Evaluating our research team’s first three years to identify broader strategies for effective and sustainable capacity constructions

It is vital for research teams to assess their activities and outcomes as they grow in confidence and momentum if their capacities are to be enlarged and sustained. The authors use this chapter to conduct a theoretically framed evaluation of the first three years of operations of the research team that they constitute. Attention is given to individual reflections by group members and to a thematic analysis of those reflections. The resulting picture of the team is necessarily complex, multifaceted and partial, in keeping with the contexts of contemporary academic work. Nevertheless certain signifiers emerge from that picture that portray the team’s current capacities, the strategies that have been successful to varying degrees in constructing those capacities and the elements of those capacities that warrant further development. More broadly, the authors use these capacities, strategies and elements to elicit wider implications for the construction of capacities in relation to learning and engagement by individuals, groups and communities.