Collaboration

For us, collaboration meant working together on a joint project. We all had a stake in the success of it. We all felt quite passionate about the topic; the practitioner researchers in particular were passionate about the idea of looking at our practice in a rigorous manner and sharing the conclusions with the wider public. The way we chose to work, collaboratively, was one of the big challenges of the project. Collaboration is about more than a group of people working together, it's about how they negotiate their way through the process, the roles they play, the group dynamics, the way they solve their challenges, they way they carve up the work. Our collaborative research experience was enriched by the many years of experience we had had in the field. Like other practitioner researchers, "We were drawn to the project by the idea of working with each other and with the project coordinator" (Niks et al., 2003, p. 81). However, unlike the practitioner researchers in Dancing in the Dark, we were quite passionate about our research topic. We embarked upon this research project because some of us needed an adventure, believed that it was a rare opportunity and wanted to try out research, but most importantly, we wanted to articulate to the world what we understood to be effective ABE/Literacy practice.

Collaboration is not a smooth process, but it was made more challenging by the distance that separated us, the complexity and busyness of our working (and personal) lives, and the fact that we were embarking upon a project and process that few of us had experience with. Again, like other practitioner researchers, we noticed that, "Research takes time, and collaborative research takes even longer because relationships, as well as meaning, have to be negotiated" (Niks et al., 2003, p. 81).

Marina, who had very recent experience in it through her involvement in the "Dancing in the Dark" project, guided us in our collaborative process. We talked about Marina's role and how she would be involved in this project, what the role of "Research Friend" meant to this group and what we were trying to accomplish.

I often wonder if we had the same understanding of what it meant to work collaboratively. For example, there were many times during our research team meetings when decisions were not made, when we chose, because of lack of time or energy or both, to defer the decision. Some members of the team were more comfortable deferring the decisions, perhaps noting that we will never agree, so why keep talking about it, or perhaps feeling that they needed more time for the idea to settle before they could agree. Does a group working collaboratively need to reach consensus most of the time, or is it all right to agree to disagree? We never asked this question, and we never got down to agreeing what collaborating meant to each of us. We simply moved along, respectfully, seriously, learning this new craft and reflecting on our own practice.