‘Working with’ as a methodological stance: collaborating with students in teaching, writing, and research

Abstract

Using critical ethnography guided by cultural sociology, this paper examines the role of ‘co’ in teacher education; coresearching, coteaching, and cogenerating dialogue. The authors are a pre‐service teacher and a college instructor, and through our multiple perspectives and positionings, we explore how collaboration served to dismantle teacher–student hierarchies and replaced them with complex relationships mediated by polysemic approaches to research. Pushing against traditional ideologies, we utilize a multi‐voiced approach to writing as we present our experiences and interpretations of data relative to the possibilities of collaboration in education and research. As we analyze our role in collaborative endeavors, we ask: How can we find ways to work across and around hierarchical institutional structures when working with our students? What are ways that we can examine our individual lived experiences together, and is it possible to work with each other to develop identities as teachers that are not predicated on power differentials?

Keywords:

• pre‐service teacher education
• collaboration
• polysemic research
• dialogue
• coteaching

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Tricia Kress for inviting us to submit to this special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and to Carolyne Ali‐Khan and two anonymous reviewers who provided critical feedback and suggestions to this work.

Notes

1. The use of > emerged from discussions with Carolyne Ali‐Khan. We gratefully acknowledge her contribution and support of this work.

2. For a comprehensive discussion of coteaching and of cogenerative dialogues, please see the following review chapters: Bayne (2009) and Martin (2009).

3. Coteaching and cogenerative dialogue for us are interwoven and inseparable, yet for the purpose of discussion and analysis we draw them apart here.

4. The specific structure and unfolding of one semester of such a course are described in Siry (forthcoming).

5. Transcript notations were adapted from Roth (2006) who cites Gail Jefferson (e.g., 1989) as his source. The following conventions were used:

really Underline indicates emphasis or stress in delivery

ALL Capital letters are used when an utterance is louder than the surrounding talk

idea‐ The hyphen mark indicates a sudden stop.

wa::s Each colon indicates approximately a 0.1 second lengthening of sounds longer than normal

done? Punctuation marks are used as characteristics of speech rather than grammar features

just do [it] Square brackets indicate overlapping speech