Understanding Teachers’ Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Conflict and Coping Strategies

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 4:20 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Listening, Understanding, and Responding to In-Service Teachers (Table 34)

Abstract

The tension between the demands of interdisciplinary teaching and the disciplinary-based professional development context drives teachers to conduct interdisciplinary collaboration. This study longitudinally traced the collaboration process of an interdisciplinary teaching team from Shanghai to explore teachers’ conflicts and coping strategies in interdisciplinary collaboration. Analysis shows teachers faced task conflicts based on educational perceptions and disciplinary stance, process conflicts based on roles and time, and relationship conflicts triggered by personalities and work styles. Negotiation, dominance-support, avoidance were typical coping strategies, and the third parties also facilitated conflict coping. This study discusses how particular conflicts and coping strategies relate to interdisciplinary collaboration characteristics and cultural traditions. This study provides new insights into understanding teachers’ interdisciplinary collaborations in the East Asian context.

Author

• Yanru Chen, East China Normal University