In this panel discussion, we want to explore questions and challenges of different levels of collaboration or ways of working together in educational ethnography under the auspices of the production of knowledge on education. Ethnography can be regarded as being inherently collaborative (see: Lassiter 2005). But if we accept ethnography as a collaborative, cooperative and joint production of knowledge, many questions namely around cooperation within and between people, projects, disciplines, places, organizations and research teams etc. arise.

The model of the ‘single tribe and single scribe’ approach to ethnography, where one or two authors together do an ethnography is still widely and successfully practiced (as a collection of examples see: Anderson-Levitt 2003; for an overview see: Delamont 2012). But this approach has limitations and shortcomings too. Therefore educational ethnography has already long ago called for having a broader and more team-oriented approach (see e.g.: Woods et al. 2000). But there were early serious admonitions too, like the title “Doing Team Ethnography. Warnings and Advice” (Erickson and Stull 1998) illustrates. And sometimes ethnographers dared to raise the quest for a national level (Beach 2018) or even a European perspective (Troman and Jeffrey 2008).

The panel discussion consists of two parts: We will first present a team-ethnography (TE) and its challenges for the researchers and the researched. The project is a multi-sited team-ethnography with the title “Conspicuous Children. An Ethnography of Processes of Recognition in the Kindergarten” (Presenters Sieber Egger, Unterweger). The project is finished and therefore well suited to be questioned with regard to the team-aspects of knowledge production.

Working as ethnographers in teams on different research sites is first a test for the ethnographer(s) research-wise. The problems start with seemingly simple questions of wanting to have a joint dataset and using a shared, or even coordinated perspective. Both issues cause immediately practical, methodological and theoretical questions of high complexity. For instance, how can individual fieldnotes be integrated into a common ethnographic record? Should they be one single text, or must they be organized and managed by author (Safronov et al. 2020)? And if we work in teams, how do we handle names of people, places etc. in a way the data remain understandable for the analysis for all readers? And furthermore: how do we analyze such data from different authors: alone, together, in mixed settings, comparatively etc.? And all the difficulties multiply when we want to work on and with ethnographic records that include different kind of date like text, audio, photographic and video-data (Hernandez-Hernandez and Sancho-Gil 2018). And finally: who is mentioned how in the publications? And who has what right to use the data, to publish etc.? These are but a few introductory questions which will be encountered when doing ethnography in teams (Clerke and Hopwood 2014).

In a second part, we would like to go beyond the level of individual projects and focus on cooperation in ethnography in general. Here we are interested in collaboration with regard to different disciplines, organizations, working cultures, etc. To do so, we will present the history, development and status of a small international network named “Spaces and Places of Organized Childhood” (SPOC) (Presenters Frank, Hekel, Rissler, Weitkämper). The formation of SPOC started in 2016 as a loose cooperation between two ethnographic research teams of different universities in Switzerland. SPOC has expanded ever since into Germany and Luxemburg. Today SPOC is a small international, interdisciplinary network or group which, in its next project, focuses on the ethnography of pedagogical forms. Following the presentations, we would like to discuss the challenges and chances of these forms of international ethnographic collaboration and cooperation.

Anderson-Levitt, Kathryn M., ed. 2003. Local Meanings, Global Schooling. Anthropology and World Culture Theory. New York, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Beach, Dennis. 2018. Structural Injustices in Swedish Education. Academic Selection and Educational Inequalities. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Clerke, Teena, and Nick Hopwood. 2014. Doing Ethnography in Teams: A Case Study of Asymmetries in Collaborative Research. Springer. Delamont, Sara, ed. 2012. Ethnographic Methods in Education. Four Volume Set. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC: Sage. Erickson, Kenneth Cleland, and Donald D. Stull. 1998. Doing Team Ethnography: Warnings and Advice. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: SAGE Publications, Inc. Hernandez-Hernandez, Fernando, and Juana M. Sancho-Gil. 2018. “Writing and Managing Multimodal Field Notes.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education 21 (online). Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2005. “Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 46 (1): 83–106. Safronov, Petr, Alexandra Bochaver, Anastasia Nisskaya, and Diana Koroleva. 2020. “Together apart: field notes as artefacts of collaborative ethnography.” Ethnography and Education 15 (1): 109–21. Troman, Geoff, and Bob Jeffrey. 2008. “Die Erarbeitung eines Rahmens für ein ‚geteiltes Repertoire‘ in einem international vergleichenden Forschungsprojekt.” In Ethnographie und Erziehungswissenschaft. Methodologische Reflexionen und empirische Annäherung, edited by