Trine Østergaard Wulf-Andersen

Research Learning: How Students and Researchers Learn from Collaborative Research

Among new developments in the Roskilde University project work model, this chapter reports the experiences from an experiment of undergraduate students working on subprojects within the framework of their supervisors’ (the authors’) research project. The experiment builds on and enhances the ideal of research based learning, by placing the students at the center of actual research processes, and by organizing their learning processes through their interaction with ‘real’ research problems, empirical and theoretical fields, informants, researcher colleagues etc. This model enhances and explores a relationship, based on shared practice and collaborative learning processes inside and outside of the university, between the students as research learners and the researchers as project managers as well as supervisors.

Poetic representation: working with dilemmas of involvement in participative social work research

This article is based on a Danish research project with young people in vulnerable positions. Young people are involved throughout the research process, including the interpretation of material produced through interviews, and discussions on how reflections and conclusions from the research should be written up and disseminated. The article takes a methodological focus, considering general aims and methods of the research project, before turning to the elaboration on how poetic representations have been constructed and employed as a vehicle for certain kinds of participation, representation, and dialog, of situated participants. The article includes a lengthy example of a poetic representation of one participants story, and the author comments on the potentials of ‘doing’ poetic representations as an example of writing in ways that challenges what sometimes goes unasked in participative social work research. The article moves to ‘trouble’ understandings of participative research as egalitarian and consensus-driven, and proposes a focus on the tensions and positioning of knowledge production.