Our recent NEARIMeet on Saturday 26 January 2019 was held in Marino Institute of Education in Dublin. It was our first time to visit Marino and we are hugely thankful to Suzy Macken and her colleagues in MIE for organising the day and facilitating the meeting for us. The day was a mixture of input, dialogue, critical thinking, collegiality and coffees and scones. It kicked off with a reading from Caitriona McDonagh on voice, from the ideas of Richard Winter on Finding a voice – thinking with others: a conception of action research. Winter says:
Action research is about seeking a voice with which to speak one’s experience and one’s ability to learn from that experience.
It is also about helping others to find their own voices. Action research is decentralising the production of knowledge. Other people’s thinking, based on their experience, is a key resource in enabling us to think creatively about our own, to think critically about the thoughts we started with in order to construct a new cognitive space, into which we might, provisionally, decide to move.
Winter, R. (1998) ‘Finding a voice – thinking with others: a conception of action research’ Educational Action Research, 3(6): 53-68.
This was followed by our keynote presentation from Josephine Bleach. Josephine spoke with passion, insight and experience about her work in engaging in community action research in her presentation entitled ‘Voice in Action Research’.
Laura Loftus then shared her insights around speech and language therapy student placement experiences in her Round Robin presentation.
After our coffee break, Suzy Madden told the story of her studies around supporting students on teaching placement.
Tom Cosgrove gave the final Round Robin and gave everyone much food for thought as he asked ‘How can I , by collaborating with my students and colleagues, improve my current practice of: teaching reflective writing in a professionally accredited engineering programme?’
Video snippets from our presenters as well as their slides are available below:
Thank you so much for the availability of these resources to those of us who can’t make the meets. Solid gold! And a great record of the event.
Thanks Pip
We’re delighted that you find these resources useful and also that you can ‘attend’ Nearimeets vicariously through them. We all really appreciate your comments and insights and your regular sharing of great articles and links to academic papers. We look forward too, to meeting up in May.
Mary