Career story
I write this having submitted my doctoral thesis only a few months ago. My research explores the relationships schools build with other schools to collaborate and support one another. How did I become interested in this topic? While working as a researcher with schools in Chile - a school system well known for its incentives that encourage competition among schools - I realised that such competition rarely took the form of cutthroat rivalry. In reality, headteachers and teachers were often more sympathetic and supportive toward others they saw coping with the same challenges they faced. At the time, the existing literature - mostly produced in Anglo-Saxon contexts - focused on relationships between schools within formal networks, often involving incentives and support to make it happen. But would these formal forms of collaboration exist in my context? Would they work as prescribed? And more importantly, were there other, more informal ways in which schools were working together and supporting each other that the literature was overlooking? These were the kinds of questions that motivated my doctoral research.
In addition to a genuine and growing interest in the topic, I also saw this as an opportunity to explore methods I was less familiar with. I've always been interested in research methods, and have been lucky enough to have had some level of familiarity with different approaches. This emerging research project was the perfect opportunity to engage with social network analysis - an approach that is precisely about relationships, which ended up being the main methodological framework in my study.