NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
Individual and Institutional Partnerships: Some Experiences
By Beatrice Avalos, University of Chile, Santiago
Email: bavalos@terra.clKeywords
Research partnerships, individual & institutional, Chile, RRAG, Papua New Guinea
Summary
Three very different kinds of partnership are discussed here. The first, in Chile itself, was much more than research training; it involved joint research with a key partner. The second was a South-South cross-national egalitarian partnership in a policy research review on teacher effectiveness; and the third was a bilateral partnership in PNG for local teacher development.
In the early seventies we were setting up a programme focused on interdisciplinary research in education, at the Catholic University. It was a wonderful time to be moving ahead in this direction as the University had just reformed itself and there was a great emphasis on establishing interdisciplinary research centres. We got together young potential researchers who worked in different university departments, most of them with Ph.D. or Masters degrees from American, British and other European countries. However, none of us had really been able to move ahead in research, as we were solitary individuals in different locations. A substantial grant from the Ford Foundation and solid support from the University was a good starting point. But we needed something more. Noel McGinn from Harvard University agreed to spend a year with us, and that was a crucial input for many to learn about the mechanics of being a researcher. He assisted some in refining research methodologies, participated in the critical analysis of our on-going studies and engaged in a major research project with three other of us. It was the best practical learning experience that we could have had in those years. The Interdisciplinary Programme of Educational Research known as PIIE is no longer in the Catholic University, but stands on its own as a longstanding centre committed to research with a social focus.
Years later, in the late seventies, I was lucky to be involved together with Bob Myers, in the setting up of the Research Review and Advisory Group (RRAG) [1] and to lead with Wadi Haddad the production of a State-of-the-Art Review of Teacher Effectiveness research. This meant identifying researchers in different world locations and discussing with them an outline and set of procedures to gather and analyse research in those locations. Probably, this could be defined as a very rich egalitarian form of partnership. In West Africa, India, South America, Middle-East, Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand, each researcher endeavoured against all odds to find, analyse and produce a review of the research in the country which in most cases was the first in that field ever done. The partnership worked without e-mail communication, with a couple of face-to-face meetings and the rest through ordinary mail and telephones. The product of the effort of so many with little resources is still quoted in international literature concerning teacher research in developing countries.
In the late eighties, my adventurous spirit took me to Papua New Guinea, where I spent six years as Professor of Education at the University. This was a country that was building its higher education system and putting a great effort into preparing local capacity to replace the many expatriate teachers and professors still working in the country. There were many fronts on which to work. One had to do with the improvement of teacher preparation in the Community Teachers? Colleges. There was the possibility of Australian money to move ahead on this. I still remember the day when Bob Elliott and Clarrie Burke from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) came to my office to discuss a proposal to establish a joint B.Ed. campus programme for Community Teachers? College lecturers. The University of PNG would grant the degree while the QUT would provide a one-year programme in Brisbane and on-going support when the lecturers were back at their jobs in the colleges. There was an incredible amount of learning on both sides, and as a result a solid group of lecturers were empowered to become academic leaders in a system of teacher education which, at the time, was involved in important changes such as raising entry standards and lengthening of the period of study.
All the former were different forms of working together which, rather than being imposed externally, grew from the circumstances and the willingness of researchers and academics to pool the strengths each one had, to learn from each other, and to contribute to education in their different contexts.
Footnote
[1] It was from this RRAG conception that NORRAG was developed in 1986. [Ed]
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