Collaborative Meaning-Making and Dialogic Interactions in Critical Friends as Co-Authors

ABSTRACT

From this year-long study, we offer new perspectives for being and becoming critical friends as co-authors. Informed by the Transactional Theory of Reading, a narrative view of experience and feminist communication theory, we positioned ourselves as collaborative, active meaning makers who could read and make meaning from our lived experiences and who could disrupt and problematize our narrative lives as teacher researchers. Through use of a collaborative conference protocol, we discovered what it means to be and to become critical friends who can co-author narrative understanding of self in the study. We have revisited the concept of critical friendship by repositioning our coauthoring as not just a resource for the completion of a better end product, but also as a way of being and knowing that enables an individual to revisit, reignite, disrupt, problematize and challenge one’s past and present storied lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Transactional paradigm
• narrative inquiry
• collaborative inquiry
• dialogic interactions
• self-study
• critical friends
• collaborative conference protocol

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.