Staying With the Collaboration Trouble

• In Event: Educational Collaborations and the Ontological Turns

Abstract

Purpose: The Latin roots of “collaboration” include com, meaning "with, together, or jointly," and laborare ("to labor"). These form the Late Latin collaborare ("to labor together"), the most often utilized definition of collaboration in the field of education, writ large.
I complicate still-dominant education discourses that contour collaboration in education as most often willingly working to offer solutions to already identified “problems.” I argue that responses to the AERA Call require “staying with the trouble” created by assumptions of always-genial versions of “collaborative educational conversations” as yielding equitable “problem-solving education communities” of organizational stakeholders and researchers. I here stay with the trouble posed by one long-term collaborative endeavor in which I engaged with fellow teachers, researchers and organizational stakeholders, including school principals and superintendents. Our research project was co-conceptualized as co-researching and re-creating curricula within one school district that would prioritize issues of “difference” that then supposedly would encourage more equitable relations among all. But our efforts instead were punctured by constant rupturings of expectations for always congruent, always in synchronous and harmonious agreement versions of collaboration as well as of those project aspirations.

Theoretical Mode of Inquiry: To interrogate these breeches, I draw from Haraway’s (2016) theorizings of sympoiesis -- “making-with” -- that can add both ontological and epistemological possibilities for proposing and enacting “what was not there before” (Haraway, p. 127). I do so to argue that any efforts toward “collaborative education conversation” will be difficult without concomitant changes in prevailing versions of unitary, sovereign, coherent “selves” who engage in equitable and generative versions of collaboration, community, and conversation.
Underlying Haraway’s sympoiesis is her theorizing of a relational ontology: that is, rather than any version of that sovereign, human-only self, entities are constituted by “an expandable number of quasi-collective/quasi-individual partners in constitutive relatings; these relationalities are the objects of study. The partners do not precede the relatings” (2016, p. 64). For Haraway, any research that takes substance as prior to relation will necessarily fail.

Data Sources: I re-viewed what I previously deemed as disruptive data that challenged always synchronous collaborating efforts.

Warrants & Scholarly Significance: Haraway’s theorizing of sympoiesis offers potential for enactings of “collaborative education conversations” that do not recursively replicate versions of such that promise equitable and “solution-producing outcomes” that work for all. Rather, such endeavors as those signaled by the AERA Call might in fact be more realized if theorized as dynamic, boundaryless, amorphous, impossible to reduce to simplistic and formulaic “conversation,” or research methods, or human-only intra-actions that assume a “self” who is able “to recognize, know and easily capture the ‘I’ that has just shared experiences with those [with] whom s/he studies” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2008, p. 300). Rather, mutual inter-dependences and productive mergers of unpredictable forces might enable “new research” that could gesture toward ways to think differently, especially in relation to “lively and agential more-than-human network[s] of relationality” (Marchand, 2018, p. 294) – of all that could comprise “collaborative education conversations” that matter.

Author

• Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University