CRITICAL RELATIONALITY KEY TO INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION
Fatima Pirbhai-Illich and Fran Martin in 2013 at the beginning of their collaboration . Fran Martin and Fatima Pirbhai-Illich in 2019 in Fatima ' s home where they often work together .
Dr . Fatima Pirbhai-Illich ( University of Regina ) and Dr . Fran Martin ( University of Exeter ) speak candidly about how working collaboratively across multiple differences , including interculturality , spirituality , disciplinary , and personality differences , though difficult at times , has informed their research into decolonizing approaches to pedagogy , extended their network of research collaborators , and broadened their vision and impact as well as having established a lifelong friendship .
Shuana : How would each of you describe yourself personally , academically , and professionally ?
Fatima : At a personal level , I describe myself as a human being in relation with the world , and with people around me and nature and so forth . But more so , a very spiritual being ; I ’ m very connected spiritually to both the esoteric and the materiality that we have around us . Academically I categorize myself as being transnational , and professionally as an educator , and a learner . I ’ m a learner at each stage of everything I do . As a researcher , my focus is to work with marginalized and minoritized communities , to understand what harms and injustices have been done and that continue to be done , and I try to figure out a way to ameliorate the harms and injustices . ... to do something that is going to be more sustainable , but also to try to understand issues of power around those injustices and to address the power imbalance so that it ’ s not just about fixing something , it ’ s more structural change , systemic . How can we work within an ethical framework that includes my spiritual ways of being and to work ethically with and across difference .
Fran : When I describe myself personally , I start with my family ; I ’ m very connected to my family . I ’ m a twin . I come from a farming background . I ’ m gay . Academically and professionally , there is a blending between my personal self and my professional self in terms of who I am . So , why do I say that ? My professional self is an educator even from when I first trained to become a teacher and went into early years education , and from there went into being a teacher advisor , and then from there into higher education , working with preservice teachers and so on . I always have had a desire to make a difference and focused more on student voice , trying to support those whom I perceived to have less of a voice in their education to have more of a voice in their education . In those early days , I was far less aware of how I acted systematically and institutionally ; I worked more on an individual basis . I ’ ve come to know more , far more , about that working with Fatima . ... My brothers and sisters and myself are all boarding school survivors . I think it was hugely damaging to us in some ways . It gave us lots of advantages from the type of education we received , but emotionally it was probably quite damaging . So we have all grown up to be people who care about fairness , and obviously a particular view of what fairness means , and justice in different ways . I ’ m sure that ’ s from where , partly , the need to support student voice came : because in the boarding school I didn ’ t have any voice at all .
I went into geography education initially , and that has to do with the farming background and living on and in the land . All of our family ways of being , our family funds of knowledge , revolved around the seasonal and daily patterns of farm life , my dad being a farmer . A lot of that has moved into my interests in being an educator as well .
Fatima : And just as your life revolved around farming , our life was determined by the spiritual aspect . Even while you ’ re here , Fran , I have to look at a calendar and see what special prayers we have today before I can make a decision about what we can do . The spiritual dimension comes first before anything else . Shuana : Is it because you ' ve had to move a lot , that spirituality is more important than place ? Fatima : I come from Tanzania , East Africa , a country that was colonized by the Portuguese , the Germans , the Omanis , and the last ones were the British , and so we ’ ve had to learn how to adapt with each colonizer . During the time leading to independence and soon after there was a lot of civil unrest , people that could afford it , or even if they couldn ’ t , would borrow money to send their kids abroad to study . That was the start for me . I went to Kenya to study , and then to Canada to do my Bachelor ’ s degree , and to Surrey , UK to do my master ' s degree , but I couldn ’ t get a job . I think in those days ( 1985-88 ) Canadians were pretty racist , overtly racist . That ’ s when the moving from here to there started : life circumstances that forced me to move or to leave and try something different .
Shuana : How , where , and when did the two of you meet ?
Fatima : We met in Australia . I was on sabbatical in 2013 , and Fran was , too . We met through a mutual friend I was staying with while teaching at the Australian Catholic University .
Fran : And , I was in Newcastle , doing some work with a teacher educator there , and I let our mutual friend know that I was in the area because Newcastle is only a train ride away from Sydney . She said , ' You must come down . I ’ ve got this other friend staying at the moment and you ’ d get on .' So I went .
Fatima : The interesting thing was , we were having a drink , enjoying olive tapenade with pita bread , and we were sitting at the table and as we started to talk , we realized how similar our work was , although in different areas , but so similar and yet here we were , I am from Canada , Fran from the UK , and we were working in silos . And we thought , you know , we should pool our knowledges together and see what we can do with our combined knowledge . Literally that is when we started collaborating .
Shuana : What was the similarity you recognized ?
Fatima : The intercultural part was the similarity . Learning to understand difference , it ’ s an intercultural exchange and Fran ’ s work also does that . Fran : At that point I was just coming to the end of a research project that looked at the intercultural dimension of study visits for teachers and preservice teachers from the UK to West Africa , in one instance , and southern India in the other instance . The research took a postcolonial lens on the nature of the relationship between the countries and the context that provided for the ways in
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