Collaboration as Expansive Practice: Exploring the Learning Potential of Collaborative Action Partnerships

• In Event: Centering Justice: The Political and Ethical Commitments in Teaching, Learning, and Learning to Teach

Abstract

Recent attention on research-practice partnerships has focused on the ethical potential partnerships have in disrupting power relations towards more transformative ways of being by working with communities (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). This paper contributes to this work by investigating such a partnership within collaborative action ethnography (CAE) to examine how a history teacher’s critical pedagogy influenced students' historical thinking. We argue that our (the teacher and researcher) partnership created opportunities for expansive learning that transcended the teacher-researcher binaries, creating a learning experience steeped in ethical reflection and political action.

CAE works to disrupt power relations between the researchers and practitioners through active collaboration on research design, implementation, and analysis (Erickson, 2006). Modeling this partnership, we interrogated how our CAE informed our teaching and research practices and the resulting political and ethical implications of our work. To trace shifts in practice, we used expansive learning frameworks. These frameworks focus on how interacting activity systems inspire development of new artifacts (e.g. tools and ideas) for navigating expanded forms of practice (Engeström, 2001). Guided by grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006), we open-coded data sources (project design notes, field notes of class, etc.), while aggregating instances referencing shifts in project direction, researcher reflections, and teacher reflections for further micro-ethnographic analysis (Erickson, 1996).

We argue that the artifacts developed in our partnership, specifically analytic memos, worked to expand our understanding of critical historical thinking and collective learning, shaping our collective engagement in teaching and research. For example, our first memo examined examples of the teacher’s discourse. We noticed the frequent use of collective-centered talk (e.g. using “we” instead of “I”), leading to discussions on the teacher’s collectivist values as a learning and political goal. Given that collectivity was a key theme in the project, our engagement with the memo revealed new ways of seeing collectivity that informed our research (focusing on student discourse on collectivity) and teaching (reflecting on collectivist values in class). The analytic memo artifacts also created opportunities for professional and ethical reflection. At the micro level, the memos mediated discussions about moment-to-moment actions consequential to the ways we understood student responses to pedagogical moves. At the macro level, the memos offered opportunities to notice the multiple interactions teachers negotiate on a daily basis, seeing how these interactions work towards larger political agendas while allowing for intentional reflection on how we were creating a dignifying learning environment (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014; Philip, 2018).

This analysis contributes to work interrupting normative conceptualizations of research partnerships as binary (Penuel et al., 2015). In this paper we were limited by language describing the partnership between “teacher” and “researcher.” Building alternative grammars reflecting how teachers are researchers and vice versa is essential in deepening theoretical conceptualizations of learning between the two. Lastly, we offer a conceptualization of teacher learning as an ethical interactional process steeped in political action (Philip, 2018), supporting core practices of critical reflection and intentionality, and necessitating a re-imagining of teacher education and evaluation that reflect these forms of learning (Cerna-Prado, et al., 2019).

Authors

• Ava Jackson, Boston University

• Corey Winchester, Northwestern University