keep work on the data ticking over – that has been some help

– My participation has also been facilitated by the fact that I have an office and a secretary that can help out with the administrative work

Structure: External: Workload (✗)

– I am not always able to have my mind 100% on the project, … If I don’t respond to an e-mail (even while on a writing retreat) I will feel that I am neglecting my responsibilities. Because we have strong central controls … I have to sign off many documents – and at the moment there are e-mails telling me that because I’m off campus I’m holding things up… So there is guilt….

– …the inability to attract suitably qualified personnel who have the knowledge and experience of academic development work also meant that the centre has to operate with skeleton staff, the few appointees need hand holding. This meant that the time had to be divided over a number of the centre activities thus leaving me with minimal time devoted to the project’s activities. Thus the outcomes of the project are not met within the scheduled times

Structure: External - internal (✔)

• Resources for research

– The writing retreat at Mont Fleur has been the most facilitating event. The place is conducive to working and the encouragement and support from the Project team members is great. I really enjoyed engaging with the group and drawing on their experience and knowledge. I felt very at home with the Project members.

Structure: External

• Geographic spread and travel fatigue (✗)

– The main challenge I have faced has been travelling long distances to the meeting places in Cape Town. Travelling has been very exhausting and I would have problems of working well on the first days of meetings due to exhaustion

Structure: Internal: subgroups (✔)

– I found that working in a smaller ‘sub-group’ was more effective than when the entire team was supposed to be working towards a particular deadline … I have participated in a number of ‘sub-projects’ over the past two years and each have, to a greater or lesser extent, generated outputs

– …I have been “forced” to work and write with others. This has been a huge challenge as most of my writing experience has been single authored papers

Structure: internal (✔)

• Lack of structure, deadlines and direction from project leadership felt as a constraint by some

Culture: External/internal

• Novelty of research in institution – value of collaboration as provision of opportunity:– Coming from an academic institution where

research and publishing by the academic developers has in the past not been emphasised, the need to reflect on, and share our practices through research and publications on our practices is made critical by my involvement in a study of a national magnitude (researcher from a HDI)

Culture: Internal

– Despite the many benefits of working in a large team (and I am very grateful for having had this opportunity), my experience has been that the process has been unwieldy and probably not as productive as it could have been. I have often experienced a sense of frustration over the time taken to ‘get everyone on the same page’ (researcher from a HAI)

Culture

• Ideas of the role of theory in research

• Ideas of the usefulness of using Margaret Archer and the interplay of structure, culture and agency

• Belief in the importance of collaboration

– Shared project (‘concern’ cf Archer): professional development and educational enhancement in SA

Agency

• One could look at individual agency:

– Members’ determination to make the collaborative research project work

– Members’ determination to derive personal/professional benefit from the project

• And corporate agency: the ‘group’ agency that allows the learning to flourish

Impact of corporate agency

Learning through the team writing projects has been very rewarding. Writing for me is usually quite a solitary activity – so I wasn’t too sure how the team writing approach would work – but it has been very useful to hammer things out with the group – to ounce ideas off each other – to critique what we have done –to get the benefits of the other writers’ knowledge, etc. We all bring something different to the writing process – and that has been quite an eye-opener for me

Impact of corporate agency

A major benefit for me has been in the area of writing for publication. Through a collaborative process with two seasoned researchers resulting in a publication in a highly rated higher education journal my confidence in publishing was boosted. Through learning from the process I have in 2013 alone now been able to publish three articles in peer reviewed DHET accredited journals

Impact of corporate agency

I do not know what it feels like to do a PhD totally on your own, but I am not sure if I would have been able to do it as an individual. Being a member of the group gave me exposure to so many different opinions and ideas which, although I did not always understand everything, still informed my own growth and inspired me to continue

Impact of corporate agency

the theoretical and the methodological rigour of our experienced colleagues in the project is very empowering to inexperienced researchers. Coming from an academic institution where research and publishing by the academic developers has in the past not been emphasised, the need to reflect on, and share our practices through research and publications on our practices is made critical by my involvement in a study of a national magnitude”

Individual Agency

Those participants who were able to align the project aims to their personal concerns and projects seemed to benefit significantly from their involvement in the project.

Individual agency: ‘dispositions’

I guess my own curiosity was piqued by the need to learn about critical realism, which I first resisted, then got so stimulated by, so the answer is ‘my own curiosity’ here.

Conclusion

• Distinction between ‘Collaboration’ and ‘collaboration’ useful.

• ‘Collaboration’ and ‘participation’ –interconnected and yet slippery

• Interplay of structure, culture and agency – useful analytic framework for studying collaboration

• We advocate more research on collaborataveresearch in SA/resource constrained contexts/contexts with high levels of educational inequality

Conclusion

• The system at the level of structure and culture constrains or enables the emergence of corporate agency; and thus learning in collaborative research groups

• In this project:

– There was increased

agency for both individuals

and the group

Conclusion

• Collaboration is helpful to support learning

• BUT it is highly challenging, precisely because of the conditions that make it necessary

• And these conditions are highly contextual and historical

• Given its context, for SA

nationally funded large

projects can make a

significant contribution to the

HE landsccape

References

References

Boughey, C. & Niven, P., 2012. Higher Education Research & Development The emergence of research in the South African Academic Development movement. Higher Education Research and Develoopment, 31 (5) 641 - 653Brew, A., Boud, D., Lucas, L & Crawford, K. (2012). Reflexive deliberation in international research collaboration: minimising risk and maximising opportunity. Higher Education, 66(1), pp.93–104. Available at: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10734-012-9592-6 [Accessed February 22, 2014].Kahn, P., Goodhew, P., Murphy, M. & Walsh, L. (2013). The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as collaborative working: a case study in shared practice and collective purpose. Higher Education Research & Development, 32(6), pp.901–914. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07294360.2013.806439 [Accessed July 2, 2014].Kahn, P., Petichakis, C. & Walsh, L. (2012). Developing the capacity of researchers for collaborative working. International Journal of Researcher Development 3 (1) 49 – 63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/17597511211278643Leibowitz, B., Ndebele, C. & Winberg, C. (2013) The role of academic identity in collaborative research. Studies in Higher Education. DOI:10.1080/03075079.2013.801424 (3 June 2013)Leibowitz, B., Bozalek, V., Carolissen, R., Nicholls, L., Rohleder, P. and Swartz, L. Educating the Educators: Creating a powerful learning environment. Pp. 117 – 129. In: Leibowitz, B., Swartz, L., Bozalek, V., Carolissen, R., Nichols, L. and Rohleder, P. Eds. (2012) Community, self and identity: Educating South African university students for citizenship. Cape Town:HSRC Press.