Work Integrated Researching by groups of students: WIRED for employment research seminar

Abstract: This presentation focuses on small teams of students researching in professional workplaces. Such Work Integrated Researching (WIR) value-adds to students’ knowledge base about future employment contexts, and provides a different perspective from work-based learning, allowing students to deeply observe and understand much about the less-tangible aspects of workplaces. Moreover, WIR may provide employers with useful understandings that connect theory with practice, as well as enable academics to engage in meaningful and realistic partnerships with industry. WIR may best be conducted by small groups of students to enable their mutual support, to reduce supervision load and travel, and especially to provide a united but varied focus on an industry issue.

In this case study of WIR, three Masters of Education students were placed in one high-school and shared common research questions and methodology that were applied to each of three different classes. The objectives of this presentation is to provoke discussion of the following features that were found to be enabling factors of WIR in the Education Dissertation (WIRED), comprising whole-semester research projects:

1. 1. A shared conceptual framework (the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching- MELT).
   2. Common research questions that were applied to different contexts in the same workplace
   3. Short time-frame kept the research constrained, and so needed ethics approval before the start of the semester.
   4. Shared meetings around research questions and process reduced the supervision load and increased peer-support, including friendly-peer review.
   5. Each student’s research was unique and dissertation submitted separately
   6. Potential synthesis of each project into one publication.

See www.rsd.edu.au and www.melt.edu.au

Biography: Dr John Willison is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Education at the University of Adelaide. Contact details and further information for John Willison