"I am here" - the collective experience, impacts and sense-making from a shared Summer School experience

This paper aims to offer a practice-inspired contribution to reflect on the role of extracurricular activities in the journey of academics, in particular PhD students, by describing and analysing a particular lived experience at the European Educational Research Summer School. Held at the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences of the University of Porto, Portugal, it focused on “Participatory Approaches in Educational Research”. Being a group of two tutors and six doctoral students, we depict some of the impacts the week had on all participants while sharing and reflecting on the potential of participatory research and processes in both individual projects and collective experience. The group mobilised arts-based research methodologies to start a reflexive dialogue about the transitioning process from doctoral student to becoming a researcher. Inspired by Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) and Image Theatre (Boal, 2002), attending to the multiplicity of our collective visions, voices, and experiences, we endeavoured to foster a safe and creative space for collaboration where thoughts and feelings could be collectively experienced and reflected upon. The use of arts-based research, the rapid growth of trust within the group, and the agency that was felt andtaken up by the participants were the main themes identified in our analysis, which were at the heart of the unexpected way the week unfolded.