Research Learning and Teaching in a Fast-Changing Higher Education Context: Intertextual Constructions of What Counts as Research in Lithuania

• In Event: 56.058 - The Discursive Construction of Learning Opportunities: Developing an Interdisciplinary/Interprofessional Ethnographic Research Agenda for Postsecondary Education

Abstract

Since regaining independence from the soviet union 26 years ago, Lithuania has been undergoing rapid changes in higher education. 50 years of totalitarian rule had imposed particular views of scholarship and student-faculty relationships. In the past three decades, Lithuanian scholars faced seemingly unsurmountable challenges – from creating new policies, to learning new ways of thinking and doing research. Many of these changes and their influences remain invisible not only to the outsiders, but also to the people themselves. Yet, making the underlying perspectives and processes visible, may enable the scholars to understand their contexts in deeper ways and then influence change to create more equitable opportunities to knowledge and participation in a global scholarly community.

Objectives
In this paper we analyze Lithuanian scholars’ discourse to uncover how their constructions of scholarship are intertextually tied to the larger social processes impacting research learning and teaching in higher education. The primary question is: How do Lithuanian scholars inscribe particular contexts impacting their research teaching and learning?

Perspectives/ Theoretical Framework
This study is driven by the interactional ethnographic perspective (Green, Skukauskaite, & Baker, 2012), which guides our focus on discourse and its interrelationships with individual, social, historical, and other contexts, as made visible by participants in interaction. We specifically draw on Bloome and Egan-Robertson’s (1993) notion of intertextuality as socially constructed. They argued that in interaction, people propose, acknowledge, mark as significant, and intentionally construct links between language-in-use, events, people, and contexts. In this way, their discursive choices (Ivanič, 1994) make visible what participants deem important and how their actions and words relate to and create particular ways of being, doing, knowing, and interacting.

Methods and Data
Drawing on ethnography, discourse analysis, and intertextuality, we examine the tensions and opportunities for learning research in Lithuanian higher education, from the perspective of doctoral students and faculty. The primary data are interview-conversations with Lithuanian faculty and graduate students. 10 interviews (averaged 1.5-hours each) were transcribed to examine how participants inscribed research learning. We then noted intertextual ties to identify documents participants marked as significant, thus exploring relationships between participant inscriptions and textual representations of research.

Results
Analysis revealed that participants emphasized the need to learn and understand varied approaches to research, particularly qualitative research, which appeared in Lithuania only about 10 years ago. This need was guided by their individual interests and the desire to participate in international research communities. Meanwhile, academic requirements and relationships, learning opportunities, and historical contexts impacted their access to research knowledge and ways of learning it. Discourse analysis revealed a tension between individual and socio-historical contexts, but also helped us uncover scholars’ agency.

Significance
Examining discursive constructions of research learning in Lithuania makes visible the influences of larger socio-historical processes, which create tensions but also foster researcher agency and leadership. Analyzing the relationships between language and social processes in a higher education system of a fast-developing society has a potential to make visible influences, processes, and practices, and ways of analyzing them, which remain obscured in more stable educational systems.

Authors

• Audra Skukauskaite, Academic Research Consulting

• Liudmila Rupsiene, Klaipeda University

• Ingrida Baranauskiene, Klaipeda University