Entangling Our Thinking and Practice: A Model for Collaboration in Teacher Education

Abstract

Collaboration is a key component of our practice as teachers and teacher educators and there is a need to develop generative models for collaboration among teacher educators. We have created and tested a model of collaboration. Data were drawn from: recordings of monthly group meetings; discussion threads and documents on our leaning management site; individual interviews with all members of the group conducted three times across the project; and reflections on these interview transcripts by individual annotation and group discussions. The model includes a collaborative overarching research project and, nested under this mantle, a series of focused research projects conducted by pairs of collaborators, international networking, and enactments of scholarship. A key element of the success of this model was the foundation of this research in arts-based inquiry. The model has enabled rapid and rich development of academic collaboration with flexibility to develop new practices and projects that benefits research and teaching.