Collaborative Research Community Research Articles

Equity in practice: Lessons from a cohort-based model for community voice and input in data linkage and use

Objective and ApproachCross-sector data sharing and linkage can transform information about individuals into actionable intelligence to build stronger, healthier, and more just communities. Yet, the use of cross-sector data can also reinforce legacies of racist policies and produce inequitable resource allocation, access, and outcomes. To avoid this, we must embed data equity practices throughout the data life cycle and provide mechanisms for community voice and input. However, few integrated data systems are doing this well. To combat this challenge, AISP designed a 30-month technical assistance program–the Equity in Practice Learning Community (EiPLC)--to collaboratively develop guidance and models for centering racial equity in data integration. This session provides an overview of our EiPLC Scope & Sequence, a curriculum we designed to guide this work. Currently, 10 jurisdictions in the U.S. are receiving coaching around this curriculum and shifting their data integration practices to advance equity. ResultsTo date, progress has been nonlinear, with positive results. Work in action across the cohorts includes changes to cross-agency data governance, collaborative research agendas, legal agreements, staffing, and community participation practices including. ConclusionsWhile these efforts are nascent, progress is evident and site team members indicate growth as individuals and as site teams. Key features of success include a focus on building relationships, establishing working norms, grappling with racialized histories, and interrogating the role of structural racism and systems of power. ImplicationsThe EiPLC provides a successful model for supporting sites to embed data equity principles throughout the data life cycle.

Essential Advance Care Planning Intervention Features in Low-Income Communities: A Qualitative Study

ContextOlder adults with low socioeconomic status (SES) participate in advance care planning (ACP) at lower rates than those with higher SES. Community feedback is an essential component of intervention design for communities with fewer social and health resources to ensure that the intervention is relevant and meaningful. ObjectivesTo understand the perspectives for potential interventions, we aimed to qualitatively explore participant priorities for ACP intervention development. MethodsUsing a qualitative descriptive design, we recruited and conducted individual and one-time, semi-structured interviews with older adults (aged 50+) with low income (< $20,000/year) (n = 20), Recruitment methods included flyers and in-person recruitment and purposive and snowball sampling methods. Following a thematic analysis plan, themes emerged from recursive transcript review by two independent coders and inductive categorization of the most robust codes. ResultsTwo themes captured participants’ perspectives regarding ACP intervention development: 1) specialist advocacy and reliability and 2) person-centered communication. Older adults with low SES prioritize ACP communication that is driven by their goals and that is led by trustworthy specialists that advocate for their needs. ConclusionOur work highlights that intervention preferences were informed by the prior strain and struggle of waiting on other kinds of health and social services. We propose an adapted model for community research collaboration to promote equity in addition to practice and policy recommendations.

Post-Pandemic Hybrid Learning Trends in Higher Education and its Implications in Students’ Academic Performance

This study used a systematic literature review and a bibliometric analysis to establish publication trends, key researchers, collaborative networks, thematic focus and effective strategies associated with hybrid learning environments in higher education. The study concentrated on the SCOPUS database using terms related to hybrid and online learning, academic performance and COVID-19, covering records within a specific period, using the PRISMA guidelines. The study used the bibliometric analysis through VOSviewer, revealing patterns in collaborative relationships and thematic trends. The study established that academic interest in hybrid, blended, online and virtual learning increased from the year 2020 to the year 2024 rising from nine in 2020 to 57 in 2023. The co-authorship network analysis revealed a collaborative research community, showing the existence of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional partnerships in advancing research and developing comprehensive insights into educational outcomes in hybrid learning environments. Co-citation analysis identifies influential authors and distinct thematic clusters. The co-occurrence map highlighted interconnected themes related to mental health, strategic adoption of distance learning and students’ satisfaction. The study recommends that researchers should prioritize ongoing research within hybrid, blended, online and virtual learning environments to respond to evolving educational landscapes and recommend research-based learning strategies. For effective and innovative knowledge sharing, there is a need for interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research collaboration through joint projects, conferences and publication platforms.

"Estuvimos en una hielera": Migration trauma and detainment among newcomer Latinx adolescents.

Exposure to migration-related traumatic events may increase the risk for immediate distress upon arrival and complex trauma following resettlement. Record numbers of Latinx immigrant youth are being held in detainment facilities at the border and around the country. However, little research examines the psychological sequelae of trauma among detained youth. Through addressing these gaps, this article can inform policies and best practices that adhere to human rights and foster acculturative adjustment. This article describes community collaborative research with newcomer Latinx adolescents enrolled in public high schools. Study 1 (n = 127) used quantitative data to examine whether time in detention and trauma exposure were associated with psychosocial adjustment. Study 2 (n = 46) used qualitative data to explore the lived experiences of detainment and related trauma. Study 1 results found that over a third of participants had been detained for at least 4 weeks (36%) and nearly half the participants witnessed or experienced a traumatic event (46%). Although time in detainment was not related to internalizing or externalizing symptoms, exposure to trauma was associated with more internalizing and more externalizing symptoms. Study 2 results illustrated specific detainment-related stressors, including multiple relocations, inhumane conditions, legal concerns, and family separation, as well as complex psychological sequelae, both during detainment and after resettlement, as well as some satisfactory experiences. Results contribute new understanding of the unique experiences of immigration detainment and its psychological sequelae and can inform legal, policy, and educational practices that directly impact recently resettled Latinx youth. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

“Showing Up for Each Other”: Designing Community and Living Solidarities with Families

Despite the colonizing dynamics of educational institutions and the extractive research paradigms of academia, we argue that family- and community-centered research partnerships can foster collective care, cross-racial solidarities, and more just educational ecosystems. Drawing from a long-term community research collaboration, the authors (a university professor and community-based organizational leader) offer three grounded examples of our efforts to live cross-racial solidarities and realize healing and transformation with parent leaders and educators in perilous times.

A citizen science approach to develop a digital intervention to reduce HIV stigma and promote HIV self-testing among adolescents and young adults: a mixed methods analysis from Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan has one of the fastest-growing HIV epidemics in the world, with increasing rates among adolescents and young adults (AYA). Innovative strategies are needed to increase HIV testing uptake and decrease HIV stigma among AYA. Citizen science, defined as the active engagement of the general public in scientific research tasks, promotes and facilitates community engagement throughout the research process. This citizen science study used crowdsourcing to engage AYA in Kazakhstan to develop a digital intervention to reduce HIV stigma and promote HIV self-testing. Our objectives in this paper are to describe the approach used, its feasibility and acceptability, and AYA motivations for and lessons learned collaborating on the study. From October 2021 to July 2022, in collaboration with a Community Collaborative Research Board and a Youth Advisory Board, we developed an open call requesting multimedia submissions to reduce HIV testing stigma. Eligible submissions were separated by age group (13-19 or 20-29 years) and judged by a panel composed of AYA (n = 23), healthcare professionals (n = 12), and representatives from the local government and non-governmental organizations (n = 17). Each entry was reviewed by at least four judges and ranked on a 5-point scale. The top 20 open call contestants were asked to submit self-recordings sharing their motivation for and experience participating in the contest and lessons learned. Descriptive statistics were calculated for quantitative data. Qualitative data were coded using open coding. We received 96 submissions from 77 youth across Kazakhstan. Roughly, three-quarters (n = 75/96) of entries met judging eligibility criteria. Of the eligible entries, over half (n = 39/75) scored 3.5 or higher on a 5-point scale (70.0%). The most frequent types of entries were video (n = 36/96, 37.5%), image (n = 28/96, 29.2%) and text (n = 24/96, 25.0%). AYA's primary motivations for collaborating on the study included a desire to improve society and help youth. The main challenges included creating content to address complex information using simple language, finding reliable information online and technological limitations. Crowdsourcing was feasible and highly acceptable among AYA in Kazakhstan. Citizen science approaches hold great promise for addressing the increasingly complex health and social challenges facing communities today.

A Case Study of Perceptions of Adult Educators on Reflective Practice

This research, as stated in the introduction part, unravels the perception of adult educators on reflective practice; whether there is a disparity between belief and actual practice, and factors that affect their involvement in reflective practice. The purpose of the present research is three-pronged: (1) to have a better understanding of the various viewpoints on reflective practice held by adult educators; (2) to enhance my research competence through reflecting upon research practice; and (3) to foster reflective practice through forming a collaborative research community. “Reflective practice is a powerful approach to professional development. But it is much more. It is an integrated way of thinking and acting focused on learning and behavioural change; it is individuals working to improve organizations through improving themselves.” This engagement is fundamental to promoting not only reflective researchers but also reflective communities. Not only the researchers but also in an educational setting, teachers, senior managers, heads and assistant heads should be involved in reflective practice and how it can be developed through building up reflective communities. Therefore, this paper voices both researchers’ and academics’ voices.

ComPRePS: An Automated Cloud-based Image Analysis tool to democratize AI in Digital Pathology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has extensive applications in a wide range of disciplines including healthcare and clinical practice. Advances in high-resolution whole-slide brightfield microscopy allow for the digitization of histologically stained tissue sections, producing gigapixel-scale whole-slide images (WSI). The significant improvement in computing and revolution of deep neural network (DNN)-based AI technologies over the last decade allow us to integrate massively parallelized computational power, cutting-edge AI algorithms, and big data storage, management, and processing. Applied to WSIs, AI has created opportunities for improved disease diagnostics and prognostics with the ultimate goal of enhancing precision medicine and resulting patient care. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has recognized the importance of developing standardized principles for data management and discovery for the advancement of science and proposed the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable, (FAIR) Data Principles1 with the goal of building a modernized biomedical data resource ecosystem to establish collaborative research communities. In line with this mission and to democratize AI-based image analysis in digital pathology, we propose ComPRePS: an end-to-end automated Computational Renal Pathology Suite which combines massive scalability, on-demand cloud computing, and an easy-to-use web-based user interface for data upload, storage, management, slide-level visualization, and domain expert interaction. Moreover, our platform is equipped with both in-house and collaborator developed sophisticated AI algorithms in the back-end server for image analysis to identify clinically relevant micro-anatomic functional tissue units (FTU) and to extract image features.

CrustyBase v.2.0: new features and enhanced utilities to support open science

BackgroundTranscriptomes present a rich, multi-dimensional subset of genomics data. They provide broad insights into genetic sequence, and more significantly gene expression, across biological samples. This technology is frequently employed for describing the genetic response to experimental conditions and has created vast libraries of datasets which shed light on gene function across different tissues, diseases, diets and developmental stages in many species. However, public accessibility of these data is impeded by a lack of suitable software interfaces and databases with which to locate and analyse them.BodyHere we present an update on the status of CrustyBase.org, an online resource for analysing and sharing crustacean transcriptome datasets. Since its release in October 2020, the resource has provided many thousands of transcriptome sequences and expression profiles to its users and received 19 new dataset imports from researchers across the globe. In this article we discuss user analytics which point towards the utilization of this resource. The architecture of the application has proven robust with over 99.5% uptime and effective reporting of bugs through both user engagement and the error logging mechanism.We also introduce several new features that have been developed as part of a new release of CrustyBase.org. Two significant features are described in detail, which allow users to navigate through transcripts directly by submission of transcript identifiers, and then more broadly by searching for encoded protein domains by keyword. The latter is a novel and experimental feature, and grants users the ability to curate gene families from any dataset hosted on CrustyBase in a matter of minutes. We present case studies to demonstrate the utility of these features.ConclusionCommunity engagement with this resource has been very positive, and we hope that improvements to the service will further enable the research of users of the platform. Web-based platforms such as CrustyBase have many potential applications across life science domains, including the health sector, which are yet to be realised. This leads to a wider discussion around the role of web-based resources in facilitating an open and collaborative research community.

Exploring Mutual Learning of Four Chinese Senior High School EFL Teachers in a Collaborative Action Research Community

Abstract English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ professional development has been attached much importance with the advent of the National English Curriculum Standards (NECS in short) for Senior High Schools as it initiates the shift from knowledge-skill-oriented education to competence-oriented education. As an effective way for teachers’ professional development, collaborative action research community is introduced in this study to provide teachers with opportunities for mutual engagement, meaning negotiation, and a shared repertoire. Four senior high school EFL teachers from four different schools were studied in a collaborative action research community to explore how teachers from diversified backgrounds achieve mutual learning for their professional development. With data collected from observation, interviews, and journals, the study reveals that diversity and partiality help maintain mutual engagement in the community of practice. Meaning negotiation and mutual accountability in a joint enterprise contribute to the coherence of the community. Moreover, the participative activity of online and offline group discussion and the common topic of thinking visualization were treated as sources of a shared repertoire, an essential indication of a harmonious community. In this case, this study extrapolates how the collaborative action research community achieves harmony to support teachers’ professional development in action research.

The Current Situation, Hot Spots, and Suggestions on the Education Research of the “Four Histories” in Universities—Visualization Analysis Based on CiteSpace

Universities are an important support for cultivating qualified socialist builders and reliable successors. Carrying out “Four Histories” education in universities is of great significance in enhancing the political, ideological, and emotional identity of college students, and fully implementing the fundamental task of cultivating morality and cultivating talents. Using CiteSpace to visualize and analyze the current status and hotspots of the “Four Histories” education research in Chinese universities, and then construct a scientific knowledge graph. Research has found that the number of publications in this field has shown a gradually increasing trend over time; The cooperation between researchers and publishing institutions is loose, and a highly cohesive research group has not yet formed; The research topics mainly focus on universities, college students, ideological and political courses, the new era, value implications, and practical paths; There is relatively little research on the “Four Histories” education in vocational colleges; Scholars generally use theoretical research and rarely use empirical research. Promoting the education of “Four Histories” in universities should strengthen communication and cooperation among ideological and political workers in universities, and build a strong collaborative research community. Continuously adapting to changes in the international situation and meeting the growth needs of young college students.

Psychosocial Research and Communities

The importance of understanding the concepts of community, psychosocial research, and how community psychosocial research comes to exist, remains central to the impact these have on the health and well-being outcomes of communities and individuals. At the core, community psychosocial research must aim to holistically address, alleviate, and improve the psychological and social factors that negatively impact the health and well-being of communities and individuals. This editorial proposes six core outcomes of community psychosocial research, including the following: understanding the context of the community, exploring the community-level factors, highlighting disparities, formulating community-based interventions, engagement, and collaborative community research which should all be used to inform policy and practice that contribute to the enhancement of societal health and well-being outcomes.

Building consensus around the assessment and interpretation of Symbiodiniaceae diversity.

Within microeukaryotes, genetic variation and functional variation sometimes accumulate more quickly than morphological differences. To understand the evolutionary history and ecology of such lineages, it is key to examine diversity at multiple levels of organization. In the dinoflagellate family Symbiodiniaceae, which can form endosymbioses with cnidarians (e.g., corals, octocorals, sea anemones, jellyfish), other marine invertebrates (e.g., sponges, molluscs, flatworms), and protists (e.g., foraminifera), molecular data have been used extensively over the past three decades to describe phenotypes and to make evolutionary and ecological inferences. Despite advances in Symbiodiniaceae genomics, a lack of consensus among researchers with respect to interpreting genetic data has slowed progress in the field and acted as a barrier to reconciling observations. Here, we identify key challenges regarding the assessment and interpretation of Symbiodiniaceae genetic diversity across three levels: species, populations, and communities. We summarize areas of agreement and highlight techniques and approaches that are broadly accepted. In areas where debate remains, we identify unresolved issues and discuss technologies and approaches that can help to fill knowledge gaps related to genetic and phenotypic diversity. We also discuss ways to stimulate progress, in particular by fostering a more inclusive and collaborative research community. We hope that this perspective will inspire and accelerate coral reef science by serving as a resource to those designing experiments, publishing research, and applying for funding related to Symbiodiniaceae and their symbiotic partnerships.

Collaborative Learning: A Design Challenge for Teachers

This study, focused on collaborative learning approaches, aims to contribute to our understanding of whether and how teachers propose these kinds of activities in their daily practice. Particularly, this study aims to explore teachers’ behaviour when designing such activities for their learners with respect to different learning settings (i.e., face-to-face and/or blended settings vs. fully online settings). With reference to fully online settings, the Emergency Remote Teaching that took place during the COVID-19 outbreak is used as a reference case. The results of a self-reported survey of Italian teachers (N = 268) are presented. Our conclusions indicate that Italian teachers do propose collaborative learning activities to some extent in face-to-face and/or blended settings as well as in fully online settings, with statistically significant differences both in reference to the approaches adopted and to the (technological) tools used. Nonetheless, the data also indicate that teachers’ design decisions are not always in line with recommendations widely proposed by the collaborative learning research community.

Diversitäts- und kultursensible Gesundheitsinformationen für mehr digitale Gesundheitskompetenz: Eine kollaborative Community-Forschung zu Barrieren und Bedarfen

ZusammenfassungHintergrundBei Gesundheitsfragen spielt das Internet eine zentrale Rolle, wobei Verbraucher:innen vor der Herausforderung stehen, geeignete Such- und Bewertungsstrategien zu entwickeln. Damit Informationen zur Gesundheit im Internet gefunden, verstanden, beurteilt und angewendet werden können, bedarf es digitaler Gesundheitskompetenz auf individueller und auf organisationaler Ebene. Vor dem Hintergrund gesellschaftlicher Pluralität und Diversität wurden Fähigkeiten und Zugänge marginalisierter Communities in diesem Zusammenhang bisher wenig beforscht.ZielDiese Studie untersuchte die Nutzung von Online-Gesundheitsinformationen im Alltag aus einer postmigrantischen Perspektive, welche nicht Migrationshintergründe, sondern lokale Kontexte von Migrant:innen in Deutschland als Vulnerabilitätsvariable versteht. Ziel dieser Studie war es, sowohl das digitale Gesundheitsinformationsverhalten marginalisierter Communities ethnografisch und kollaborativ zu erforschen als auch praxisnahe und kultursensible Ansätze für Akteur:innen der Gesundheitskommunikation zu entwickeln ohne migrantisierende Zuschreibungen zu reproduzieren.MethodenIm Rahmen einer kollaborativen ethnografischen Feldforschung im Stadtteillabor der Bochumer Hustadt von 10/2020–01/2021 führten Community-Forscher:innen online leitfadengestützte Interviews in ihrem Umfeld durch. Die Interviews wurden mittels einer qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse ausgewertet.Ergebnisse und DiskussionDie Ergebnisse machen deutlich, dass sprachliche, inhaltliche und mediale Aspekte von Online-Gesundheitsinformationen den Zugang zu und Umgang mit diesen für marginalisierte Communities bedingen. Die postmigrantische Perspektive stellt einerseits Migration als hinreichende Analyse- und Erklärungskategorie in Frage und begründet zugleich Diversitäts- und Kultursensibilität als zentrale Komponenten des Zugangs zu Gesundheitsinformationen und der Entwicklung von Maßnahmen zur Stärkung der digitalen Gesundheitskompetenz in pluralen Gesellschaften. Es bedarf sowohl vielsprachiger, transkulturell resonierender und technisch barrierearmer Online-Gesundheitsinformationen als auch gestärkter Interaktion zwischen Individuen einer pluralen postmigrantischen Gesellschaft und der Online-Gesundheitskommunikation.

Barriers and supports for uptake of human papillomavirus vaccination in Indigenous people globally: A systematic review.

Despite the availability of effective and safe human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines that reduce the incidence and impact of cervical cancer and other cancers, HPV vaccine coverage rates remain persistently low and the cervical cancer burden disproportionately high among Indigenous people globally. This study aimed to systematically identify, appraise, and summarize the literature on documented barriers and supports to HPV vaccination in Indigenous populations internationally. Forty-three studies were included and an inductive, qualitative, thematic synthesis was applied. We report on 10 barrier themes and 7 support themes to vaccine uptake, and provide a quantitative summary of metrics. Focusing on Indigenous perspectives reported in the literature, we propose recommendations on community-research collaboration, culturally safe intergenerational and gender-equitable community HPV vaccine education, as well as multi-level transparency to ensure informed consent is secured in the context of reciprocal relationships. Although the voices of key informant groups (e.g., HPV-vaccine eligible youth and community Elders) are underrepresented in the literature, the identification of barriers and supports to HPV vaccination in a global Indigenous context might help inform researchers and health policy makers who aim to improve HPV vaccine uptake in Indigenous populations.

Shedding Light on the Outcomes of Minorities in Quebec: The Case of the Education to Employability (E2E) Study

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this study was to observe and analyze the educational experiences of members of the English-speaking Black community in Quebec and how those experiences may have impacted the employability outcomes of participants. More broadly, this study aimed to contribute towards the filling in of certain information gaps pertaining to not just the aforementioned community but racialized and linguistic communities more generally. Background: The article is based on a community research collaboration conducted between the Black Community Resource Centre (BCRC) and the Provincial Employment Roundtable of Quebec (PERT). It followed discussions between the two organizations centering around conducting research on employability and how education factored into employability outcomes. Eventually the decision was made to draft a collaboration agreement and create a research design more concretely. Methodology: Research was conducted by applying a mixed methods approach which incorporated qualitative and quantitative data collection. This was made up of two parts: 1) surveying and collecting educational and employment data from a sample of Quebecers and 2) interviewing participants from the English-speaking Black community in Quebec on their educational and employment experiences. Findings: Firstly, Black survey respondents, irrespective of linguistic identity, recalled receiving more negative actions from their school and school staff compared to survey respondents who did not belong to a visible minority. In particular, Black survey respondents had the highest ratings of specific incidents of discipline/punishment and public shaming/humiliation. These differences between the Black respondents and White respondents were found to be statistically significant after conducting an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). Second, English-speaking survey respondents, irrespective of race, recalled higher parental involvement in their education and school experiences. Parental involvement in education was observed at a higher rate for English-speaking respondents than for French-speaking respondents. Focus groups were conducted to provide context and depth to the survey findings. In particular, participants described experiencing a lack of sense of belonging, as well as racism perpetrated by school staff and community. Focus group participants also described an evolving perception of their identity as members of Québec’s ESBC. Focus group participants described negotiating their identities as Black English speakers and as Quebecers, with some describing their Quebecer identity as secondary to their race and language. Impact on Society: The impact of this research is that it was able to generate quantitative data on the outcomes of different racialized groups within the sphere of education and show that amongst the sample of participants, there were statistically significant differences in outcomes across racialized and linguistic groups. Furthermore, it offered a space where highly detailed qualitative data could be collected directly from community members, particularly the English- speaking Black community in Quebec. The long-term impact on society will still run its course but it represents a contribution to the body of knowledge on literature pertaining to this community and in this context while also being able to generate further questions relating to race and language in Quebec and how they impact the educational and employment spheres.

Developing a conceptual framework for short text categorization using hybrid CNN- LSTM based Caledonian crow optimization

Due to the continuous progression of social media networking sites, people share their thoughts, viewpoints, videos, speech and images through short texts. But the short texts are manually understandable but hard for the machine to collect data for clarification. The limited terms present in the short texts seem difficult while categorizing, analyzing as well as evaluating. Since social media and Bibliographic repositories like Digital Bibliography and Library Project (DBLP) contains a substantial amount of information, it is necessary to mine only useful information from the existing short texts. To achieve effectiveness and efficiency in short text categorization, the content-related characteristics derived from various machine learning techniques are admired. The significant objective of the proposed approach involves the categorization of short text and enhancing its accuracy, which can improve further finding collaborative research communities.. In this work, a hybrid convolutional neural network-long short term memory (CNN-LSTM) based new Caledonian crow optimization (NC2LO) model is utilized to classify the short texts. The crows utilize both social and asocial learning for developing tool modelling skills. Getting attracted to the behaviour of this variety of crows, and motivated by the learning strategy of crows, a new Caledonian crow optimization model referred to as NC2LO model is established. The conceptual framework of the proposed methodology consists of four different phases namely the data collection phase, data preparation phase, data pre-processing phase and short text categorization phase to classify the short texts with a high accuracy rate. Then, the proposed CNN-LSTM based NC2LO for short text categorization is evaluated using four different types of datasets namely IMDb, AG news, Twitter, and Tagmy News. Finally, the comparative analysis is carried out to evaluate the accuracy rate for various approaches and the analysis demonstrated that the proposed approach achieves a high accuracy rate of about 97%.

Review: Rapid Ethnographic Assessments: A Practical Approach and Toolkit for Collaborative Community Research, by Thurka Sangaramoorthy and Karen A. Kroeger

Review: <i>Rapid Ethnographic Assessments: A Practical Approach and Toolkit for Collaborative Community Research</i>, by Thurka Sangaramoorthy and Karen A. Kroeger

Emerging from the third space chrysalis: Experiences in a non-hierarchical, collaborative research community of practice

This article discusses the creation of a research-focused virtual community of practice (vCoP) for geographically-dispersed third space professionals, motivated by desires for enhanced professional collaboration, visibility and identity. The authors used collaborative autoethnography (CAE) to evaluate their personal reflections as vCoP participants. Data were gathered in two collaborative writing activities and analysed using thematic analysis (TA). The TA identified two connected themes, which capture the vCoP members’ aspirations to transcend their current roles and be research-active through connecting with like-minded professionals. Collaborative writing activities, including authoring this paper, cultivated elements of academic identity such as independence and purpose. A non-hierarchical and supportive vCoP environment allowed the members to work beyond time and institutional constraints to foster the evolution of the community and an emerging sense of professional identity beyond that typically associated with third space roles. The paper offers a model of collaboration that could help groups in similar situations.