Partnership, as a particular form of knowledge exchange between university departments of education and other stakeholders, has been promoted as a desirable outcome at both European and national levels (Smith et al. 2006; Scottish Government, 2011; Dahlstedt, 2009; Caul and McWilliams, 2002). This study consists in a case study of one recently completed research project that was a consequence of a formal partnership agreement between a university and five local authorities. The project was concerned with mapping the experiences of early career phase teachers in their first year of practice after completing Initial Teacher Education (ITE), so as to identify ways in which partnership arrangements between the university and local authorities might better support beginning teachers in future.
The paper is in three parts. In part 1, we consider the broader discursive context within which this particular partnership was forged. Part 2 identifies some of the new socio-material relations that were a consequence of this agreement, together with some of the insights that this generated. The third and final part evaluates these accomplishments in conjunction with an analysis of the new alignments, responsibilities and performativities that were also produced as a consequence of undertaking funded research, under the sign of partnership.
The project was funded by the Scottish government in response to a recent policy initiative 'Teaching Scotland's Future’ (Scottish Government, 2011, often referred to as the ‘Donaldson Report’) that includes recommendations in relation to the development of university/local authority partnerships. Within Scotland, whilst there had been research into the early career phase of teachers (e.g. TLRP, 2007) relatively little was known about how programmes of ITE articulated with the kinds of support and demands that local authorities placed upon beginning teachers, as part of their transition to becoming newly qualified teachers post ITE. Not only was information about this transition patchy as between universities and local authorities, it also became apparent that there were few if any formal links between adjacent local authorities either as regards policy or practice.
Rather than assuming a stipulative, or trait-based approach to partnership, the paper reports on the socio-material effects of a partnership coming into being (Fenwick et al., 2011; Fenwick and Landri, 2014). Beginning with a ‘signature event’ in which five local authorities signed an agreement with a university to work together, we investigate the socio-material effects of this act of signature (Gherardi and Landri, 2014) so as to identify the new relationships and practices to which this gave rise. In the second part, we illustrate how this issued in new knowledge about teachers’ use of theory in their practice, as a relational effect of this new assemblage. To be more specific, it was found that some early phase teachers regarded theory and strategy as synonymous, and we trace how this insight led to new practices in relation to thinking about how theory mobilisation and translations might be approached within ITE.
In the final part of the paper we consider how the signature event produced new alignments, responsibilities and accountabilities – that led to new forms of governance as well as new forms of unknowing. Under the sign of ‘partnership’ which, in policy terms appears to be an unquestioned ‘good’ (akin in this respect to appeals to ‘excellence’, ‘international’, ‘participation etc.), we evaluate ‘partnership’ as a mixed blessing in so far as new university accountabilities and audit cultures were produced (Strathern, 2000). ‘Partnership’ within these terms might be seen as giving rise to both new insight and relational possibility and a further extension and intensification of governance that issues in a more coherent regime of regulation (Ranson, 2003).
