Continuing Collaborative Knowledge Production: Knowing when, where, how and why

Abstract

This paper questions assumptions about conducting research based in programs developed to serve communities which have traditionally had restricted access to the university. Grounded in an off-campus Master of Education initiative, it raises a number of ethical considerations. The questions addressed are as follows. (1) When does one move to doing research on a project which has been a satisfactory collaboration between a university and a community? (2) How is an academic to think about a collaborative project which will not, or perhaps cannot, become a site of research? (3) Where, in the space between community members’ focus on the local/specific and an academic’s focus on the global/theoretical, is it appropriate to share what has been learned? (4) Why should members of a First Nations/Aboriginal community (read any traditionally excluded group) participate in a piece of research destined for the world of academe?