The complexities and tensions in researching extended education across geographies

The To Make The Invisible Visible research collaboration (TIV) involving researchers from Sweden, Switzerland and Australia is now in its fourth and final year. The other papers in this symposium present some of the important knowledge produced by this project. As well as learning much about practice in Extended Education, we believe this project also has important methodological implications. Further, we believe the project also taught us something about the mindset of extended education in the individual countries. The researchers who have collaborated over the last three years all shared a desire to better understand the complexities of play and leisure focused Extended Education practice across geographical contexts. That raises questions about our preconceptions and understandings of different childhood values. However, Extended Education is a small field, meaning that team members arrived at TIV with many differences, theoretical, methodological and cultural. Throughout the project, these differences surfaced and re-surfaced in multiple ways that impacted on research methods, analysis, presentations and writing. This paper takes its starting point in the overall research question: What opportunities and challenges do researchers articulate around collaborating on research about Extended Education? The results presented are based on an analysis of written reflections provided by the participating researchers (n:11), focusing on opportunities and challenges during the research process. As qualitative researchers, we do not regard such differences which are described above as problematic or a flaw that compromises the research and its findings. The intrusion of the personal in research is instead to be expected. As Lather & St Pierre (2013) ask, how is it possible, and for how long, to untangle our human selves from acts of research and the data and writing they produce? The many ways we experienced our differences, the disagreements, tensions, navigations and middle grounds we landed on were the research. It made us think about our personal and/or national ideas of a good childhood or leisure time of children. Our data and analysis for this project emerged from these tensions. This paper takes a critical reflective look back at the TIV project. It presents reflections from members of the research team about what they learned from this research collaboration, and what were significant moments that shaped the research. This paper has important implications for all Extended Education researchers, and particularly those who collaborate across geographical and theoretical contexts.