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Russell Bishop is foundation Professor and Assistant Dean for Maori Education in the
School of
Education at the
University of
Waikato ,
Hamilton, New Zealand.
He is also a qualified and experienced secondary school teacher. Prior to his present appointment he was a senior lecturer in Maori Education in the Education Department at the
University of
Otago and Interim Director for
Otago
University 's Teacher Education programme. His research experience is in the area of collaborative storying as Kaupapa Maori research, having written a book Collaborative Research Stories: Whakawhanaungatanga and published nationally and internationally on this topic. His other research interests include institutional change, Critical Multicultural Education, and Collaborative Storying as Pedagogy. The latter area is the subject of a book, co-authored with Professor Ted Glynn, published in 1999. This book Culture Counts: Changing Power Relationships in Classrooms, demonstrates how the experiences developed from within kaupapa Maori settings; schooling, research and policy development, can be applied to mainstream educational settings. His most recent book, Pathologising Practices: The impact of deficit thinking on education, co-authored with Carolyn Shields and Andre Mazawi, and published by Peter Lang, investigates how deficit thinking pathologizes the lived experiences of children and prevents minoritized children from achieving their full potential in schools.
He is currently the project director for a large New Zealand Ministry of Education funded research /professional development project that seeks to improve the educational achievement of Maori students in mainstream classrooms.
KEYNOTE PRESENTATION
Indigenous Self-Determination in Research: The Interview as Collaborative Storying
This analysis is undertaken from the position of a researcher who is a member of an indigenous minority, the Maori people of Aotearoa/New Zealand. The main concern that Maori people and other indigenous peoples face is how to develop research that addresses their desire for self-determination over research issues of initiation, benefits, representation, legitimation and accountability. This analysis seeks to examine the Interview as Collaborative Storying, an approach to research that both addresses concerns Maori as indigenous people express about research into their lives, and which makes sense within the cultural context of Maori people's lived experiences.
Collaborative Storying falls within the broad rubric of Narrative inquiry. Narrative inquiry (after Connelly and Clandinin, 1990) is an approach that addresses Indigenous concerns about research. Narratives are devices for communicating, interpreting and giving meaning to our experiences that allow research participants to select, recollect and reflect on stories within their own cultural context and language, rather than that chosen by the researcher. As such, narratives can constitute useful research tools for those in pursuit of self-determination.
This paper proposes that researchers engaging in research into Maori contexts actually engage in collaborative story telling where the stories of the research participants merge to create a collaborative text, a mutually constructed story created out of the lived experiences of the research participants.
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