There is debate about whether and how educational research has relevance for and is accessible to teaching practitioners. Much literature highlights the value of practitioner-based research approaches as a pathway to engaging teachers more readily with and in research, however, the practitioner research approach is often viewed negatively and is…

The New Zealand Ministry of Education identifies 'Teaching as Inquiry' (TAI) in the New Zealand Curriculum as an effective professional learning approach in promoting student learning and raising achievement. Aligned with this document, Auckland University of Technology Master of Teaching and Learning programme for postgraduate students wishing to…

This article reports on my experiences as a novice researcher as I traverse the challenges of being a postgraduate international student while conducting fieldwork in my own country. While my research aimed to determine the strategies of five public elementary school principals who facilitated school turnaround and the political and economic…

This article is the reflection of an emerging researcher who has experienced different nudges from the beginning of accessing the research field to the final stage of collating data in rural Nepal. My experiences and reflections may provide provocations to researchers to consider before they undertake field research. Areas that researchers should…

This paper looks at ways in which methods used in literary analysis can contribute to higher education research. I start by describing a methodology commonly used in the analysis of literary texts, close reading or textual analysis, and outline how it can be utilised in conjunction with several theoretical approaches in the literary studies…

Supervisors supporting queer individuals engaged in postgraduate research in Visual Arts face a number of issues. Beyond concerns with balancing the autobiographical and the scholarly, a supervisor may also encounter questions relating to safety, identity, tokenism, exoticisation and the pressure candidates feel to develop work that has…

This paper presents data generated during a semester-long programme to support international students from countries in Melanesia and Asia embarking on masters research in education in a New Zealand university. All were scholarship recipients. The researcher-and facilitator-of the programme, was interested in documenting and understanding the…

Michel Foucault wrote of the "well-managed life" as one that would require a certain "care of the self." As a preliminary to the exploration of the care of the self as a scholar, this paper explores why scholars choose to live the "researching life" in the first place. The experiences of 57 people who completed Ph.D.s…

This study followed 57 New Zealand candidates for a Ph.D. in Education through the years of writing their theses, focusing on their internal struggles and how these affected, and were affected by, those with whom they had close relationships. Their efforts to balance the scholarly, professional, interpersonal, and domestic dimensions of life, a…