Academic design research often fails to contribute to design practice. This dissertation explores how design research collaborations can provide knowledge that design professionals will use in practice. The research shows that design professionals are not addressed as an important audience between the many audiences of collaborative research projects. The research provides insight in the learning process by design professionals in design research collaborations and it identifies opportunities for even more learning. It shows that design professionals can learn about more than designing, but also about application domains or project organization.
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Collaborative research methods such as action research and engaged scholarship are seen as one way for research to impact practice. Scholars engaged in such research face several opportunities and challenges that often do not make into academic publications, and yet hold valuable insights. In this symposium, we will unpack the research journeys of academics who have been involved in projects with practitioners as knowledge partners. This symposium's objectives are twofold. First, we will showcase the diversity in research design across our panelists and discuss potential traps as researchers balance rigour with relevance. Second, we will discuss specific research strategies such as relational reflexivity and researcher vulnerability (Bjørkeng, Carlsen, & Rhodes, 2014) that push the frontiers of research methodologies.
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In recent years, there has been a growing focus on incorporating the perspectives and experiences of people with dementia in research. However, collaborative research that engages with their everyday lives remains limited, and there is little reflection on this research approach. Our research project on everyday life with dementia was conducted in the Netherlands by a team comprising academic researchers and co-researchers with dementia. The co-researcher group of six people with dementia called themselves Brain Power. The group was the first of its kind in the Netherlands. This study aims to reflect on the processes that underpinned the collaborative research over a three-and-a-half-year period. To identify significant elements in the collaboration, individual reflections were collected from Brain Power members and academic researchers, and three joint group reflection meetings were obtained. A reflexive thematic analysis of the data identified four main themes: (1) Forging a group identity; (2) Learning together as a driving force of co-creation; (3) Sharing experiences to transform perceptions of dementia; and (4) Carrying on our work together. These themes are illustrated using descriptions of the ways of working and reflections on the process. The results indicate that long-term collaborative research with people with dementia is feasible and adds a deeper level of understanding and authenticity to the outputs. Working collaboratively on a research project requires specific skills from both academic researchers and co-researchers with dementia.
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Over the last two decades, institutions for higher education such as universities and colleges have rapidly expanded and as a result have experienced profound changes in processes of research and organization. However, the rapid expansion and change has fuelled concerns about issues such as educators' technology professional development. Despite the educational value of emerging technologies in schools, the introduction has not yet enjoyed much success. Effective use of information and communication technologies requires a substantial change in pedagogical practice. Traditional training and learning approaches cannot cope with the rising demand on educators to make use of innovative technologies in their teaching. As a result, educational institutions as well as the public are more and more aware of the need for adequate technology professional development. The focus of this paper is to look at action research as a qualitative research methodology for studying technology professional development in HE in order to improve teaching and learning with ICTs at the tertiary level. The data discussed in this paper have been drawn from a cross institutional setting at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands. The data were collected and analysed according to a qualitative approach.
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Collaborative learning is not a new teaching and learning approach; it has been around since the 1970s and is an evidence-based practice that has been proven to be effective time after time. Therefore, instead of reinventing the wheel or only relying on best practices or anecdotal evidence of what works and what doesn’t, especially when designing Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) environments, educators might find it useful to make use of existing collaborative learning instructional design elements. These elements have been scientifically proven to be effective and can be applied in both the physical and online international classroom.
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Educational innovations often tend to fail, mainly because teachers and school principals do not feel involved or are not allowed to have a say. Angela de Jong's dissertation shows the importance of school principals and teachers leading 'collaborative innovation' together. Collaborative innovation requires a collaborative, distributed approach involving both horizontal and vertical working relationships in a school. Her research shows that teams with more distributed leadership have a more collaborative 'spirit' to improve education. Team members move beyond formal (leadership) roles, and work more collectively on school-wide educational improvement from intrinsic motivation. De Jong further shows that school principals seek a balance in steering and providing space. She distinguished three leadership patterns: Team Player, Key Player, Facilitator. Team players in particular are important for more collaborative innovation in a school. They balance between providing professional space to teachers (who look beyond their own classroom) and steering for strategy, frameworks, boundaries, and vision. This research took place in schools working with the program of Foundation leerKRACHT, a program implemented by more than a thousand schools (primary, secondary, and vocational education). The study recommends, towards school principals and teachers, and also towards trainers, policymakers, and school board members, to reflect more explicitly on their roles in collaborative innovation and talk about those roles.
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When teaching is considered as a collaborative activity, the aimof research projects in schools needs to exceed the individualand personal levels and aim to contribute to research-informedreflection of a team of teachers. Within this multiple case study, weadapted the graduation research project within a primary teachereducation programme, trying to bridge the personal level (wherestudent-teachers show their individual competence) and thecollaborative level (where the graduation research project aims toinspire practice of several teachers within a school). In this redesignof the graduation research project, the concepts of boundary activity,ownership, meaningfulness and dialogue were helpful. However,our study shows that connecting graduation research projects withschool development is not just a matter of redesigning a part of thecurriculum, but that it requires new perspectives and new qualities ofstudent-teachers, research supervisors from the university and actorswithin the school.
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To elucidate how authoritative knowledge is established for better dealing with unstructured urban problems, this article describes how collaborations between researchers and officials become an instrument for conceptualizing and addressing policy problems. A case study is used to describe a research consortium evaluating the controversial practice of ‘Lifestyle’ based housing allocation in the Dutch domain of social-housing. Analyzing this case in key episodes, we see researchers and policymakers selectively draw on established institutional practices—their so called ‘home practices’—to jointly (re-)structure problems. In addition, we find that restructuring problems is not only intertwined with, but also deliberately aimed at (re-)structuring the relations within and between the governmental practices, the actors are embedded in. It is by selectively tinkering with knowledges, values, norms, and criteria that the actors can deliberately enable and constrain the ways a real-world problem is addressed.
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Designers move more and more in the direction of Service Design, in which frequently a participatory or co-design approach is used to involve service providers in the design process. The designerprovider relationship in such Service Design processes differs in four aspects from traditional client-relationships: The relationship is 1) more dynamic and interactive, 2) based on collaboratively evolving ideas and ambitions, 3) focusing on the process of innovation, rather than on the outcome, and 4) frequently based on extrinsic motivation for innovation or on fuzzy starting points. Designers experience difficulties in persuading service providers of the importance of such a collaborative approach, while providers are not familiar with this kind of approach and their organizations are not ready for such a kind of collaboration. This paper positions designer-provider relationship in Service Design processes in literature and describes a research proposal for the development of an efficient and effective participatory design intervention that stimulates collaboration between designers and service providers.
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Horizontal collaborative purchasing (HCP) has often been cited as a way for hospitals to address the challenges of the rising healthcare costs. However, hospitals do not seem to utilize horizontal collaborative purchasing on any large scale, and recent initiatives have had mixed results. Focusing on Dutch hospitals, in this paper we present major impediments for collaborative purchasing, resulting in a first component of our proposed electronic horizontal collaborative purchasing model for hospitals; as a second component it contains a collaborative purchasing typology. A first validation round with hospital purchasing professionals, described separately in Kusters and Versendaal (2011), confirmed four applicable purchasing types and fourteen salient collaborative purchasing impediments. The model is operationalized by including possible information technology (IT) solutions that address the specific fourteen impediments. This model is validated through methodological triangulation of four different validation techniques. We conclude that IT has the potential to support, or overcome, the impediments of HCP. The validation also reveals the need to distinguish between more processrelated, as opposed to social-related, obstacles; the immediate potential for IT solutions is greater for the process-related impediments. Ultimately, we conclude that the collaborative epurchasing model (e-HCP) and implementation roadmap can be used by healthcare consortia, branche organizations, partnering healthcare institutes and multi-site healthcare institutes as a means to help identifying strategies to initiate, manage and evaluate collaborative purchasing practices
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