Braiding Again at OEGlobal 2024

From the feedback on last year’s conference, and also personally from my own experience, one of the most powerful ideas was the conference vision crafted by our Norquest College hosts of Two Eyed Seeing and Braiding.

We opened up a space in the OEG Connect as places to try and talk about braiding. At some level, it’s as simple as finding connections and making them visible of ideas, practices, resources that maybe are not at first glance adjacent or related. Well that’s how I saw it.

And our Brisbane-based conference hosts are also interested in introducing this again as a connective practice. We are in contact with our Norquest colleagues @Darrion @DawnWitherspoon @rlawson780 who I understand are working on some reflections or writing on the 2023 effort (Darrion and Robert will be in Brisbane too), but also, maybe I can convince them to record a bit of audio to share their thoughts looking back on it.

And I am counting on @cjnewton (also going to Brisbane) who shared with us this highly related project, the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science.

Yet just this week the braids wove again when conference co-host @AdrianStagg shared a very new and relevant OER published by the Council of Australian University Libraries in their OER Collective “He Awa Whiria: Braiding the knowledge streams in research, policy and practice

“He Awa Whiria” is an edited text showcasing examples of research, policy and practice where Māori and Western science conventions have been combined using He Awa Whiria: the braided rivers framework.

So how can we embrace this approach of braiding leading up to and during the conference? What have you seen or read or experience that is relevant? Is this meaningful? How can we encourage more braiding and what does it look like?

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