Staying with the (Collaboration) Trouble

• In Event: University/K-12 Collaborations

Abstract

I complicate assumptions and discourses that contoured one large, three-year “collaboration project,” which involved educators who supposedly were willing to work in synchronous ways in order to conjure “solutions” to already identified “big problems” within one large school district. As “consultant,” I worked alongside ten teachers, three school principals and one superintendent. We supposedly were co-researching and re-creating curricula that would prioritize issues of “difference” within one school district located in the U.S. coastal northeast.
Donna Haraway has taught us that if we are to understand and enable responses to our world, we must “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2010; 2012). I thus attempt to do so in relation to multiple contradictions that erupted within this three-year collaborative endeavor. I also draw from Haraway’s (2016) theorizings of sympoiesis -- “making-with” -- that can ad ontological and epistemological possibilities for proposing and enacting “what was not there before” (Haraway, p. 127).

Author

• Janet L, Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University