Zooming in on the partnership of a successful teaching team: examining cooperation, action and recognition

Abstract

This article investigates the cooperation of a teaching team in Swedish upper secondary education over a period of five years. The data collection builds on field studies and partly on a collaborative research approach. Three areas of cooperation have been identified: collaboration among the staff; interactions between the staff and the students; and the partnership between the staff and other stakeholders/local workplaces/institutions. The cooperation has been analysed with concepts from different practice theories and from Honneth’s theory of recognition. The results illustrate: the importance of different kinds of connections of actions for sustainable cooperation and partnership that are socially based and flexible actions as well as action based on rigorous routines; the importance of objects and inscriptions for durable social connections; and how recognition is present and manifested in all successful areas of cooperation. Recognition is not only essential for building and maintaining prosperous ‘external’ partnerships. The results and analysis show how recognition is also a key to durable forms of staff collaboration and for student school connectedness.

Keywords:

• Cooperation
• partnership
• practice architectures
• action net theory
• recognition

Notes

1. The term ‘teaching team’ is used, as well as ‘staff’, ‘team’ and ‘staff team’. As presented in more detail in the ‘Context’ section, the staff in the team are not only teachers but also include a welfare officer, a study guidance officer, a coach coordinating vocational education and two youth recreation leaders.

2. The programmes are preparatory education, programme-oriented individual options, vocational introduction, individual alternative and language introduction, and their respective aims are as follows:

• The aim of preparatory education is that students in the compulsory school who have not achieved eligibility for a specific national programme should be able to study to remedy this.

• The aim of programme-oriented individual options is that students should receive an education that focuses on a national vocational programme and that they should be admitted to the programme as soon as possible.

• The aim of the vocational introduction is that students should receive a vocationally oriented education which makes it easier for them to establish themselves on the labour market or that leads to studies in a vocational programme.

• The aim of the individual alternative is that students should progress to the vocational introduction, to other forms of education or to the labour market.

• The aim of the language introduction is to provide immigrant youth who have recently arrived in Sweden with an education where the emphasis is on the Swedish language to make it possible for them to progress to the upper secondary school or to other forms of education.

For a detailed description and analysis of these programmes and the impact of the reform on alternative pathways, see Henning Loeb and Lumsden Wass (2015).

3. See http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/youth/index_en.php (retrieved 12 August 2015).