The main goal of this paper is to review activities and their outcomes in the second year of the implementation of the project “REP-Synergy: Towards Improvement of Research Capacities Essential for Teacher Education and Practices in Serbia and Estonia”, (grant no. IZ74Z0_160511, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation within the SCOPES programme). The project is based on the idea of the integration of research and teacher education (McNamara, 2002; Pollard et al., 2008; Brew, 2010) in order to improve teaching practice. This integration should be of special interest within Eastern European countries currently going through a process of comprehensive social transition in changing education systems, policies and practices of research education. , which is the case both in Serbia and Estonia. In the case of Serbia, the education system is in the process of a comprehensive reform struggling with a transition from an education system mainly focused on the transmission of general knowledge and with strong academic orientation to an education system focused on the learning and development of key educational and professional competencies (Pantić, 2009; Pavlović Babić & Baucal, 2013) which enable young people to successfully participate in the education and to plan professional career. From the teacher perspective, they need to be trained in order to build capacities for practice-led research and to use research results to improve their professional practices (Brookfield, 1995; Loughran, Mitchell & Mitchell, 2002; McNamara, 2002; Korthagen, 2004; Pollard et al., 2008). The analysis of pre-service and in-service teacher training programmes in Serbia has shown that existing research evidences are not relevant enough, or not at all, to education practice and practitioners, as well as to educators of future teachers. The challenge is even bigger in the context of the ongoing wider education reform which is oriented to support the evidence based policy making and the development of reflective practitioners. For this reason, our project support direct collaboration between young researchers, mainly educated in the field of psychology, and (future) teachers from the Teacher Education faculty on the realization of a series of small-scale research studies. Specific goals of the project are: to improve understanding of their needs for research evidences and their capacities to design and pilot research study that will correspond better with needs of educational practice and practitioners, as well as to establish network between younger PhD and post-doc researchers and teacher educators and practitioners. As a long-term goal we see the empowerment of their professional capacities, balancing theoretical and practical components of education, as well as encouragement of the autonomous engagement in working with colleagues in other institutions and countries (and with members of the wider research community).

The goal of this paper is to report experiences and findings from the second year of the project implementation. The main purpose is to reflect experiences from the first stage of a project implementation, to identify participants’ beliefs, meanings and identities that might support or prevent the process of building a productive collaboration among them and to identify external factors that might support or prevent process of building a productive collaboration.

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