Interview with theme convenors of one of seven UKFIET 2025 conference themes, ‘Equitable partnerships and cross-cultural collaboration’: Rhona Brown, University of Glasgow and Amy Lightfoot, British Council. The Call for Abstracts is open until 21 March 2025.
What excites you about your theme?
Two heads are better than one, teamwork makes the dream work – there are lots of terrible cliches about working in a team or partnership, and with good reason. Working together IS often much more productive and satisfying than working alone, and this holds true for many education contexts. But, just like putting children in groups and calling it ‘groupwork’ doesn’t necessarily facilitate collaborative or ‘learner-centred’ working, so too, forming a partnership in name does not automatically enable more impactful, meaningful outcomes. And it certainly does not guarantee equitable or ethical ways of working.
‘Partnerships and cross-cultural collaboration’ have become a default setting for our sector but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy, or that there aren’t ways to understand and improve how we work together to make it a better experience for all concerned. This is what we’re interested in with our theme – what can we learn from each other about how to work together better? How can we ensure that cross-cultural collaborations are as respectful and equitable as possible and that they actually result in relevant, sustainable outcomes? We know that there are many barriers and underlying power structures (and beliefs) that influence partnerships and we want to get these out in the open and by acknowledging them, examine how we can try to overcome them – together.
How does your theme connect to today’s global landscape and the overall conference?
We’re going to stick our neck out and wager that (irrespective of recent events and current rhetoric in some quarters), the vast majority of people working in our field see the value in working cross-culturally and in partnership with others – with other individuals, with other organisations and with other countries – to achieve our shared goals around quality and equitable education. Everyone ultimately benefits by improved standards of education, even when it is happening on the other side of the world, because, as we know, education underpins all other aspects of global development. With the right sensibilities, everyone can also benefit from working with people who have different ways of seeing, knowing and doing to widen our understanding of education.
In terms of the conference theme, partnership is at the centre of how we mobilise knowledge and how we innovate for sustainable development – and therefore doing partnerships better and more equitably, means more likely progress in knowledge mobilisation and innovation.
What kinds of papers/sessions would you like to see submitted under your theme?
There are many spaces to share the achievements and outcomes of education and research projects, and often partnerships are nodded to as a means of achieving those results. In this theme, we really want to create a space to grapple with the messy inner-workings of partnerships themselves.
We’ve set out a full list of questions we’d like submissions to respond to in the full abstract writing pack, but to summarise, we’re interested in hearing about how you make the most of partnerships and collaborations – at their best, what kind of impact can they have – and how do you know that it was the partnership and the diversity of perspectives that got you there? What kind of skills and sensibilities do people in the most successful partnerships have, and how can we all work to develop these? What conditions are required to nurture and support healthy partnerships?
Also, what about the challenges faced within these partnerships – those underlying, structural inequities and power imbalances – how do we get them out in the open and discuss them, and change them for the better? What happens when things go wrong – how have people tried to avoid this, or fixed things when they fell apart? We really would like to encourage honest, open and brave sharing and learning about this important topic.
We welcome a variety of session styles and formats, that creatively make space for in-depth critical reflection, unpacking the messiness of partnerships and collaboration, and, in keeping with the theme, a diversity of perspectives.
