Realms of Care-full engagement

The next two lessons are predominantly comprised of guest video contributions from care-full scholars who operate in the overlapping realms of scholarly practice identified earlier:  

• Research  
• Teaching & education  
• Doctoral Supervision
• Collaboration & net-weaving  

A person can be active in one of them, or many, or all. Moreover, there can be various degrees of engagement.  

Our goal in this MOOC is to represent a variety of interpretations of care-full scholarship. We initiate this by giving voice to a mixture of contributors, who practice care-fully in different contexts of action and at different career stages. Overtime, we look forward to this diversity of perspectives being further enriched by your own contributions and those of your fellow MOOC cohort.

For the purposes of this Unit (and stage of the course) the offerings of our featured guest contributors (some of whom you will have already met in Units 1 and 2) in these next two lessons are centred around:

• Firstly (in this lesson), their own personal disclosures on what they are passionate about, how this maps on to the dimensions of caring about and caring for, and in turn how this feeds into their own sense of purpose in connection with their scholarly work. In addition to hopefully finding their contributions inspiring (e.g. when it comes to reflecting further on your own interests and cares and what drives you with regard to connecting caring about and caring for with the care giving of your own care-full scholarly practice), we also really hope that you will enjoy understanding more about what ‘makes them tick’ in connection with any future contact you may have with them or their scholarly work (starting with that listed in our Unit 8 library);
• Secondly (in the next lesson), some slightly more extended overall reflections (in comparison to the snapshot medley included in lesson 1 above) of what care-full scholarship means to them in terms of how they have been able to connect what they care about and care for with their main areas of scholarly work; and,
• Thirdly, (in the next lesson), short reflections on some of the different dimensions of care-full scholar framework from a range of different scholarly realms.

In support of featuring a wider range of perspectives, we include also voices of care-full practitioners who are not currently working within the academic system, but who might have been researchers in their earlier lives, or who are experienced in collaborating with academic scholars in participatory and transdisciplinary research projects.

You can decide to watch all guest contributions, or just concentrate on one or two videos, depending on your interests. Included alongside many of the video interviews are some prompting questions to stimulate conversation with others on this course, and reflectively with yourself.