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35 limitations and opportunities as a researcher in being able to answer my research questions. In the second section I describe the research tools that I developed and employed for data collection and analysis. In the third section I describe the research site – the Preparation for Social Action program at the Kimanya-Ngeyo Foundation in Uganda – as relates specifically to my data collection and analysis.

Towards a Praxis of Collaboration My aim is for this research methodology, data collection, and analysis for this study to be governed by the principle of collaboration. While the chasm between “researchers” and “practitioners” can be a wide one (Chambers 1983), GaztambideFernandez (2004) suggests that collaboration in curriculum work is possible through personal sacrifices in order to engage with curriculum work as a public moral enterprise, as he cites Doerr and Marshall’s assertion that “In our contemporary praxis of collaboration, the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts” (qtd. in GaztambideFernandez and Sears 2004: xv). In my own ethical considerations as researcher, I must give careful thought to what my research praxis of collaboration might in fact look like, and how it might alter within different contexts and in consideration of my personal and embodied identifications.

Reeler (2007) suggests one posture that researchers and program evaluators might take in studying programs as organic systems of social change: There is a need to observe the change processes that already exist in a living social system. If we can do this before we rush into doing our needs analyses and crafting projects to meet these needs, we may choose how to respond more respectfully to the realities of existing change processes rather than impose external or blind prescriptions based on assumed conditions for change. (2)