Teachers’ professional transformation in teacher-researcher collaborative didactic development projects in Sweden and Finland

ABSTRACT

To what extent can teachers’ involvement in knowledge-producing activities be enhanced through collaboration with researchers? This article reports on two teacher-researcher collaborative didactic development projects in Sweden and Finland. By using the theory of practice architectures, the aim is to explore how teachers’ knowledge contribution and participation may be transformed through collaboration in two action research-based projects. Even though the practices of collaboration are different, one aiming for book production and the other for didactic development in the classroom, the findings regarding the teachers’ professional transformation seem to have similarities. The norms of how teachers initially understand themselves are transformed through the collaboration. The teachers start out by stating that they feel unsure of their own capacity, but through collaboration they start to see themselves as knowledge producers when they understand the value of their contribution of knowing-in-action. The teachers’ professional transformation is made possible through time given and the set-up of collaboration through dialogues. As the teachers develop agency in the collaborative process of producing knowledge with the researchers, the relationships of power and solidarity change. The findings contribute to the research field emphasising teachers’ important role in knowledge production and practice development processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher-researcher collaboration
• teachers’ professional development
• didactic development
• action research
• practice architectures

Introduction

How teachers should be involved in building a professional knowledge base for the profession has long been discussed by both teachers themselves and educational researchers. Thirty-five years ago, Carr and Kemmis (1986) contributed to this discussion with a theoretically based argument that teachers actually have to be involved if we really want transformation of teaching and learning practices in schools to happen. Much has happened since then in the educational field as a whole, both in schools and politically. Research emphasises teachers’ important role in knowledge production and practice development processes (Carlgren 2009; Groundwater-Smith et al. 2013; Ingerman and Wickman 2015; Ligozat and Almqvist 2018). The discussion about teachers’ involvement in research continues, yet teachers’ contributions to the professional knowledge base is often not acknowledged. We use the theory of practice architectures to gain a better understanding, and acknowledge, the contributions teachers can make to the knowledge base of the teaching profession.

The study in this article builds on two research projects: a Swedish project where teachers and researchers have been writing a book about didactic dilemmas together and a Finnish collaborative project between teachers and researchers implementing a new didactic model, classroom tandem, in a formal language teaching context. In both projects, action research has been used as a methodological approach for setting up the collaboration between researchers and teachers. The aim of both projects has been to contribute with new didactic knowledge and competences as well as practice development in the teachers’ classrooms.

We, the authors of this article, each led one of the projects, together with other researchers. Due to our joint involvement in an international researcher network we started to reflect upon the projects and discovered similarities in their aims and the evolution of processes over time. Within the network, a theoretical framework, the theory of practice architectures, focusing on practices and their conditions, has been developed and used (Kemmis et al. 2014). The theory of practice architectures brings prefiguring conditions such as norms, practical set-ups, and relations of power and solidarity among participants into focus. As action researchers working from this perspective, we were interested in questions of how to improve collaboration between teachers and researchers and how to strengthen everyone’s voice. In action research there is a long tradition of focusing on issues around collaboration between academia and schools (Bruce, Flynn, and Stagg-Peterson 2011; Edwards-Groves, Olin, and Karlberg-Granlund 2016; Groundwater-Smith et al. 2013). Previously we had both experienced challenges in setting up collaborative projects where teachers and researchers can work on an equal basis We were aware that several obstacles may constrain teacher-researcher collaborations from earlier research (e.g. Forsman et al. 2014; Aspfors et al. 2015; Hamza et al. 2017; Olin and Ingerman 2016). Obstacles such as differing aims and practices, flawed knowledge about each other’s situations, inadequate negotiations about expectations of the collaboration, and inappropriate expectations of each other, for example, may constrain collaborative projects. We wanted to deepen our understanding through analyses of the new projects where knowledge about those aspects had underpinned the set-up of the teacher-researcher collaboration.

Our analyses begin from a practice perspective as earlier mentioned, using the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al. 2014) as a theoretical lens. Through this lens we focus on the sayings, doings and relatings of different actors (mainly the teachers), as well as how the different conditions in the two projects may affect teachers’ professional transformation. The aim of the study presented here is thus to explore how teachers’ knowledge contribution and participation may (or may not) be transformed through the collaboration in two didactic development projects. The focus is on how teachers relate to: I) knowledge production and development work; II) researchers as co-workers in a Swedish and a Finnish project. We also analyse how the practices of collaboration in the two didactic development projects are strengthened during and through teacher-researcher collaboration.

Background and research context

There is a complex array of influences at play internationally when it comes to questions and practices of teacher involvement and teacher learning in knowledge building and practice development in schools (Hardy 2012). The Swedish and Finnish educational contexts are part of the Nordic traditions of ‘Bildung’ and folk enlightenment, where trust and reliance on teachers’ competences is brought to the fore (Rönnerman, Salo, and Furu 2008). Yet there are also other trends which emphasise test-based accountability, standardised curricula and corporate management models (Hardy, Heikkinen, and Olin 2020) in these contexts. Those trends run in opposite directions when it comes to teacher involvement.

Both projects in this study were set up to establish and support collaborative processes where teachers’ knowledge and competences are fully considered. In the following, we will describe the research approaches and ideas underlying those practices.

Comparative didactics and didactic development dialogue

In didactic research in Sweden, there is a trend towards involving teachers in research and knowledge production for teachers’ teaching (Ligozat and Almqvist 2018). However, constructive collaboration does not just happen when different actors come together. Hamza et al. (2017)demonstrate how teachers and researchers have different priorities when they collaborate and often end up working in parallel towards their own goals as opposed to engaging in a real exchange of ideas.

Comparative didactics is a growing research area aiming to contribute to a deeper understanding of teaching and learning in different subjects. This research is always in some way conducted together with teachers, who have to provide access to their classrooms where the empirical studies are carried out. Comparative didactics should be seen as a way of dealing with questions about similarities and differences in teachers’ selection of content and manners of teaching and how these selections influence students’ learning. Additionally, the results from comparative didactical research contribute to the development of teaching.

In a five-year-long international research project of comparative didactics the departure was in research in the Nordic and French traditions of didactics, focusing on analyses and critical discussions about teaching and learning in various school subjects (Ligozat, Amade-Escot, and Östman 2015). Studies of teaching traditions (Ligozat, Lundqvist, and Amade-Escot 2018; Marty, Venturini, and Almqvist 2018) contributed to the understanding of what didactic choices look like in teaching and how tradition informs these choices, although teachers cannot in any simple and unambiguous way be said to belong to one or the other teaching tradition. Teachers orient their concrete teaching by organising the choice of aims, content and working methods in ways that are not clear or uniform. Even so, teaching traditions contribute with models for comparing and discussing the choices made by teachers.

In the Swedish part of the international research project of comparative didactics, teacher-researcher collaboration was undertaken to write a popular science book (Almqvist, Hamza, and Olin 2017) for teacher education. Methodologically this built on action research in combination with the ideas from comparative didactics to use comparison, both to deepen knowledge about teaching practices but also to use different theoretical knowledge traditions in the process of inquiring into teaching dilemmas. To be able to work with comparisons, a collaborative model involving teachers and researchers was set up, known as didactic development dialogue. The model aimed at supporting a writing process for teachers and researchers to identify, describe, problematise and discuss teachers’ didactic dilemmas. We will come back to the thoroughly structured writing process after a short description of the contents of the book.

The teachers’ didactic dilemmas were taken as a starting point for the writing process because a fundamental idea underpinning the model of didactic development dialogue was that teachers’ own experiences and knowledge should be used as a starting point to be developed and refined through the process of comparison. The teachers were asked to choose what they would consider a central didactic dilemma in their own practice. A didactic dilemma relates to one or more of the three relationships in the didactic triangle: the content-pupil relationship, the pupil-teacher relationship and/or the teacher-content relationship (Kansanen 2011).

The teachers were encouraged to describe their dilemma in detail: in which situations it emerged in their classroom, what they would do about it and why they would consider it a dilemma, problem or a challenge to handle. In the described dilemmas, the frames for the didactical situation were often taken into account since this helps to explain why a specific situation became a dilemma. This is an example from the book:

How could I give the pupils enough freedom to make them feel that the teaching is meaningful, and, at the same time, steer the teaching so that they learn what is expected in the curricula? (Almqvist, Hamza, and Olin 2017)

The first part of the dilemma has to do with the pupil-content relationship, related to learning, interest and motivation, but also the pupil-teacher (pedagogical) relationship. The question about how to handle this dilemma must be understood in the light of frames for the teaching and learning situation, where both content and activities to a large extent are prescribed through curricula. Depending on how open the system is there will be more or less scope for the teacher to make decisions about the content based on his or her knowledge of the situation and the pupils. In the didactic development dialogue a dilemma like this is described and concretised from a specific classroom, as a case to deal with in the written dialogue that follows.

The book consists of nine cases in nine chapters, starting with the didactic dilemma that the teachers choose to write about. The teachers write their cases with the help of a co-author for each chapter. Those co-authors are researchers. Each dilemma is commented on by one teacher and two other researchers with expertise in relation to the dilemma. After the comments the co-author researcher writes a conclusion and, finally, the main author (teacher or teachers) writes a conclusion on the whole of the content, in relation to their teaching practice and their own learning.

In the project, specific activities involving the main authors (the teachers writing the cases and their co-author researchers) were set up to support the writing process. It started with a two-day meeting where the purpose, process and expected outcome were described by the three project leaders (researchers from the main research project of comparative didactics) and discussed. Then the teachers wrote their first part of each chapter, supported by the co-author researchers, in about four months. The written cases were sent to the commenting teachers and researchers, who wrote and sent their comments back in another three months. After that a two-day dialogue was set up in the middle of the writing process, as a meeting where the main author teachers and co-author researchers met to reflect on the comments and to discuss how to write their respective final parts (conclusion and final reflections). Finally, those final parts were written over a period of four months. Altogether, the whole process of writing the chapters took one year.

The development of the didactic tandem model for language teaching in a Finnish context

In Finland it is believed that teachers are participating less and thus less interested in continuing professional development suggesting that new practices that strengthen collaboration between universities and schools, researchers and teachers, are needed (e.g. Aspfors et al. 2015). At the same time there is a trend in research focusing on ‘didaktik’ and teacher professional development away from traditional (often instrumentalist) in service training towards collaborative site-based development. In order to enhance teachers’ involvement and engagement in teacher-researcher collaborations, it is crucial that the researcher act as a negotiator concerning the conditions for participation (Forsman et al. 2014; Aspfors et al. 2015).

In the last ten years, in language didactic research and in national debates in Finland there has been a call for a more communicative approach to second national language teaching and for more contact and bilingual cooperation between the language groups (Finnish and Swedish) within the educational context. One form of bilingual cooperation in a school context being applied is classroom tandem, a model for language learning and teaching within curriculum-based second national language teaching in Finland (see Pörn and Hansell 2020). Finland is officially a bilingual country, with two official national languages, Finnish and Swedish. Both national language groups are constitutionally guaranteed equal rights in society, including education. Under current legislation, the nation’s education system is organised separately for the two language groups in parallel monolingual schools that follow the same national core curricula, but use different languages of instruction and administration. Both language groups study the other national language as a compulsory school subject, Swedish as the second national language in Finnish-medium schools, and Finnish as the second national language in Swedish-medium schools (Boyd and Palviainen 2015; Nuolijärvi 2013).

Tandem as a model for language learning, developed in a German-French youth exchange in the 1960s, was originally implemented in non-formal learning contexts (see Bechtel 2003 for a historical overview). Tandem learning entails reciprocal two-way learning in cooperation between two students with different first languages learning each other’s languages in dyads.

The main principles of tandem learning are reciprocity and learner autonomy (Brammerts and Calvert 2003; Holstein and Oomen-Welke 2006). Reciprocity entails the students switching languages, dividing time equally between being the learner of their respective second languages (L2) and being a model and supporter in their respective first languages (L1). Simultaneously, they develop learner autonomy, that is, they take responsibility for their own learning process (e.g. Karjalainen et al. 2013). In addition to these principles, a third characteristic of tandem learning is authenticity, i.e. authentic learning situations, understood as second language learners having the opportunity to use and learn the second language in interaction and reciprocal cooperation with a native speaker in a non-formal learning context instead of practising the second language in a traditional formal educational context (Pörn and Hansell 2020; Rost-Roth 1995).

Tandem language learning has previously been organised mainly outside of curriculum-based language education, usually among adult learners or university students (e.g. Bower and Kawaguchi 2011; Karjalainen 2011; Tian and Wang 2011). Although tandem is originally developed in non-formal contexts, in recent years tandem learning has also been implemented and integrated in formal educational contexts at different levels (Pörn and Hansell 2020). Tandem language learning in a school context entails cooperation between two students, two teachers, two language groups and two separate school systems (cf. Pörn and Hansell 2019). Since the principles of tandem learning were originally implemented in a non-formal context, challenges associated with transferring the tandem model from a non-formal to a formal classroom context have been highlighted for discussion, regarding both learner autonomy (Pörn and Hansell 2020) and authenticity (Elo and Michaela 2018). The classroom context has distinctive implications, especially in how autonomy is implemented and how authentic interaction and discussions emerge. The school curricula, lesson plans, assessment, and the teacher’s responsibility in language teaching imply limitations on the students’ autonomy in tandem classroom practices (Pörn and Hansell 2020). The challenges regarding the authenticity concern how the teachers manage to produce and develop language learning tasks supporting authentic learning situations in a formal tandem classroom context (Elo and Michaela 2018). Due to the lack of teaching material for tandem language teaching in general, the starting point of the Finnish didactic project in this study was to further develop and produce new tasks in order to develop the tandem model for curriculum-based teaching of the second national language in Finland.

The context of the Finnish didactic development project in this study is a three-year, action-research-based project which was launched in cooperation between researchers, language teachers in Finnish- and Swedish-medium upper secondary schools (located in different parts of the country), and ICT teachers. The teacher-researcher collaboration was undertaken to implement classroom tandem in virtual learning environments. The five teachers involved in the project had limited previous knowledge of tandem theory and modest practical experience of tandem teaching in a school context. However, the teachers’ collaboration had a basis in more long-term contact between the schools for several years before they started this tandem cooperation. The only teaching material to hand at the beginning of the project was a recently published Finnish handbook in classroom tandem, a result of a previous teacher-researcher collaboration (see Löf et al. 2016).

Due to the lack of teaching material for tandem teaching in general, and especially regarding classroom tandem in virtual learning environments, the aim of the current teacher-researcher collaborative didactic development project was to further develop and produce new tasks. The teachers and researchers regularly met, discussed and evaluated the challenges and possible solutions regarding how to implement tandem and further develop tandem tasks to be finally published in a digital handbook at the end of the project.

Theory and methodological considerations

In this study the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al. 2014) is used to interpret what happens in the Swedish and the Finnish collaborative didactic development projects. The focus is on teacher-researcher collaborative practices. Practices are what happen in a specific place during a specific time space. Using the theory of practice architectures means that we delimit the practices we study by identifying the project (purposes and tasks) they entail. In both projects the purpose is to develop didactic knowledge and teaching practices through teacher-researcher collaboration.

The theory of practice architectures as a theoretical lens

To describe the collaborative practices, the sayings, doings and relatings are central entities to identify and interpret from a practice architectures perspective (Kemmis et al. 2014). The sayings represent forms of understanding; doings represent modes of action; and relatings represent ways in which people will relate to one another and the world. To further understand and explain why practices unfold as they do, the intersubjective spaces where the practicing takes place has to be considered. In the theory of practice architectures those spaces are discussed as arrangements encountered in language; in space-time in the material world; and in social relationships. More specifically they are described as I) cultural-discursive arrangements that exist in the dimension of semantic space, and that enable and constrain how we can express ourselves in the social medium of language, ii) material-economic arrangements that exist in the dimension of physical space-time, and that enable and constrain how we can do things in the medium of work and activity, and iii) social-political arrangements that exist in the dimension of social space, and that enable and constrain how we can connect and contest with one another in the social medium of power and solidarity.

Based on our previous results and experiences of action research-based development projects through teacher-researcher collaboration, we have found that an important prerequisite for successful collaborative development projects is, first of all, voluntary participation that relies on teachers’ authentic interest (Forsman et al. 2014; Aspfors et al. 2015). When initiating a project, it is important that teachers are invited to engage in decisions concerning arrangements of their own development projects. The researcher’s role is important, especially in the initial phase in order to enable prerequisites for a successful teacher-researcher collaboration to be met. There is also a need for support and encouragement from school leaders, particularly in form of commitment and to provide time and space for reflections, and it appears that this has to be explained (in sayings) by the researchers (see e.g. Forsman et al. 2014; Aspfors et al. 2015).

We have also identified the significance of the researchers’ efforts (doings) regarding the material-economic arrangements, initially in raising the consciousness of and negotiating on the forms, arenas and resources for enabling teachers’ development work beyond the existing orders (cultures) within the schools. This includes negotiations on the allocation of time and resources for the extraordinary activities the projects imply (Forsman et al. 2014). The role of the researcher can be conceptualised as that of a negotiator regarding cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements enabling collaboration. The researcher needs to contribute fully and continuously to the process at different levels where these arrangements are negotiated. This means that the researcher needs to negotiate at an organisational level with school leaders and principals, and at a teacher-researcher level with teachers (Aspfors et al. 2015; Hamza et al. 2017).

The teacher-researcher collaboration in both projects in this study was initiated by the researchers. They invited teachers they had been working with previously in courses or projects. This means that the teachers’ participation was voluntary in both projects and built on already established trust in previous teacher-researcher collaboration. Material-economic arrangements in terms of allocated time and resources were provided and negotiated with the teachers from the start. This included, for example, meetings in conference accommodations without being disturbed by every-day obligations and also meeting each other in informal discussions during coffee breaks and lunch time. Social space for communication and collaboration was provided by the researchers, organising arenas for communication through regular teacher-researcher meetings and dialogue conferences. In those social spaces an important aspect for us as researchers was to balance our own and the teachers’ opportunities to contribute with knowledge and experiences in the meetings.

Data and analyses

Data from different occasions are chosen for analyses in the two projects. In the Swedish project data is gathered from the two-day dialogue meeting in the middle of the writing process and in the Finnish project data comes from one teacher-researcher collaborative meeting at the beginning of the three-year project and one meeting at the end. The data from those specific occasions makes it possible to describe the appearance of the practices from a practice architectures perspective, and also to describe potential transformation that is related to the collaboration. In both projects the participants were informed that data were gathered for research purposes and all participants gave their consent.

The teachers and co-author researchers in the Swedish project met for a two-day dialogue meeting to reflect on the comments they had received and to discuss how to write their respective last parts of the book. The data from this occasion consist of the 13 teachers’ and nine researchers’ individually written reflections both before and after the dialogues in the meeting. Each dialogue had a purpose in relation to the overarching aim to support the writing process. Initially the purpose was to deal with frustration and surprise from the reading of the comments and later on to nurture constructive discussions generating ideas of how to handle the comments in one’s own writing, also contributing to producing new didactic knowledge. At the end of the meeting, everyone wrote about experiences so far in the project and what difference the collaboration at the meeting had had for their upcoming writing.

The data in the Finnish project consist of participative observations in form of audio-taped meetings, which have been transcribed. The analyses starts from a teacher-researcher meeting in the beginning of the project, where the focus was on planning the implementation of the tandem model in teaching practice by elaborating the aims of existing tasks and by producing new tasks to be suitable for language teaching in virtual tandem classrooms. The analyses continued with the last meeting, two years later, when the teachers and researchers discussed their final versions of the tasks before publishing them. The teachers and researchers reflect on the results in relation to the didactic tandem model being applied.

In the analyses of the written reflections and transcribed audio-taped meetings in this study, first, we have identified how the practices of collaboration appear and are transformed. In accordance with the research questions, the focus was on how the teachers relate to I) the knowledge production, II) their own development work, and III) the researchers as collaborators. In relation to these three foci we have coded data using the concepts of sayings, doings and relatings from the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al. 2014). Through categorising the coded material we could identify: 1) Ways the teachers expressed themselves (sayings), for example, how they talked about their own practice and also theoretical reasoning. 2) How teachers reacted and acted in relation to others or artefacts which have to do with place or space (doings), for example, when they are becoming more adapted to the environment or the situation. 3) How teachers react and act in relation to others or artefacts which have to do with relationships of power or solidarity (relatings), for example, when there are different opinions about how to value different knowledge contributions. These findings are reported in the result section below. Finally, to be able to explain the appearance of these aspects of practices we went through the data again, searching for what and how arrangements (cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political) were mentioned and visualised. This reasoning is shared in the discussion section.

Results

In both the Swedish and the Finnish didactic development projects we have identified similar patterns of transformation in the collaborative practices. This is visualised by first describing practices from the start (the beginning of the dialogue meeting in Sweden and one of the first collaborative meetings in Finland) and thereafter by focusing on changes in practices (following the happenings throughout the dialogue meeting in Sweden and comparing with the last meeting in Finland).

The collaboration practices at the start of each project

When the dialogue meeting in the Swedish project was about to start some teachers hesitated to join the meeting. They explained that they felt uncomfortable with some comments they had received on the dilemmas they had identified and that they did not want to meet the researchers who had written those comments (relatings in regard to the researchers as co-workers). The project leaders (researchers) explained that the researchers who had commented (they were external to the project) would not join the dialogue meeting. The meeting would be with the co-author researchers, only and that the purpose of the meeting was to discuss the comments and how to handle them. This convinced the teachers to join.

At the teacher-researcher meeting, at the beginning of the Finnish project, the teachers expressed uncertainty of their own capacity to implement and integrate tandem teaching in their own language teaching (sayings and relatings in regard to own contribution). When the teachers and researchers started to discuss the tasks at hand, both the course book tasks for traditional language teaching and the tasks from the recently published handbook in classroom tandem (Löf et al. 2016), the teachers adopted a non-committal attitude towards discussing and elaborating the aims of the tasks to be suitable for tandem teaching (doings in regard to own contribution). The teachers oriented towards the tandem handbook at hand as ‘expertise’ (relatings in regard to theoretical model knowledge):

To be sure, we have read the handbook, and we have a writing task … .

Some of the teachers also expressed weak interest in producing new tasks:

Yes, but I’ll have to check my course book, there are probably a lot of good tasks in it, so I don’t have to do them all myself … .

In the discussions at the dialogue meeting between teachers and researchers in the Swedish project, it turned out that there were different opinions and feelings about the comments received from the researchers. Some teachers felt unfairly criticised and they defended their way of defining the dilemma from the standpoint of being a responsible actor in a teaching practice which had to be carried through on its own terms (doings and relatings in regard to own development work and researchers’ knowledge contribution). For example, one teacher, whose dilemma was about how to grade and assess the students in a fair and correct way, reflected:

Since my case is about grades and assessment, I found it quite difficult to respond to one researcher’s comment that we teachers “label” our students. She is very critical of grades overall and it is difficult to respond to someone with that approach. It becomes like another discussion - having grades or not having grades.

Other teachers were critical towards the comments pointing out that the commenting researchers were not well informed (doings and relatings in regard to researchers’ knowledge contribution), for example:

I also experienced her comment as if she was not really familiar with the central content of the curriculum versus knowledge requirements.

Some teachers argued that it was impossible to follow advice given by commentators since their theoretical argumentation did not help in a practical situation. Theoretical and practical knowledge was commonly talked about in the discussions as contradictory entities with little relevance for each other (sayings and relatings in regard to different forms of knowledge). However, there were also positive reactions to the comments. Some teachers indicated that the comments opened up new thoughts or ideas for them (sayings and relatings in regard to the contribution of different kinds of knowledge), either in relation to what to do in their classrooms or how to develop or add something in their texts to better explain what they were trying to elaborate on.

At the beginning of the collaboration in the Finnish project, it was obvious that the teachers did not actively participate in the researchers’ discussions about the tandem theory and tandem specific issues. When the researchers started to discuss a didactic dilemma related to the tandem theory, for example, how to pair the students with respect to the students’ corresponding levels of competence in their respective second languages, the teachers were silent and only listened to the researchers (doings and relatings in regard to own knowledge contribution and co-working with the researchers). The teachers did not respond to the researchers’ discussion, but rather dismissed the discussion by only pointing out that pairing is difficult:

Yes, it was difficult, surprisingly difficult pairing students … it almost causes you anxiety … .

Another example was the researchers’ tandem specific discussion about how to open up more authentic discussions between the tandem partners instead of getting stuck in task-oriented discussions. The teachers did not engage in this discussion either, but switched topic (doings and relatings in regard to own knowledge contribution and co-working with the researchers). They focused on their own teaching practices and participated by presenting what tasks they had worked on (sayings in regard to different kind of knowledge contributions). The teachers pointed out challenges and constraints related to the implementation of tandem teaching in their own classroom practices (sayings, doings and relatings in regard to own contribution based in practice knowledge). Since the tandem teaching was organised as a cooperation between two schools, one Swedish and one Finnish-medium upper secondary school, and two teachers from different schools, the co-teachers had different course curricula to take into consideration. Therefore, the teachers often raised critical questions in the discussions related to curriculum:

It’s difficult when we have different course curricula in our schools …

… . and now the new national core curriculum comes and is added as well.

Due to the tandem teaching model applied in a virtual learning environment, the teachers also raised technical problems when teaching and working in a shared virtual learning environment.

Summarising the initial phases of the collaborative projects in relation to the first research question (how teachers relate to the knowledge production and development work) shows that the teachers in both projects took their experiences and knowledge from their classrooms as a basis or standpoint that they could talk about and defend. In relation to the second research question (how teachers relate to the researchers as co-workers), the results show that the teachers initially met the researchers with scepticism and a non-committed attitude regarding participating and relating to the kind of knowledge contribution that the researchers might bring. Even if teachers were fully-fledged professionals, who were able to act autonomously and professionally in their classrooms, some teachers expressed a dependency on the researcher in this kind of collaborative project about didactic knowledge production. The teachers’ sayings, doings and relatings may in some cases be interpreted as uncertainty about their own capacity and competence in the meeting with more academic practices, which the researchers are familiar with. In other cases it may be interpreted as a power not to involve oneself in the exchange of ideas from different knowledge domains (practical and theoretical knowledge). Participating in discussions where new models, perspectives and critical reflections are raised for mutual scrutinising, is not a familiar practice to the teachers and they do not act as agents in this collaborative process of producing new knowledge together with the researchers. They handle the situations by switching topic, being silent or defending themselves. However, there are also openings when some teachers start seeing the possibility of widening their knowledge by opening up to new ideas.

The transformed collaboration practices

During the two-day meeting in the Swedish project, a flow of dialogue sessions was set up with the purpose of supporting each other in reading, responding and reflecting on the comments and how to write the last parts of the chapters in relation to the comments. The co-author researchers were to write a conclusion and the teachers a final reflection in their chapters after the meeting. The dialogues between the teachers and the researchers supported the teachers in starting to view the comments, even the problematising and critical ones, as constructive parts of an on-going written dialogue about the dilemma that they had raised in the chapter (relatings in regard to researchers as co-workers and to other researchers’ knowledge contribution). The teachers realised that in their last part of the chapter, when they were going to write the final reflection, they would have the opportunity to have the last word in the dialogue. As one teacher reflected at the end of the meeting:

Dialogues with other participants gave me new perspectives – what is it that the comments say to me and what can I highlight in my last part of the text.

In similar ways, the teachers at the end of the Finnish project started showing confidence in their own knowledge contribution. They had developed their professional language regarding how to discuss practical issues related to the tandem theory (sayings in regard to own knowledge contribution). The teachers also participated more actively in the teacher-researcher collaboration, and the teachers and researchers together reflected on the results in relation to the didactic tandem model being implemented in the classrooms (sayings, doings and relatings in regard to researchers as co-workers and different knowledge contributions).

To specify these transformations, first from the Swedish dialogue meeting, the teachers went from defending their own practical standpoints to finding constructive ways of using the comments in different ways, both in their own last reflection part of the chapters but also in future work in classrooms (doings and relatings in regard to own knowledge production through co-working with researchers). One teacher reflected:

Student influence is a difficult issue, which I still find difficult. Of course, we need to get the students in the mindset about grades and assessments as the commentator suggests. But to what extent? As professionals we need to know what is required for different grades, but we must clarify the differences, and here student influence can be of great help.

Here the teacher made use of the researcher’s comment to deepen her own reasoning around the role of the pupils and the teacher in assessment work. Another constructive strategy was to use new thoughts that the researchers’ comments represented for further development of own thoughts and work:

I have also received some help in interpreting the commentators’ perspectives and have seen how we can build on these in our final comment, future research and teaching process.

To take an example from the Finnish project, the teachers referred to the issue of pairing the students, which was expressed as a challenge at the beginning of the project, in new ways:

Now we’ve been pairing the students so that the students who have a tendency to be absent are placed in groups of three – so, since they are with another student, it usually works out.

This saying shows how the teacher had learnt and produced new knowledge about how to pair the students in a way that supported tandem language learning (sayings in regard to own problem-solving practical knowledge). The teachers initiated discussions and reflected upon tandem specific issues and thereby showed enhanced competence to discuss with each other and with the researchers (sayings, doings and relatings in regard to own contribution in collaboration with researchers). The teachers also expressed certainty and competence in producing new knowledge about how to implement tandem in classroom practices, to be shared with other teachers, through a handbook. As one teacher states:

What we need to remember is that we need to write and explain this in greater detail to other teachers.

In the same way, it became clear to all the teachers in the Swedish project that it was essential at all times to keep the teacher students as readers of the book in mind, to be aware of the aim of the writing (relatings in regard to own knowledge contribution/expertise).

One focus that became clearer after the conversations with others at the meeting was to direct the text to future teacher students. What do I want to convey with my text? How can I make it easier for them in their future work as teachers?

At the end of the Finnish project, the teachers showed deeper didactic knowledge about the tandem model, and they related to each other and to the researchers as co-workers producing new knowledge in reciprocal collaboration (relatings in regard to own role in collaboration with teacher colleagues and researchers). As one teacher said:

Then I also added instructions – discuss in Finnish. I was thinking that they’d use approximately half of the lesson for Finnish and half for Swedish. At first I had them alternating, but we discussed it with Lena (teacher) and decided that it would be too messy, so now they will speak half of the lesson in Finnish and half in Swedish.

In conclusion, the teachers’ transformed ways of relating to their own role and competences in both projects show how the teachers started seeing themselves as agents in the collaborative process of producing knowledge together with the researchers. The teachers understood that they have an important role in bringing their knowledge into the learning process for the teacher students and teachers in schools. It became clear to them that the practical experiences were also important to highlight, transformed through discussions and the writing of texts (book chapters and handbook) into sharable knowledge. They started using the researchers’ ideas to deepen their own reasoning, bringing in their own ideas for producing new knowledge and initiating discussions on topics they had chosen, which showed their new agentic role in the collaboration.

Discussion and conclusions

Even though the practices of collaboration in the two didactic development projects analysed in this study are different in their characteristics (aim, content and time dimension), one (the Swedish project) aiming for book production and the other (the Finnish project) aiming for didactic development in the classroom, the findings regarding the transformed collaboration practices, more precisely the teachers’ professional transformation, have similarities.

By using the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al. 2014) to inquire into the collaboration practices we have been able to visualise the norms (i.e. cultural-discursive arrangements) of how teachers initially understand themselves to be transformed through the collaboration. In both projects the teachers started out by stating that they felt unsure of their own capacity: in the book project when reading the comments from others about their didactic dilemmas and in the tandem project about how to integrate tandem in their language teaching through action research. During and through collaboration, the teachers start seeing themselves as knowledge producers when they understand the value of their contribution of knowing-in-action. This transformation contributes to knowledge production which can be shared with others through a book and a handbook. The teachers’ professional transformation is made possible through time given and the set-up of collaboration through dialogues (material-economic arrangement) that opens up new kind of sayings, doings and relatings among teachers and researchers. As the teachers develop agency in the collaborative process of producing knowledge together with the researchers, the relationships of power and solidarity (social-political arrangements) between teachers and researchers are transformed. It becomes natural for both teachers and researchers to claim the space for their arguments in the discussions and thereby the practices of collaboration become more equal, where everyone’s knowledge can be taken into account.

At the beginning of the development projects, some teachers expected the researchers to come with advice and provide answers rather than working on equal terms with the teachers to collaboratively find solutions. This is a situation well known from previous research (see Aspfors et al. 2015; Hamza et al. 2017). The teacher-researcher collaboration set up in both projects in this study slowly transformed the teachers’ understanding of the researchers’ role, from expert to co-worker, producing knowledge in collaboration, which at the same time transforms their understanding of their own role. The teachers discerned opportunities rather than constraints in their knowledge production and own development work. The teachers understood themselves as important agents in the collaboration, in control of their own profession with specific practical didactic knowledge that they could bring into the development work. In the Swedish project, this change could be seen to happen over the two-day meeting, where the teachers gradually changed their attitudes from being insecure and vulnerable to becoming in control of their own writing. An important condition nurturing this transformation seems to be the purposeful set-up of the dialogue meeting. Here, not only was the content of the dialogues in focus but also how to make space for equalising power relationships through structuring who should talk, how much everyone should talk and about what. In the Finnish project, it was a longer process throughout the whole period of three-year development work, where the teachers in the last meeting showed deeper knowledge about the tandem teaching model and related to the researchers in new ways, with increased self-confidence and in doing so also taking on responsibility for sharing their knowledge. The teachers’ deepened understanding of their own tandem teaching and its positive effect on their own students’ attitudes, received from recurrent student evaluations during the (action research) project, seems to have been an important condition nurturing the teachers’ professional transformation through teacher-researcher collaboration.

The conclusion is that a purposeful plan for how to set up the collaboration is needed. This set up should consider, not just content focus of the collaboration but also questions of power and solidarity, as that is an important aspect. As long as the researchers are in a more powerful position, for example, when the aim is to produce written didactic knowledge (a more familiar situation for researchers), most of the responsibility rests on them. However, teachers are in a more powerful situation in relation to their classrooms and the concrete teaching practice. This makes it important that the teachers also take on responsibility for mutual didactic knowledge production which includes sharing their knowledge from this place.

In the research field of teacher learning and development, there is a history of first being occupied with challenges of how to reconstruct traditional and instrumentalist in-service training into sustainable and collaborative education development, i.e. changing the practices of teachers’ professional development (Edwards-Groves, Olin, and Karlberg-Granlund 2016; Rosendahl and Rönnerman 2006). In both projects being analysed in this study, action research as a methodological approach has underpinned the way the collaborative practices have been formed. Most important has been the idea that teachers’ knowledge contribution and participation is essential in teacher-researcher research and development work that aims at changing educational practices (Carr and Kemmis 1986). The results reinforce what previous research has already shown, that if teacher-researcher collaboration is to have any impact on practice development in classrooms, teachers’ participation has to be acknowledged. What this study more specifically points out is that for production of new didactic knowledge a well-functioning teacher-researcher collaboration seems to offer great potential for future exploration.

A limitation of this study is that we had no focus on the researchers’ actions and transformation in the collaboration. There was obviously a lot of learning and transformation on the researchers’ side in order to be able to establish new actions for common transformation; however, this goes beyond the scope of this paper. This limitation can be problematized as an ethical issue since it could be questioned if there was an equal collaborative practice where the research was conducted ‘with’ the teachers (Rönnerman, Salo, and Furu 2008), or if it rather was research ‘on’ the teachers. However, we consider that this is rather a consequence of the teachers’ and researchers’ different aims in these collaborative research projects.

Our research interest, as researchers, in teachers’ professional learning led to research questions that underpin this study. Our results additionally contribute to both the research field as well as the practice field emphasising teachers’ important role in knowledge production and practice development processes (Carlgren 2009; Groundwater-Smith et al. 2013; Ingerman and Wickman 2015; Ligozat and Almqvist 2018). Further work is, however, needed, in particular in relation to how researchers’ actions and learning can be transformed to enable sustainable dialogical collaboration where teachers and researchers can meet and work on an equal basis, constructing disciplinary, didactic knowledge. Despite the differences between these two projects our findings point in the same direction, namely to the importance of creating spaces where the teachers have the opportunity to grow into crucial agents in the production of disciplinary knowledge about teaching. If the teachers have confidence in their own capacity to contribute, not only in their own classroom but also to the profession as a whole, the teacher-researcher collaboration will nurture a base for producing didactical knowledge.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).