This presentation builds on to two research projects; a Swedish project where teachers and researchers together have been writing a book about didactic dilemmas and a Finnish collaborative project between researchers and teachers integrating a new didactic model in language teaching. In both projects action research has been used as a methodological ground for setting up the collaboration between researchers and teachers and the aim has been to produce new didactic knowledge and competences as well as contributing to practice development in the classrooms. Dialogue has been crucial as a strategy for collaborating on the Nordic ground of democratic working methods from working life research (Gustavsen, 2001). In the Nordic tradition of collaborative action research, within the field of educational research, there is also a strong emphasis on democratic perspectives, which expresses itself through the development of many different forms for dialogue with the aim of making all voices heard (Rönnerman et al., 2016). Even though collaboration is theory-based and well-structured in practice, the unfolding of the collaborative projects is not always smooth and fulfilling the aims and purposes set up on beforehand. Therefore, it is of interest to inquire into the two practices of collaboration, which we, one researcher from each project, will do through comparison between the two projects.

 Research on didactic modelling or inquiry emphasizes both researchers and teachers as crucial actors in development of disciplinary knowledge about teaching (Ingerman & Wickman, 2015). However, if and how collaboration between them may occur and be productive is not given. Both the way researchers and teachers think about the collaboration and the way collaboration is set up depends on underlying views of theory and practice and how those two dimensions are seen to be connected (Carlgren, 2009; Hamza et al, 2017). In action research there is a long tradition of putting focus on issues around collaboration and partnerships between academia and schools, as part of the research interest in how to conduct research into one’s own educational practice (Bruce et al., 2011; Groundwater-Smith, Mitchell, Mockler, Ponte, & Rönnerman, 2013; Platteel et al., 2010). One angle is to focus on ethical dilemmas in collaboration (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2007), another is to develop understanding for different forms of collaboration and how successful they might be related to different aims (Bevins & Price, 2014) and still another one is more directly connected to epistemological questions about collaboration and how it relates to the production of knowledge (Andersson & Herr, 1998).

 This study takes it departure from a practice perspective, using the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis, Wilkinson, Edwards-Groves, Grootenboer, Hardy & Bristol, 2014) as a theoretical lens for the analyses.  The focus is on how teachers relate to the development work, to their teacher colleagues and to the researchers, in and through collaboration based on dialogue. We want to explore how teachers knowledge, attitudes and competences may (or may not) change through the dialogical collaboration in the two projects. We also want to explore what nurtures and constrain these practices of collaboration. Our research questions are:

1. How do the teachers relate to their own professional development work and how, if so, do those relatings change through the dialogical collaboration?
2. How do the teachers relate to each other as co-teachers and to the researchers and their role as facilitators and/or experts? How, if so, do those relatings change through the dialogical collaboration?
3. What arrangements in the two sites are nurturing and constraining those relatings and in what ways?

In the Swedish project the teacher-researcher collaboration was undertaken to write a book (Almqvist, Hamza & Olin, 2017) for teacher education. In the book there are nine cases, in nine chapters, which start with a didactical dilemma that a teacher has chosen to write about. The teacher has written his or her case with the help of a co-author who is a researcher. Each dilemma is commented by two other researchers with expertise in relation to the dilemma and a teacher. At last the co-author researcher has written a conclusion and the teacher writes a conclusion on the wholeness of the content, in relation to the teaching practice and own learning. In the project, specific activities engaging the main authors collaboratively were set up to support the writing process. A dialogue conference became crucial as a meeting where the teachers and co-author researchers met during two days to reflect on the comments and to discuss how to write their last parts. The participants regularly wrote individual reflections both before and after the dialogues in the meeting, gathered as data. Ending the meeting, they also wrote about what they had experienced and what difference it had made for their upcoming writing. The written logs reflect the process taking place throughout the meeting. In the Finnish three-year project, the teacher-researcher collaboration was undertaken to develop a didactical model (tandem) for curriculum-based teaching of the second national language in linguistically mixed groups, a new approach in the Finnish context. Due to the lack of teaching material for tandem teaching, new tasks were systematically tested and discussed in collaboration between teachers and researchers, with the aim to be published in a handbook at the end of the project. The teachers regularly evaluated the challenges and possible solutions with the researchers. The researchers’ role as facilitators and experts in tandem learning was crucial in further developing the model. The teachers and researchers regularly met during the whole project, and all meetings were audio taped. For this study, two meetings, one in the beginning, and one in the end of the project, are chosen for deeper analysis. In the first meeting, the focus is on elaborating aims of the tasks, and in the second meeting, the teachers present their final versions of the tasks to be published, and the teachers and researchers reflect on the results in relation to the new didactical model being applied.

Even though the two projects are different in their characteristics, one (the Swedish project) aiming for book production and the other (the Finnish project) aiming for didactic development in the classroom, the results regarding the changes of the teachers’ learning seems to have similarities. In both projects the teachers start out by expressing that they feel unsure of their own capacity, in the book project when reading the comments from others about their didactic dilemmas, and in the tandem project about how to integrate tandem in their language teaching by action research. The dialogue set up in both projects slowly change the teachers’ attitudes towards how they understand the researchers’ role, from expert to co-worker, which at the same time change their understanding of their own role. The teachers start seeing themselves as important actors in the collaboration with specific practical didactic knowledge that they bring into the development work. In the Swedish project, this change can be seen to happen over the two day meeting, where the teachers gradually change their attitudes from being unsecure and vulnerable to becoming in control of their writing. In the Finnish project, it is a longer process throughout the whole period of development work where the teachers in the last meeting show deeper knowledge about the teaching model and relate to the researchers in new ways supporting their own professional development. Those findings point to the importance of creating a dialogical collaboration between researchers and teachers to support teacher growth, which can lead to new knowledge being produced. If the teachers start believing in their own capacity to contribute, not only in their own classroom but also to the profession as a whole, that will nurture a base for new didactical knowledge to unfold in such collaborative projects.

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