This symposium is concerned with the learning of professionals and service users in new forms of educational practice which require joined up solutions to meet the complex and diverse needs of students and clients. The aim is to improve awareness and understanding of how multiple professional and service users can work together in ways that increase the collective capability of education and other services.

There has long been an acceptance that collaborative practices in education support the learning of all (Daniels 2015, Creese, Norwich and Daniels 2000, Edwards 2010, Bedward and Daniels 2005, Engeström et.al. 2015, Littleton and Mercer 2013, Thompson 2012a, 2012b). The practices that will be explored in the symposium are both demanding and promising in the emergence of co-configuration work. The contributions of the symposium reports from projects in different contexts in Norway, UK and Spain. These projects are established for the purpose of building and sustaining integrated systems that can sense, respond to, and adapt to the individual experiences of students and/or clients.  The learning that is taking place is both personal and organisational. These two aspects of learning are evident in practice in what Engeström & Vähäaho (1999) describe as ‘knotworking’ in inter-professional working. Knotworking is a rapidly changing, distributed, and partially improvised orchestration of collaborative performance which takes place between otherwise loosely connected actors. Collaborative practice requires the construction of constantly changing combinations of people and resources across settings, and is often widely distributed over space. This form of collaborative work demands changes in professional practice, cross-professional arenas for collaboration, and relationships with students or clients. The papers in this symposium will: explore principles of learning and transformation in such work; refine the theoretical grounding of new ways of working; identify the learning demands involved; develop means of promoting (teaching) the new practices; and report on empirical analysis from the three different contexts.

The first paper is from the context of Norwegian teacher- and nursing-education. It reports on an intervention designed to foster creative collaboration and joint problem solving. Creativity is then understood as the emergence of new perspectives or ways of seeing a problem. Methodologically the study is inspired by design experiments, and the core data consists of video data analysed by interaction analysis. The findings of the study show that the positioning of participants as “peers” rather than “experts” is an important driver for creative problem-solving processes. Setting up a collaborative sphere for lecturers from different professional domains was perceived as being useful.

The second paper reports from an ongoing study examining teachers’ collaborative working with practices relating to the needs of vulnerable learners in 7 state second art schools in an ethnically mixed English city with wide disparity between areas of wealth and poverty. The methodology is based on a combination of interviews and Social Network Analysis from staff questionnaires. The major conclusion from the study is that schools with networks that extend beyond departmental silos are more effective in supporting vulnerable learners` attainment and wellbeing.

The third paper is a result of a coordinated research carried out by three Spanish universities; the universities of Vigo, Canabria and Seville. The paper shows how changes are made by fostering collaboration among primary-school and secondary-school teachers, students, families, and the community through collaborative formats vis-à-vis teacher development and a school`s culture. The research draws on a collaborative and participative model, taking on research development through a critical, participative and transformative analysis of practice. The analysis shows that inclusive patterns of collaboration generate new scenarios and new relationship patterns, which contribute to the strengthening of an inclusive school culture.

Bedward, J. & Daniels, H. (2005). Collaborative solutions – clinical supervision and teacher support teams: reducing professional isolation through effective peer support. Learning in Health and Social Care, 4 (2), 53-66. Creese, A., Norwich, B. & Daniels, H. (2000). Evaluating Teacher Support Teams in secondary schools: supporting teachers for SEN and other needs. Research Papers in Education 15(3), 307-324. Daniels, H. (2015). Mediation: An expansion of the socio-cultural gaze. History of the Human Sciences, 28(2) 34–50. Edwards, A. (2010). Being an expert professional practitioner: The relational turn in expertise: Springer. Engeström, Y., Kajamaa, A., Lahtinen, P. & Sannino, A. (2015) Toward a Grammar of Collaboration, Mind, Culture, and Activity, 22:2, 92-111. Engeström, Y., R. Engeström., R and Vähäaho., T (1999) When the center does not hold: The importance of knotworking. Activity theory and social practice: Cultural-historical approaches: 345-374. Littleton, K. and Mercer, N. (2013). Interthinking. Putting talk to work. Routledge, New York. Thompson, I. (2012a). Stimulating Reluctant Writers: a Vygotskian Approach to Teaching Writing in Secondary Schools. English in Education, 46(1), 84-91. Thompson, I. (2012b). Planes of Communicative Activity in Collaborative Writing. Changing English. Changing English, 19(2), 209-220.