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Abstract

Cross-professional collaboration in schools is a prerequisite for professional teaching practice and thus for professional development in many post-industrialized societies, yet little is known about how teachers with different professional backgrounds make meaning of and internalize cross-professional collaboration and how inequities in legitimacy and power in cross-professional collaboration affect professional learning. This article examines cross-professional collaboration and the professional learning it initiates between teachers and pedagogues (Danish term for childcare professionals) in Danish schools. Drawing on situated learning theory, critical psychology and Pierre Bourdieu, it explores teachers’ and pedagogues’ professional learning in conflictual cross-professional collaborations. The findings of the study document that cross-professional collaborations are spaces for negotiating and drawing professional boundaries and for producing hierarchies of different forms of professional capital, thereby re/producing dominant understandings of what constitutes teaching professionalism for teachers and pedagogues. The article concludes that cross-professional collaboratory practices may position and draw boundaries between the different professional groups, thus limiting productive learning.

Keywords

Cross-professional collaboration professional learning community of practice situated learning theory teachers pedagogues

Introduction

Accross the modern western world, the notion of cross-professional collaboration (CPC) has recently attracted political attention (Frost, 2005), due to shifts in social policies that recognize the need to expand a social service that draws on multiple professional capacities (Frost, 2005; Robinson et al., 2005). However, classroom teaching in Denmark and internationally has involved collaboration between multiple teachers, teaching assistants and learning specialists for a long time now. The international agenda presented by the OECD (Gomendio, 2017), UNESCO (Villegas-Reimers, 2003) and the Framework for 21st Century Skills (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2009) underlines that the professional development of teachers involves collaborative and networked learning – for instance, in professional learning communities (PLCs) – yet many teacher graduates feel insufficiently prepared for the collaborative aspects of the teaching profession (OECD, 2013). Little has been written on CPC in schools involving professionals from different professional backgrounds (Højholdt, 2016). Instead, the majority of research about teachers’ professional collaboration focuses on different constellations within the profession; for instance, team teaching (McLaughlin and Talbert, 2006; Mitchell and Sackney, 2011), pre-service teachers co-teaching (Hawkman et al., 2019), and alternative, parallel or ‘one teach, one assist’ teaching (Scruggs et al., 2007).

In Denmark, collaboration with a diverse array of stakeholders constitutes an important and mandatory element in the working lives of schoolteachers and a fundamental aspect of their teaching activities, as mentioned in the political agenda relating to Danish schools (Uddannelses- og Forskningsministeriet (Ministry of Education and Research), 2017) and is considered beneficial for school processes (Dahl, 2017). Until recently, the work performed by Danish pedagogues was restricted to childcare institutions such as kindergartens or after-school children’s clubs, but lately pedagogues have started teaching in classrooms, often in cross-professional constellations with teachers, following a reform of Danish schools (Undervisningsministeriet (Ministry of Education), 2013) in which pedagogues and other employees with relevant competencies support teaching activities. Even though Danish teachers and pedagogues may occupy different positions in co-teaching (EVA, 2017; Dau et al., 2019), the policy background assumes a shared responsibility for ensuring the quality of teaching, neither teachers nor pedagogues are responsible for children achieving set standards in schools. But they are responsible for providing good teaching. Even though a body of research focuses on PLCs among teachers (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012; McLaughlin and Talbert, 2006; Mitchell and Sackney, 2011; Scruggs et al., 2007), almost nothing is known about what happens to teaching professionals and their professional learning when they enter into professional, conflictual collaborative practices with participants from different professional backgrounds. So this study asks: How does collaborative, conflictual work among teaching professionals from different backgrounds (teachers and pedagogues) participate in, position and negotiate their cross-professional work in classrooms in which shared teaching is practiced? And how does this shape participants’ professional learning?

Inspired by a conceptual account of learning as primarily social and distributed in social networks through situated participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) and of professionalism as a form of capital that is negotiated and positioned in a striated field of social forces (Bourdieu, 1986), this article explores professionalization as processes of social learning and positioning. By adopting a critical everyday psychological approach, it is possible to explore how participants conduct classroom life in multiple and often conflicting environments of social relations, incorporating learning as something tied to both practice (Holzkamp, 1998) and the negotiation of professional assets and values (Bourdieu, 1991).

Related research

Cross-professional collaboration in schools

Although professional collaboration in schools and other educational institutions has gained particular prominence in international literature (see, for instance, McLaughlin and Talbert, 2006; Mitchell and Sackney, 2011), the literature on CPC is broad and diffuse, focusing on multiple forms of professional collaboration with different professionals in multiple contexts (Frost, 2005). It is difficult to compare studies in this field across national contexts, since most of the international research on CPC focuses on two-teacher programmes as variations on the concept of co-teaching. Co-teaching is often defined as teaching involving two professionals with different subject knowledge or professional competences (EVA, 2017: 25; Hansen et al., 2014). In the international literature, this often refers to two teachers, one of whom has a background in special education, and includes children both with and without special needs (Friend and Cook, 2000). International comparisons are difficult because individual countries understand co-teaching in different ways and have different approaches to CPC. This calls for further exploration of CPC between professionals with diverse backgrounds, particularly in contexts such as Danish schools, where much of the teaching is organized around collaboration between teachers and pedagogues. Most studies of teacher–pedagogue collaboration focus on participants’ welfare, the distribution of roles, and the nature of such collaborative work in international contexts (EVA, 2017). The literature has established that, when working in pairs or groups, ‘innovative alternative approaches for student teaching and related field experiences’ (Bacharach et al., 2010; Friend et al., 2015: 80), i.e. professional learning, may arise, although it is unclear what these approaches are. There is a significant amount of literature on co-teaching, but much of it consists of descriptions of programmes and effective practices (Friend et al., 2015). A considerable number of international studies focus on professional learning as something that occurs in teamwork (McLaughlin and Talbert, 2006; Mitchell and Sackney, 2011; Prenger et al., 2019), yet there is a gap in the literature on how teachers from different professions collaborate and what this means for their professional learning.

Teaching professionalism and professional learning

Professionalism and professional learning have been conceptualized in numerous ways, but there is no overall agreement about what professionalism is or what it means to pursue professionalization (Goodson and Hargreaves, 1996; Korthagen, 2004). However, there is a general belief that teacher professionalism entails scholarship, subject knowledge and academic competence (Ball, 2003; Hargreaves, 2000, 2003; Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012; Hattie, 2009). The literature on pedagogues’ professionalism focuses on interaction skills, well-being and the psychosocial development of young children (Hamre et al., 2014), often involving relational and emotional work. Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (2011; cited in Ward and Wilcox-Herzog, 2019: 409) argue that there are two primary approaches to the care and education of young children: play-based learning or ‘developmentally appropriate practice’, and skills-based learning. Although these approaches are not mutually exclusive, much of the literature about pedagogues focuses on qualities such as love, kindness and forgiveness to promote emotional health, positive relationships and enhanced well-being for children (Haslip et al., 2019). Skills and competences associated with teachers and pedagogues are broad and cover a large variety of professional approaches, but they constitute dominant matrices (Collins, 1998: 63) that reflect fundamental differences in how teachers’ and pedagogues’ professionalism is often interpreted.

A community of practice (CoP) is a space that brings together participants interested in improving their practice through an exchange with others who have similar goals (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Consequently, learning occurs in the CoP when members build relationships with each other and participate through in-person interactions. Scholars have argued that most teacher learning takes place unconsciously and involves cognitive, emotional and motivational dimensions (Korthagen, 2004, 2017), recognizing the social significance of learning from other people (Lave and Wenger, 1991) and that many of the learning events occurring in workplace contexts are not formally taught but embedded in normal working practice (Eraut, 2004, 2012). Social learning is an aspect of professional collaboration (Hargreaves, 2000: 166; Little, 1990, 2003; Timperley et al., 2007), yet is often overlooked in literature about PLCs that involve different professional positions.

Professional leaning communities among teaching professionals

PLCs have been introduced in the literature as learning sites for teachers and other professionals (Korthagen, 2010) and can be defined as groups of people sharing and critically questioning their practice in ongoing, reflective, collaborative, learning-oriented, growth-promoting ways, thus operating as collective enterprises (Mitchell and Sackney, 2011; Prenger et al., 2019: 1; Stoll et al., 2006: 223). Most of the literature on PLCs focuses on collaborative work among professionals from a similar educational background (i.e. teachers), indicating that teachers’ engagement in PLCs in schools positively influences both their professional learning (Korthagen, 2010; Prenger et al., 2019; Sahlberg, 2011; Sleegers et al., 2013) and the pupils’ learning (Timperley et al., 2007: 205). PLCs are groups of people actively working together on a common task, simultaneously learning and acquiring new competences as they learn to identify and produce (new) meaning through a social network (Korthagen, 2010; Wenger, 1998). PLCs have been introduced as sites for professional learning to address problems related to what has been referred to as ‘the crisis in teacher education’ (Grossman, 2008), i.e. that teacher-training graduates implement little of what they learned during their training (Korthagen, 2010; Nygren, 2004).

There are two particularly important strands regarding the teacher–pedagogue community and professional learning in the literature on PLCs. The first strand focuses on literature about PLC processes (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012; Stoll et al., 2006) – for instance, PLCs for sharing practices, life-long learning and collaboration between colleagues (Ifanti et al., 2017) – and professional learning which is informal (Hargreaves, 2000: 151; Sleegers et al., 2013: 119) and embedded in social practice (Nolan and Molla, 2018). Objections have been made that the PLC concept is ‘fuzzy’ (Sleegers et al., 2013: 120) since it draws on multiple theoretical conceptualizations and offers diverse explanations of PLCs. The second strand focuses on professional learning in PLCs (McLaughlin and Talbert, 2006; Mitchell and Sackney, 2011; Prenger et al., 2019). This strand highlights the role of PLCs in integrating professional development based on collaboration and exchange between colleagues (students, teachers, pedagogues and other staff) into schools’ agendas regarding continued professional learning (Korthagen, 2010; Prenger et al., 2019; Sahlberg, 2011; Sleegers et al., 2013). Most PLC studies focus on interpersonal relations or community aspects, such as collective group learning and/or developing relationships and shared norms and values (see Stoll et al., 2006). Overall, the literature on teachers’ professional learning in PLCs in schools advocates that teachers who collaborate may develop new expertise (Hargreaves, 2000; Prenger et al., 2018). However, forced or ‘imposed’ collegiality may be resisted by teachers (Hargreaves, 2000: 166; Little, 1990); and group dynamics can work against mutual learning (Little, 2003), causing either support for or resistance to professional learning (Timperley et al., 2007: 205). This study therefore addresses CPC as a potential learning arena for the professionals involved, focusing on social processes that are not necessarily visible, targeted and free of interpersonal conflicts.

Theory

Power, everyday life conduct and situated learning in cross-professional communities of practice

Drawing on situated learning theory (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), Bourdieu’s notion of the field as a force field of social relations (Bourdieu, 1986), and critical psychology’s concept of everyday life conduct (Dreier, 2009), this article acknowledges a social and dialectical understanding of professional learning, recognizing that power works in subtle ways and is inherent in all forms of social practice. With Lave and Wenger (1991), it becomes possible to acknowledge learning and professional development as something that is socially constructed and emerges from our actions in relation to the actions of others. Wenger (1998: 45) describes this process as being ‘constantly engaged in the pursuit of enterprises of all kinds’, defining and engaging in these pursuits together by intersecting with each other and with the world. Learning is therefore social and situated, giving primacy to the dynamics of ‘everyday existence, improvisation, coordination and interactional choreography’ (Wenger, 1998: 13). CoPs consist of groups of members who are mutually engaged in a joint enterprise and a shared repertoire (Wenger, 1998: 152). Exploring teachers’ and pedagogues’ membership in CoPs may make it possible to explore different forms of participation that become reified differently and thus lead to diverse forms of identification and meaning-making.

The notion of power in Lave and Wenger’s concept of situated learning is not emphasized, though legitimate peripherality is described as ‘a complex notion, implicated in social structures involving relations of power’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 36), thus ascribing an empowering position to anyone on the periphery. Inspired by Bourdieu (1977, 1986), the collaborative practice between teachers and pedagogues can be understood as a field of socio-cultural forces and individual agents’ ‘habitus’, which are results of socialization that engenders in individuals a ‘disposition’ below the level of consciousness to act or think in certain ways (cf. Naidoo, 2004). Teachers’ and pedagogues’ actions and practices may therefore be seen as effects of habitus and competences acquired on the basis of what is regarded as legitimate and thus powerful in this field (Bourdieu, 1977); hence, different forms of CPC may be explored as discursive formations that result in specific social arrangements. Consequently, CPC may be understood as something produced by subtle discursive power and embedded in the school’s structures, and thus not something that represents rational, power-free and fixed processes. ‘Capital’ is Bourdieu’s (1986) notion of human assets and potentials for human practice that can strengthen the somewhat unsubstantiated link between person and context, since capital becomes visible in social fields, which are also human fields of practice. Capital can be used to understand what participants bring with them into the field of CPC and how capital/competences evolve as participants move from peripheral to central positions in the learning field of the teacher–pedagogue community.

A focus on everyday life as a set of shared practices that steer and create a particular self-understanding (Dreier, 2009) may add a more detailed and personal perspective to the analyses. The concept ‘conduct of everyday life’ (Holzkamp, 1998) implies an understanding that everyday life is ‘conducted’ and not just ‘an expressive and aesthetic lifestyle but an active effort and accomplishment’ (Dreier, 2009: 199). This takes place in accordance with the ‘unending and diverse work of re-producing even a relatively uneventful life’ (Dreier, 2009: 199), in which relations contradict and compete with each other in the structural arrangements of social practice, including in professional collaborations.

For Lave and Wenger (1991: 31), learning is ‘an integral and inseparable aspect of social practice’ and an aspect of being engaged in legitimate peripheral participation, with peripherality suggesting that there are multiple, varied, and ‘more- or less-engaged and inclusive ways of being located in the fields of participation defined by a community’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 34–35). Hence, social participation – and the positioning of professionalism and professional practice – among teachers and pedagogues may vary depending on their engagement in the social practice concerned. CPC can therefore be addressed as something that is relational and revealed through negotiations of power and positioning of different types of professionalism, each holding different forms of legitimacy and modes of domination (Bourdieu, 1986).

Methodology

Research design and methods

The study involved a two-month case study (2019) in one school, School 1, and subsequent data generation during a one-month period in two schools (School 2 and School 3) to gather comparative data to be used alongside data from School 1. To ensure variation in the data material, including effects of possible differences of power, dominance and negotiation between teachers and pedagogues, the three schools were located in two different regions of Denmark, respectively, the centre of Copenhagen (School 1) and a provincial town (Schools 2 and 3). In School 1, two cross-professional team constellations, each consisting of two teacher–pedagogue pairings working in two classes (aged 6–9) were studied, making it possible to incorporate the perspectives of both newcomers and central participants (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Members of team constellations were interviewed individually to obtain different professional perspectives on the same situations. Fifteen interviews with teachers, pedagogues and student teachers (Schools 2 and 3), three of which were focused group discussions (FGDs), were also conducted to gain insight into aspects of the two professions’ working areas and experiences with CPC in different schools and team constellations. All interviews and FGDs lasted between 1 hour 56 minutes and 2 hours 24 minutes.

Data analysis

All interviews were transcribed in full and coded for content using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006). This entailed not focusing on individual psychologies but theorizing with regard to the sociocultural context and structural conditions that enabled the individual accounts (Braun and Clarke, 2006: 85). This was done to acknowledge a decentred analytical account in which subjects were seen as social participants involved in trajectories related to structural arrangements of social practice (Dreier, 2008: 45-57), meaning that the various social contexts and communities in which subjects participated were also objects of analysis. Data were first coded for content regarding issues of social engagement, collaboration and meaning-making, senses of professionalism and professional learning. Codes were then sorted into themes, emphasizing each professional group’s experiences and identification with CPC and learning. The material was then analysed in two steps, focusing on locating patterns across the entire data set (Braun and Clarke, 2006: 82) within the overall theme of CPC as a particular form of situated learning. The first step involved a ‘lengthwise reading’ (Haavind, 2000: 172) in which occurrences, conditions and experiences associated with teacher–pedagogue collaboration were emphasized. This reading included themes such as conflictual everyday life conduct, uneven social participation and professional positioning. The second step involved a ‘crosswise reading’ (Haavind, 2000: 174), comparing the two sets of material with each other and with the context of classroom collaboration. Inspired by Melhuus (2002: 82), comparisons between the two accounts focused on how similarities and contrasts resulted not from the things in themselves but from the way they were enabled by socioculture and structural context. In this step, phenomena such as professional learning as professional boundary drawing emerged inspired by the overall notion of the field of CPC as a social force field.

Findings and discussion

Everyday life conduct and conflicts in cross-professional collaborations

Despite their physical proximity, teachers and pedagogues lived separate lives in classrooms. Both groups seemed to agree that this unshared daily practice negatively influenced their teaching, but they offered different explanatory accounts of it. According to teachers, the pedagogues did not prioritize and prepare for the teaching; yet, according to the pedagogues, the community was a space for either claiming or losing professional territory, as exemplified below:

Teacher: It’s about coming in [to the classroom] and being prepared, so there is something of a clash here (…). I show up at 7.30 [am] [to prepare] for when the children get to class, so we know what is going to happen. The pedagogues shows up at the time they are supposed to show up [and do not prepare].

Pedagogue: If I want to discuss the pedagogical red thread [with the teachers], then it often turns into [that teachers say] ‘yes, but if you [pedagogues] do this in the afternoon, then we [teachers] will do this in the morning’. I just think this is another way [for teachers] to say that ‘if you [pedagogues] don’t interfere in our business, we won’t interfere in yours’. I think this has been typical of this teacher and pedagogue collaboration. It started off badly. It was like you had to fight for your place somehow.

As illustrated above, both professional groups disapproved of each other’s practices: The teachers felt that the pedagogues intruded in their classroom, disturbed their teaching, and were best ignored; they thought the pedagogues’ participation would construct ‘whole new frames [for teaching]’ and classroom teaching would ‘slip from being school to being a kind of [day] care’. The pedagogues, on the other hand, complained that the classroom teaching was defined and arranged by the teachers. In a Bourdieusian sense (1977), everyday classroom practice was a conflictual space in which the pedagogues’ position was not given but arose in a type of professional battlefield, in which the teachers’ professional capital apparently appeared superior. Bourdieu (1993a) reminds us that an analysis of social space is also about examining how and by whom knowledge about the object under investigation is generated and whose interests are served by such knowledge-generating practices. Pedagogues mentioned that ‘physically, we [pedagogues] left our setting [in daycare] and entered a framework that was already set because the teacher was used to doing it in a certain way, so they continued that way’, indicating that teachers had already set the agenda and that negotiation therefore seemed impossible. Fields are sites of struggles over the ‘principles of hierarchisation’ (Bourdieu, 1993a) so, when the teachers set the frames for classroom teaching, they also defined the value of the pedagogues’ acts and ideas; consequently, CPC emerged as a conflictual space between the actors’ different positions and their opposing agendas in the social field of the classroom (Bourdieu, 1986).

According to Dreier (2009), common everyday practice is a shared practice in which participants pursue personal concerns in relation to each other, yet teachers and pedagogues distanced themselves from each other and moved closer to members of their own group following a social comparison. The cross-professional team members divided into groups to create a culture of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ (Eriksen, 2002: 19) or of ‘legitimate’ and ‘non-legitimate’ participants (Collins, 1998). As such, cross-professional collaboratory teams developed several ‘shared realities’ that influenced how each professional group perceived itself and the other professional group, causing teachers to stand by the blackboard and pedagogues to sit on the benches with the pupils. Assigned to positions remote from the dominant space and thus to peripheral positions (Lave and Wenger, 1991), pedagogues came to occupy less legitimate positions of participation, which in turn lessened their power to define teaching as a shared practice.

Positioning, dominance and participation in cross-professional learning communities

Wenger (1998) refers to communities of practice as mutual learning sites in which reciprocal engagement, common activity and a shared repertoire engage the participants in a collective practice, but, in the study, teachers and pedagogues constantly positioned and negotiated each other’s approaches to the professional work, which influenced their professional participation. Teachers positioned themselves as central participants and emphasized that pedagogues found it difficult to position themselves in the professional community:

Teacher: It’s very much us [teachers] who take the lead in these subjects, and often we also have to define which role the pedagogue should play. I don’t always find it easy to see what the role of the pedagogues should be (…). So sometimes it’s just nice to say ‘I’m with a teacher’, because we [teachers] speak the same language and are concerned about the same things and we see the same things in the pupils and each other in terms of how we can improve the teaching.

The positions adopted by the teachers in the professional community were seemingly legitimized by the apparent withdrawal of the pedagogues from the professional scene. The pedagogues also felt that their position in the community was marginal, describing themselves as ‘wallflowers’, ‘people’ who just ‘hang around doing nothing special’, and ‘radiator pedagogues’, indicating that they were situated in peripheral positions. Following Lave and Wenger (1991), membership of new communities of practice often begins in peripheral positions, from which participants move to fuller participation. Yet the situated community of classroom teaching in the study, whose physical layout meant that pupils faced the teacher but sat with the pedagogues, did not leave much space for pedagogues to move into central positions. They knew their place was not in the centre of the professional community; some pedagogues remarked, ‘I didn’t really know what my role was’ and ‘I just sat there and fluttered around aimlessly in class’. According to Wenger (1998: 166), peripherality and marginality involve combinations of participation and non-participation, but being excluded from membership in the teaching community left pedagogues in fixed positions outside the periphery of practice. The pedagogues’ passivity and the teachers’ dominance in the central task of classroom teaching therefore suggest that their CoP had limited social and professional cohesion and was not a joint, cohesive community (cf. Lave and Wenger, 1991).

Bourdieu (1986) argues that positioning and position-making not only influence participants’ senses of community but is ingrained in the social forces of the field. Following Bourdieu (1977, 1986), the CPC observed in the study was a social field in which different agents occupied diverse positions, which resulted from the interaction between the specific rules of the field and the agents and their capital, i.e. professionalism. Professional participation was constantly negotiated, but pedagogues seemed outmanoeuvred by teachers, who made decisions about the classroom teaching without involving the pedagogues:

Pedagogue: It’s difficult to explain, because it’s going on all the time. Nothing is said aloud; but when you go [to team meetings] in the afternoon, many choices have already been made, what you should say, a direction and so on. I often wondered why we were never involved in it. There was no common decision in the whole team. I keep thinking that teachers were not used to having a culture of collaboration, because they were not used to anyone being involved.

Drawing on critical psychology (Dreier, 2009, 2011), it seems that the two professional groups conditioned each other’s participation, but, because teachers naturalized their superiority and pedagogues withdrew from the collaboration, teachers seemed able to impose their subjective reality on the pedagogues regarding how CPCs should be practiced. According to Bourdieu (1977: 165), symbolic power is used ‘to impose the principles of the construction of reality – in particular, social reality’. The teachers feeling naturally obliged to define the pedagogues’ roles could be seen as a form of symbolic power in which the teachers’ participation and dominance in the CPC tended to naturalize and restrict the pedagogues’ participation. According to Dreier’s (2011: 199), conducting one’s life is ‘inseparable from coming to an understanding of others with whom one shares (…) one’s conduct of life’, so a striated and hierarchical collaboratory practice in the CPCs seemed a way of establishing a common life conduct among the two professional groups.

Professional learning as professional boundary drawing

Both pedagogues and teachers were entangled in conflictual, collaborative situations; their different agendas and professional positioning drew boundaries for the other group’s professional participation, which affected the professional learning. The pedagogues’ professional positioning aimed to ‘build relations in the classroom’ and ‘provide care’ for pupils, and it focused on relational and pedagogical work. In contrast, the teachers’ professional positioning emphasized ‘core subjects’ and focused on didactics and academic skills. Each professional group emphasized different forms of professional capital as important and legitimate in the cross-professional collaborative community (cf. Bourdieu, 1977), and each criticized the other group’s professional contribution:

Teacher: Some of them [pedagogues] are really good at saying, ‘I want to do this’. But they very often contribute something that doesn’t have much to do with teaching. So very often (…) some pupils are not taught when they are together with them [pedagogues] (…). But I wish the pedagogues would offer something more education-wise (…) but they [pedagogues] can’t do this because they don’t know what teaching is.

Pedagogue: We [pedagogues] talked a lot about the teachers wanting the whole day to be super, super concrete and structured to the very last detail. Whereas I think that (…) there must be some chaos; the kids must be left to themselves a bit, we are there to help them. But if we are always there to keep them in hand, how do you learn to navigate in that [chaos] yourself? (…). Teachers are really looking for structure all the time (…) [saying], ‘they [pupils] must not be exposed to too much chaos because then it goes completely wrong’, but I disagree.

The interview excerpts illustrate how, by assessing each other through their own professional capital, each professional group seemingly disapproved of the other group’s professional capital (cf. Bourdieu, 1986): The pedagogues positioned the teachers as insensitive professionals and described their classroom management as too structured and as leaving little space for the children to develop freely, whereas the teachers positioned the pedagogues’ professionalism as unclear, claiming that ‘it was blurry what they [pedagogues] could offer’. The professionalism expressed in the CPC seemed to be characterized by overruling and mutual rejection, with each professional group demarcating their own and the other group’s professional territories in a kind of ‘monopolizing of separate territories’ (Barth, 1998: 19) in which teachers and pedagogues occupied reciprocal yet different professional niches in close interdependence. Yet the teachers were dominant actors, having conquered the professional space in class, whereas the pedagogues’ practice seemingly represented ‘meconnaissance’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 127), a systematically repressed and underrated practice. Life forms indicated by professional classroom practices are not only different but also ranked in relation to each other (Bourdieu, 1977). Some life forms – in this case, the teachers’ – include ‘proper’ cultural capital in the form of evidence-based knowledge (cf. Hattie, 2009) and are thus ranked higher (or valued more) than others – in this case, the pedagogues’. Teachers were dominant agents and could therefore seemingly force their subjective representation of themselves on others (Bourdieu, 1993b: 58). The norms, values and demands deriving from the specific social context of cross-collaboration are produced and reproduced in the daily encounters between people and work to secure the perpetuation of the central structures, functions and forms of logic, apparently with broad acceptance from the parties involved, even those whose privileges are curtailed (Douglas, 1986: 123), in this case, the pedagogues’.

As mentioned in the literature, group dynamics in teacher–pedagogue learning communities may prevent mutual learning (Little, 2003; Timperley et al., 2007); forced collegiality may result in resistance towards other teachers (cf. Hargreaves, 2000: 166; Little, 1990). Yet the findings of this study suggest that overt resistance was replaced by constant negotiation and boundary drawing, in which the teachers made the pedagogues subject to ridicule, and the pedagogues felt offended, patronized and criticized by teachers for their teaching approach. Boundary drawing did not result in the interchange of ideas or create mutual spaces for learning but instead limited the opportunities for both professional groups to participate in joint learning. Viewed in a larger ‘matrix of domination’ (Collins, 1998), which is a coherent system combining various oppressive and discriminatory systems, the boundary drawing and clashes of professionalism seemed to victimize the pedagogues, who approached teaching in non-academic ways, favouring relational and emotional work with pupils. In this way, the pedagogues were turned into the ‘Other’ (Collins, 1998) in relation to the dominant matrix, which favoured teachers’ professionalism – including aspects such as academic approaches, punctuality and abstaining from emotions – and left pedagogues to become illegitimate and inappropriate participants whose professional contributions could not be included in the professional learning.

Conclusion: Participation, boundary drawing and professionalization

This study explores an area that is often overlooked in cross-professional work and research focusing on CPC, connecting professional learning to the positioning and legitimization of professional capital and demonstrating the subtle learning processes that are closely tied to the dominant understanding of teaching professionalism. The article has explored how power, positioning and participation in cross-professional collaborative work among teachers with different professional backgrounds influence teachers’ professional learning when collaborative practice develops into an unshared, conflictual practice against a policy background where equality and shared responsibility is emphasized. The study demonstrates that CPC is entwined in subtle and often invisible learning processes that are coupled with power; and that professionalism does not appear in the form of knowledge and competence, but in the form of social practice that is negotiated depending on dominant versions of what constitutes ‘good teaching professionalism’ (cf. Bourdieu, 1977, 1986). Like previous studies, this study demonstrates that professional learning is influenced by other people and social interactions in various ways (Eraut, 2004; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Nasir and Cooks, 2009; Thylefors, 2012) and appears as tacit knowledge in professional work (Eraut, 2012; Korthagen, 2017). CPC may result in more (Prenger et al., 2019; Sahlberg, 2011; Sleegers et al., 2013; Timperley et al., 2007) or less (Højholdt, 2016; Scruggs et al., 2007) professional participation and sharing, but the literature does not address how power and participants’ notions of professional capital may influence their professional learning. This study demonstrates that in cross-PLCs, professional learning may depend on distinctions between what is regarded as legitimate professional participation, which may result in drawing boundaries between the two professional parties’ il/legitimate contributions to classroom teaching. Although collaborative practice and social learning are imperative with regard to professional learning and thus effective teaching (Bacharach et al., 2010; Friend et al., 2015; McLaughlin and Talbert, 2006), also in Denmark (Dau et al., 2019), this study demonstrates that when pedagogues are positioned as less legitimate participants than teachers, their professional contribution and thus their role as dominant agents in classrooms is devalued, resulting in boundary drawing and the construction of professional hierarchies among participants and therefore restrained and unequal collaboration. All professionals in Danish schools are supposed to be equal, but some may be ‘more equal than others’ (Thylefors, 2012: 505). The point is that professional learning in PLCs is also a matter of positioning professional capital, with both parties contributing to CPC. It is important to note, however, that not all CPCs are conflictual, and not all teachers and pedagogues position each other’s professional capital as unworthy and illegitimate; doubtless, other sociocultural forces in the context of cross-disciplinary PLCs influenced teaching professionals’ learning. Another limitation in the study is the lack of a control group and the number of cases (three schools in different regions of Denmark). The study concludes that when cross-collaboratory practice becomes a conflictual space for the different teaching professions, it may lead to mutual positioning and boundary drawing of professional capital, restricting each group’s opportunities for professional participation and thus hindering professional learning. When teachers and pedagogues collaborate, pedagogues are expected to be compliant instead of autonomous. This adds to the boundaries existing between the two groups of professionals and has a negative impact on their learning processes. The importance of CPC in schools and professional education should therefore be acknowledged in educational planning.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the two anonymous peer reviewers for useful and constructive comments, and to Ann-Sofie Melchior Jensen and Marie Grønlund Pedersen for assistance with data generation.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Kari Kragh Blume Dahl

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Collaborating alone? Teachers’ and pedagogues’ unequal cross-professional collaboration and what it means for their professional learning in Danish schools

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Related research

Cross-professional collaboration in schools

Teaching professionalism and professional learning

Professional leaning communities among teaching professionals

Theory

Power, everyday life conduct and situated learning in cross-professional communities of practice

Methodology

Research design and methods

Data analysis

Findings and discussion

Everyday life conduct and conflicts in cross-professional collaborations

Positioning, dominance and participation in cross-professional learning communities

Professional learning as professional boundary drawing

Conclusion: Participation, boundary drawing and professionalization

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References