FEResearchmeet. A Further Education (FE) practitioner-researcher led initiative to share and develop capacity for research and scholarship across Wales and England : analysing and theorising the period of initial development.

Abstract

This paper analyses emergent issues from four conceptualisers of FEResearchmeet. FEResearchmeet claims to be a free and democratic model for building and supporting engagement with research, led by practitioners. The narratives presented seek to document and analyse FEResearchmeet as a movement across the first three years since its inception (2017–2020). After setting out the context and methodology of the work, narrative one explores how a reaction against New Public Management (NPM) sparked an event and how this grew into a movement of collaborating individuals seeking to reposition their voices and knowledge. The second narrative looked at how an early ‘meet’ was used to challenge norms and barriers to research by creating safe spaces for the development of expertise. Narrative three journeys through the early months of COVID-19 to explore how capacity building through collaboration allows sector workers to value their voices. These narratives lead to a critique of the epistemological changes these experiences have developed and have the potential to develop in the future. The paper concludes by arguing that FEResearchmeet was a reaction against NPM by agentic practitioners who used collaboration and capacity building as tools to create new pools of knowledge in an attempt to change this position.