On Friday, November 15th we held the first Community of Practice (CoP) event of the 2024-2025 academic year.
The event was hybrid, with most participants attending in person at the J.C. Taylor Nature Center in the Arboretum, an intimate and cozy indoor building located a short walk into the woods off the main parking lots. Thank you to our friends at the Arboretum for providing this wonderful space!
In total, nineteen SOPR community members joined us for the event entitled “SOPR Community of Practice Methods Show and Tell” – it was an amazing turnout! The event was hosted by SOPR Community of Practice Facilitators Allison Bishop, Naty Tremblay, Leah Connor, and Tehzeeb Bano. The purpose of the CoP was to learn from fifth-year SOPR students about their research with a specific focus on the methods they are using. We heard from a three-person panel featuring Amanda Buchnea, Angela Easby, who joined us virtually via Zoom, and Amy Kipp. Each panelist shared a short presentation introducing their project and describing how they are collecting and analyzing their data. SOPR faculty affiliate Leah Levac acted as a discussant for the panel, sharing her reflections and lingering questions following the presentations. The gathering was also documented in photos by Leah Connor and Nealob Kakar, shared throughout this blog.
Naty offered an embodied territorial acknowledgment by inviting participants to take several Kentucky Coffee Bean seeds gathered from the Arboretum and consider that they only exist in the landscape today as a result of Indigenous stewardship. Throughout the event we were encouraged to shake our seeds as a way to show enthusiasm as our colleagues spoke.
The presentations
Amanda Buchnea’s work is on housing justice. It seeks to understand how agencies with a mandate to end homelessness are considering the specific needs of youth in their policy development and strategic planning. To answer this question, Amanda undertook a scoping review, compiling and assessing 60 pieces of academic and community literature. She also created a national survey administered through service providers, asking how these agencies prioritized strategies specifically for youth experiencing homelessness. The survey had a high response rate, with people sharing lots of detailed information in their replies. Amanda will be engaging in follow-up interviews with service providers. Amanda shared that she is an “insider/outsider researcher” because she has been working on policy to prevent and end youth homelessness in different capacities for many years, but does not have lived experience of homelessness herself. This meant Amanda could rely on her existing relationships with service providers, advocates, and other researchers in the space to run ideas by as she developed her methodology. This relational approach helped ensure the project was relevant and responsive to the sector, increased participant buy-in and response rates for the survey and interviews, and helped Amanda refine her scope and ideas.
Angela Easby’s work is on restoring intergenerational Anishinaabemowin language transmission and mobility. Angela is Métis and Anishinaabe on her mother’s side and a member of the Métis Nation of Ontario with ancestral ties to Treaty 3 territory in northwestern Ontario. Angela is enacting a practice-based methodology, visiting with and learning from fluent knowledge speakers and language learners, and engaging in autoethnography. She reflected on her original ambitions for the number and breadth of her interviews and explained that “visiting takes time. You can’t control the way things go”. She spent time visiting and building relationships with fluent speakers, but since interview opportunities did not come up organically, has focused instead on interviews with language learners. Angela reflected on the importance of reflecting on the unfolding research process to know when one is ready (or not) to proceed with a certain direction. A reflection of her relational ontoepistemology, Angela has been developing analysis from the interviews ‘in real time’ with the interviewee and often shares her own thoughts and ideas conversationally during the interviews. In addition, Angela has been visiting with herself as a language learner! She is conducting an autoethnography, writing in a journal weekly responding to the same prompts to see how the research process is changing her.
“You are always a self in relation, coming up against others and their stories”
– Angela Easby (SOPR Candidate)
Amy Kipp’s work is a community-based research project focused on building knowledge about community care and artmaking in the context of our ongoing pandemic recovery. This project is focused on the experiences of individuals who participated in a series of online and in-person workshops facilitated by Art Not Shame, Social Artist Melanie Schambach, and the Guelph Neighbourhood Support Coalition to create individual art pieces that form a large-scale mural. The mural, Art in a Just Recovery, is housed in the Guelph Farmer’s Market. Amy took part in the Mural Project as a participant-researcher, creating one of the many pieces that makes up the final mural. In her methodology, participants of the Mural Project could help shape what the research process would look like by attending five participatory planning meetings to define the research goals and questions. Once the mural was complete, participants were invited to take part in data collection through two methods: a post-workshop survey and/or an art-elicitation interview, using the art they made to prompt their reflections. Because the research was done in collaboration with local partners, some interviews were filmed to help with knowledge mobilization. Amy conducted a preliminary thematic analysis of people’s interviews and stories about their art, to identify common themes using inductive and deductive coding. She also did a narrative analysis to see how whole stories were talking to and across one another. Amy shared findings with community partners and those who attended the participatory planning meetings and invited them to share their feedback as a practice of collective sensemaking.
The photos above were shared by Amy Kipp
Reflecting and learning together
Following the presentations, Leah Levac shared her reflections on how Angela, Amanda, and Amy each demonstrate that there is no such thing as a “right or wrong method”. Instead, it is important to be careful and intentional about how methods selected respond to the research question(s). Leah also shared that sometimes there is a tendency for scholars who are interested in breaking new ground by rejecting strict disciplinary boundaries to reject everything, including rigor. The three presentations by Amanda, Angela, and Amy demonstrate great rigor and innovation through the careful documenting of processes, practices, and methodological choices. They also show that sometimes, the most ethical and intellectually rigorous choice is to build on existing practices and relationships with existing communities. Innovations can come from using familiar/common information gathering tools in new ways.
Following Leah’s reflections, we participated in group breakout discussions. Participants self-organized around shared questions and themes in a facilitation style called “open space” (thanks to Naty for bringing this to the group!). In different ways, each group picked up on the common theme of relational approaches to conducting research offered by the presenters. The group discussions were an opportunity to collectively reflect on the gifts and challenges that come from relational methodologies, including the structural limitations and constraints of a PhD program!
We closed with a collective gesture by shaking all of our tree seeds together in our hands and casting some wishes upon them for the world we hope to live in – with the promise that they would all be planted in the spring.
A guided walk in the woods
After the event formally ended, a group of 10 students lingered to participate in a nature walk through the old-growth forest at the Arboretum, guided by Naty. We wandered in the drizzling rain through vibrant plant communities, visiting with silver maple and hemlock, shaking bladdernut seed pods, seeing baby spicebush plants, learning to identify different pine species, walking through sumac and cedar groves, and seeing some beautiful fungal art on fallen logs.
Thanks to the SOPR community!
Thank you, Naty, for sharing your knowledge about the Arboretum with us! And thanks to all the presenters, to Leah for ‘listening out loud’ as a discussant, and to the participants for your deep engagement. It was a nourishing day of co-learning and relationship-building together.
Written by Allison Bishop with support from Naty Tremblay, Amanda Buchanan, Amy Kipp, Angela Easby, Leah Levac, Leah Connor, and Tehzeeb Bano.
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