From the Director of the Pymble Institute
Pymble Institute News
Patience, Kindness and Collaboration in research
Over the past few weeks, I have noticed a theme emerging in my interactions with researchers. These are the areas of patience, kindness and collaboration and they are popping up whether I am working with student researchers or meeting and connecting with experienced education academics from universities around the world. My ideas about research are expanding equally, whether I am with Year 5 discussing visual data analysis, or professors, discussing ways to have impact in research. The themes mentioned above just keep popping up. It’s like the universe is trying to send me a message!
Patience in research is an idea I was discussing over email with Professor Nick Hopwood, from Education at the University of Technology Sydney. Nick wrote to me recently with some feedback on a paper I am writing. He reflected on the opportunity we have to help young researchers, ‘take the time to really listen, to dwell, to explore implications, to secure the best possible impact’. I have been thinking about my own busy job and the amount I try to pack into a day. Am I modelling patience for the teachers and students in my orbit? How could I change my own habits to embody a patient approach?
Kindness in research, as well as researching kindness, are active topics of consideration in our Junior School at the moment. Year 5 is preparing to host Pymble’s inaugural Kindness Convention on Wednesday 15 June, where groups of Year 5 students from schools across Sydney will gather to consider ways communities can become kinder – to the planet, to other people and to ourselves. I have had the privilege of working with a dynamic group of Year 5 students, analysing visual data from photographs of students in human bar graphs. The bar graphs depict student votes on how kind they believe we are to the environment, others and ourselves. Concerningly, but perhaps not unexpectedly, kindness to self rates quite poorly, so raising awareness to kindness and making kindness a theme of research is an important message for us to speak more about. I have recently become aware of the policy of the Wellcome Trust, a British philanthropic organisation which funds health research. The core tenets for successful funding from the Wellcome Trust include supporting equity, diversity and inclusion in the design of the research, the people who will be involved and the outcomes being sought. These tenets are more important than notions of ‘excellence’, which are frequently foregrounded in research proposals. Pymble’s focus on kindness and its connection to research is one way we are modelling ways that research contributes to a better world.
Collaboration in research is another area that has been popping up recently. This was beautifully demonstrated in Associate Professor Willa Huston’s (Science, University of Technology Sydney) presentation at our student research conference. Willa’s very first slide listed the names of her team, all the people who had contributed to the powerful work on microbiological breakthroughs for koala health, that she was sharing with the conference. Whilst many think of collaboration when putting a research proposal together, Willa role-modelled ways to acknowledge the team effort all the way through her presentation.
With patience, kindness and collaboration at the heart of the Pymble Institute’s approach, we aim to play our part in changing the world through researching differently and even educating researchers to think differently.
I hope you enjoy the updates in this newsletter.
Dr Sarah Loch
Director – Pymble Institute
