Manuela's Event Experience at the Collaborative Research, Education and Practice Workshop.

The Collaborative Research, Education and Practice Promoting Wellbeing and Growth workshop recently took place in Tromsø, Norway. Participants were given the opportunity to investigate the empowerment and strengthening of participation for children and young people in need of help or follow-up from various professions. There were 30 representatives from different EUGLOH universities, along with non-university stakeholders, who were assigned to work challenges with the aim to co-create a project related to global health. Manuela was fortunate to participate in this workshop. She shares her experience:

Manuela's Story:

The first two days consisted on lectures in which participants learnt more about collaborative research and the arctic community of Sampi. In the other following days, participants were in charge of designing and presenting their project related to the challenge.

The challenged assigned to me was “Enhancing participation and inclusion in social development".

Words can hardly describe how meaningful this experience was for me, or how grateful I am to have been part of such an amazing group of researchers, PhD and Master's students from all over the world who are currently doing a program in one of the alliance universities. We definitely had the best time together, not only and the university, but also by visiting Tromsø and its beautiful Arctic landscapes!

Learning about collaborative research has definitely change my perspective on how I should conduct my next projects and on my responsibility to bring value to the community with my research. I’ll definitely consider these aspects and some new methods that were presented during the lectures as new ideas to implement in my current PhD project on "Teacher Professionalization and Inclusion in Early Childhood Education."

It’s not easy to pick a particular moment from all the different activities we did during that week, because they all were enriching , but I think that the most significant part for me was working on the challenge using the collaborative research principles as the heart of our project. We all had different ideas and opinions, but we somehow integrated these ideas into the project to make our program a safe and brave spaces for the participants. And all of these wouldn’t have been possible without the guidance of our challenge leader, Rita Sorly, and also from the other stakeholders, who were also present from time to time. They all made us feel right at home and encouraged us to bring our most creative ideas forward.

Another interesting aspect was learning about the Sami culture and to come to the realization that there are a lot of similarities when collaborating with indigenous communities in my country, Peru, and the Sami people. As one of the conference speakers said, research has often been a tool of colonialism and that is why indigenous communities often distrust researchers and their motives. And by using collaborative research we can contribute to overcoming these barriers, positively impact the community by empowering them, and ultimately elevate the value and of our research impact.

This text is part of the “My EUGLOH story” series, in which members of the EUGLOH community talk about their EUGLOH experience.

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