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What meanings can be made from an eight-week intense diverse cultural experience? In every community-based research experience are consistent tensions around creating, negotiating, and establishing solid, trusting relationships in an accelerated and constrained timeframe. Four common elements have been identified in the dynamics of these relationships: trust, intimacy, mutuality, and responsibility. It is critical to note how this research team worked through these tensions, and not the dynamics of these tensions. My engagement with Indigenous community-based research meant that I was not simply immersed in an experience, I was the experience; I was not an objective observer, but became the observed. It was a process of continually contesting my own perceptions of reality and ways of generating meaning.
When you have recovered from the adrenaline rush and jet lag; when the last suitcase is unpacked, the laundry has been dried and put away, and the last gift has been given; when the pictures have all been shown and stories told and retold; when you have sorted through the emotions of traveling abroad for the first time and leaving your family behind; when the rising star of your experience has reached its apex and you are face to face with your former reality: What is left behind? What meanings are to be made out of the experience as you sift through, manage, and negotiate eight weeks of an intense diverse cultural experience?
In fulfillment of my graduate work, I was privileged to participate in an international internship to Aotearoa (New Zealand) and to work with and observe Celia Haig-Brown of York University, the Te Kotahitanga1 Project2 team (a more detailed description of the project is provided below) at the University of Waikato, and the manager of the New Zealand Ministry of Education's GSE (Group Special Education) Poutama3 Pounamu4 Education Research and Development Centre5 (Poutama Pounamu). Immediately on my return I was asked several times to define one aspect of my internship experience that stood head and shoulders above all other learning experiences. I was dumbfounded and unable to articulate even one intelligible aspect of my entire experience. I could discuss my experiences under various subheadings such as reflexively, with Te Kotahitanga, the interviews I conducted and the oral language assessment tools I observed while...