Lived experience of connected practice: Clavier

Actors in a large scale Online Intercultural Exchange (OIE) (O’Dowd, 2016) known as Clavier (MacKinnon, 2016) took time to reflect on their personal experiences of an OIE Network (OIEN) through creating auto ethnographic accounts (Nunan & Choi, 2010). Data reflect different contexts, roles and identities. The data were analysed using a grounded theory method to explore the various perspectives, convergences, and divergences. Through this analysis, “[t]he researcher creates an explication, organisation and presentation of the data rather than discovering order within the data. The discovery process consists of discovering the ideas the researcher has about the data after interacting with it” (Charmaz, 1990, p. 1169, cited in Willig, 2013, p. 77, emphasis in original). This ‘discovery process’ was followed by a series of online discussions where we grappled with the question of how best to present this complex picture with its many facets given the short period of presentation time in the conference. An account emerged of the transformative nature of connected practice. The process of preparing this performance for the UNICollaboration conference in Krakow took the actors to a new point in their professional lives.