Giving up and getting lost in Hanoi: playing with creative research methods in transnational contexts

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper we share our experiences of working with creative research methods to explore HE teacher ‘becomings’ across a transnational education partnership between four universities, three in Vietnam and one in the United Kingdom. The work forms the qualitative phase of a two-year British Council Vietnam funded project. This phase of our research was concerned with HE teachers’ stories about their career trajectories, their concept making about professional learning and the value of post-qualitative research methods to collaborative research across substantially contrasting social, cultural and economic settings. Drawing on ideas from post-qualitative research practices we read, talked, walked and made together in a range of face to face and digitally mediated events that opened up conversations about methodology and generated a common body of shared empirical material about HE teachers ‘becomings’. We ‘followed the contours’ after Brinkman’s concept of ‘abduction’ and Maclure’s notion of ‘hot spots’ to interact with our materials in ways that challenge more orthodox approaches to qualitative research that centre on the primacy of data and coding. This approach encouraged us to relinquish the certainties, the ‘giving up’ in our title, of orthodox qualitative research traditions and disorientate ourselves, getting purposefully “lost„, in ways that foregrounded the socio-cultural and linguistic diversity of our research partnership. We share the outcomes, on-goings and provocations of our work and the significance for both HE workforce development and international teaching and research partnerships.