Graduate Students’ Education Researcher Network (GSERN)

As a graduate student, it can be difficult to create a community around your research interests.  For those of us doing research at the intersections of disciplines, this is made even more complicated because we often do not know who is doing work in our area and what kind of research is being done across campus, tackling questions from multiple perspectives.  GSERN is a community of graduate students actively doing education research at UBC, hailing from many different disciplinary backgrounds across campus.  This group has three purposes:

1.     To provide a space to share the diversity of education research occurring on campus.

2.     To create a community and network of education researchers, who share methodologies, research questions and perspectives.

3.     To grapple with questions about education research which often reaches across disciplines, epistemological frameworks and methodologies.

Time: First Friday of each month, 12:00-1:30pm

Location: Graduate Research Commons Meeting Room, Koerner Library

RSVP: http://elred.library.ubc.ca/libs/dashboard/view/4122

This project is intended to be collaborative.  Any feedback, opinions, or interest in getting involved in the planning of it are welcome!

Each meeting will have two parts – one, a central question that is integral to education research and that we believe is important to ask ourselves as education researchers, and two, a networking opportunity around a different theme.

We are also in the process of creating a UBC blog to provide more updates on the events and resources, and to potentially create a mailing list.  More information will be coming about this soon.

First Meeting – June 7^th

Major questions:

1.     What is education research?

2.     Networking around research interest

Note: this meeting will be a little shorter on the discussion so we can deal with administrative tasks.

Second Meeting – July 5^th

Major Questions:

1.     What methodologies are available in education research?

2.     Is education research interdisciplinary?

3.     Networking around (inter)disciplinary interests

Have ideas about themes for future meetings?  Email heather.fisher@alumni.ubc.ca