The paper explores opportunities and challenges internationalization in higher education has posed for Lithuanian education researchers seeking to learn new qualitative and ethnographic research approaches. The focus is learning of interactional ethnographic epistemology within a 4-year EU funded project.
Since Lithuania regained independence from the soviet union in 1990, its higher educational system has undergone major transformations (Skukauskaite & Rupsiene, 2017). Entry into the EU and the world-wide internationalization processes in higher education created new opportunities while also posing challenges for Lithuanian researchers who had been behind the “iron curtain” for over 50 years. Learning qualitative research is one of the areas in which Lithuanian scholars have struggled, especially since varieties of research approaches have greatly expanded over the past half century and most of it is published in English, mainly in the U.S. and UK. Seeking to enter international research networks, in the past 30 years, Lithuanian scholars have had to learn not only the English language but also new research approaches and research literacies for the conduct, writing, and presenting of research to international audiences. Internationalization of higher education made visible the gaps and needs for research literacy development in Lithuania; at the same time, it presented opportunities for learning research literacies through collaborations with more experienced international scholars. In 2018, a group of researchers from Klaipeda University, in collaboration with scholars in the U.S., has received an EU grant to conduct a 4-year project that examines health-care-specialist preparation to work with people with disabilities. The underlying goal of the project is to help Lithuanian researchers learn a new research approach, Interactional Ethnography, and develop competencies in conducting complex, high quality, longitudinal research projects. In this paper we explore the opportunities and challenges the project team has faced in learning and conducting the project. Domain, taxonomic, and discourse analyses grounded in interactional ethnographic perspective make visible the variety of actors, activities, and research literacy practices that came together to support Lithuanian scholars’ learning of research literacies and entry to the international research networks.
