A Sidetrack to Autoethnography. Enriching a Reading Research Collective

As a group of academics working for the first time together on a collective project on children and young people's reading engagement, we discovered the value of reflexive conversations on the nature of our individual roles as literacy educators and our roles as collaborative researchers. As the project progressed, we developed this paper from conversations that drifted into self-reflection on our own experiences as readers, teachers and researchers. Rather than viewing these conversations as digression, we decided to embrace wholeheartedly the possibility that they would enrich our research and progress our goals as a group. This was an opportunity to pause and venture into a less familiar research arena. In the process, as individuals, we revealed more of ourselves as collaborative researchers interacting in this new space which enriched our collective undertaking as well as our individual projects within different reading communities.