1 NZARE DAV09159 The Puzzles of Practice: Initiating a collaborative action and research culture within and beyond New Zealand. Niki Davis, University of Canterbury Jo Fletcher, University of Canterbury Susan Groundwater-Smith, University of Sydney Angus Macfarlane, University of Canterbury Abstract In May 2009 a group of researchers in the field of education established the New Zealand Collaborative Action and Research Network (NZCA&RN) hub through the medium of an invited research symposium and associated Blog stimulated by contributions of a leading academic (Somekh 2009a) founding member of the worldwide Collaborative Action Research Network. The principle purpose of the symposium was to establish a networked learning community in the form of “power networking” (Castells 2001), which is designed to change the way we perceive, organize, manage and consume educational research within an Action Research tradition complemented by sympathetic approaches, including Kaupapa Māori. In December 2009 the hub became an Interest Group within NZARE within its annual conference. Our goal through NZCA&RN was to advance educational research and practice in New Zealand and internationally to map the diverse territory and identify the puzzles, dilemmas and contradictions among communities, practitioners, scholars and academic leaders. The inaugural symposium was our initial effort to map the territory and initiate a hub for our community and we continue this with NZARE. The Context It was essential in the conception of NZCA&RN that we honour the many ways of knowing and being within New Zealand, which is an increasingly bicultural nation, by opening the symposium with the understanding that Kaupapa Māori and Action Research approaches, while different are not incompatible. In New Zealand, Kaupapa Māori, a discourse of proactive theory and practice, developed into a political consciousness in the late 1980s. It supported the renaissance of Māori cultural aspirations and practices as a philosophical and constructive educational perspective. Numerous commentators (Bishop & Glynn, 1999; L. Smith, 1999) argue that using traditional European research methodology when conducting research related to Māori compromises the validity of the research findings. They suggest that this methodology often looks for the negative rather than providing information necessary to bring about needed change. In their book Bishop and Glynn (1999) challenge the dominance of Western-based traditional individualistic research with Māori and promotes research methodologies that enable the realisation of self-determination and power sharing. The shared philosophy and vision of Kaupapa Māori incorporates the core value of manaakitanga where teachers “care for the students as culturally located individuals” (Bishop et al., 2007 p.1) and construct learning interactions that acknowledge their differences (Macfarlane, 2004; Macfarlane,