Overcoming personal barriers to research 

Talking with Ian about our individual routes to becoming published it was interesting to identify common themes, barriers and steps,  and to identify differences.

 Similarities

Initial under-confidence

The need for dialogue to ‘spur’ ideas

The need for encouragement from colleagues – building self belief

Having a high value on practice  (seeing our experience and practice as interesting to others).

Maintaining innovative practice to be the object of research.

Reflective practice leads productively to informal writing and output (internal papers, blogs).

Informal output as a confidence building, articulation of ideas.

The use of collaborative tools for co-authoring (distributed team writing)

A lack of formal support structures (possibly a consequence of being off campus?)

The use of informal support structures to ‘bounce’ ideas (trusted networks)

The domino effect – one output resulting in another (ideas, questions and confidence).

The need for credibility with researchers and empathy with the research process  and issues arising on a research based degree spurring practitioner research.

Overcoming time issues by valuing research as integral to pedagogic practice.

Differences

Collaborative writing vs Individual writing.

Formal study leading to research output.

Identifying journal before writing or finding outlet for work already written.

Undoubtedly the most important single factor for my own journey (so far) has been the support and encouragement of colleagues past and present.

Is there a typical journey? How can the expectation to research be met amongst staff with such high teaching loads?  As RAE becomes in increasingly prominent it would be interesting assemble more stories of researchers who are at different stages in their personal research journey.