Norwegian teacher education has undergone a change from a broader, more practice-based teacher education to appear as a five-year, more specialized teacher education at the master’s level with a stronger focus on academic skills and in-depth knowledge following the 2017 reforms (Ministry of Education, 2016a, b). Finnish teacher education has been an inspiration for educational reforms in other countries, included the reform in Norway (the GLU-reform, Norwegian 5-year teacher education for primary and lower secondary school) (cf. Hansén et al., 2014). Due to the latest reform, and inspired by Finland (Lillejord & Børte, 2017), new Norwegian teachers shall be able to ‘analyze and take a critical approach to national and international research and use this knowledge when practicing the profession’. They shall be able to ‘apply, alone and in collaboration with others, relevant methods from research and development (R&D) to continually develop their own and the school’s collective practices and carry out limited research projects under guidance’ (Ministry of Education, 2016a, b, p. 3). The student teachers’ (STs) assignments shall be professionally oriented (Ministry of Education, 2016 a, b). STs in Norway get their education both at campus and in school. During the third year of their education the STs write an R&D assignment.  

Norwegian teacher education is still characterized by a gap between theory and practice (Trippestad et al., 2017; Lillejord & Børte, 2017, 2014; NOKUT, 2006). This is also true internationally (Smith, 2016; Trippestad et al., 2017). Studies about partnership between Norwegian schools and universities in relation to the STs’ assignments, demonstrate that both teacher educators in schools (TESs) and teacher educators in university (TEUs) seldom involve themselves outside their own immediate settings (Andreassen, 2015; Jakhelln & Pörn, 2019). Neither TESs nor TEUs cross institutional boundaries, defined as ‘socio-cultural differences leading to discontinuity in action and interaction’ (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011, p. 133). In the LABTEd (Learning, Assessment and Boundary crossing in Teacher Education) -project the intention is that the participants (STs, TEU and TES) move across these boundaries using the Change Laboratory (CL) as an arena for community building and development both in school and university.

LABTEd is a four-year project carried out in two settings in two universities using cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) (Engeström & Engeström, 1986) to stimulate change and development both in school and university. This study reports from one of these settings, and the focus is on the joint work connected to the R&D assignment the STs accomplished the first year in the project. The research question for the study that this article builds on, is:

How did the triad come to an agreement on a joint design and focus for the R&D assignment?

The purpose of the study is to examine how the participants came to an agreement about both content and design of the R&D assignment, that could frame and guide the work towards a partially shared object. This study is set in a university-school partnership in one region. In addition to six TEUs, two teacher educators and the headmaster from a collaborating primary school participate in the study alongside the eight STs (four in physical education (PE) and four in mathematics) working on their R&D assignment during the third year of their study.

We have used Change Laboratories (CLs) (Engeström et al., 1996) as an arena for working on the STs’ professional development and to the development of professional practice in the chosen school subjects. Two times per semester all stakeholders met in CLs to discuss what enables and what constrains our endeavors to develop shared activities that will both contribute to the intended development

The study is designed as a case study defined as a bounded system in time and place (Creswell, 2013). The data is composed of transcripts from discussions in varied groups representing all eight STs, all eight teacher educators and the interventionist researcher in three CLs from September 2018 through February 2019. There is a total of 412 pages of transcript. In the preliminary analysis we used the constant comparative method of analyses, as described by Strauss and Corbin (1990), to structure the data material. Our first step was to conduct in-depth reading, unveiling two highlights in the data material: how the different perspectives (activity systems) are heard, and how this work in the CLs leads to a community for development creating relevance and usefulness for all. Giving us a first idea of what was going on in the dialogues and discussions, the two highlights enabled us to reduce the data material for further analysis. Having reduced the material, we moved to the second step in our analysis, a continuing open coding and categorization process (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), leading to the development of three categories: “The issue at stake”, “How to deal with it”, and “Ending with a solution”. To explore the domain of these categories further and to get a deeper understanding of the development across the categories we found Middleton’s (2010) D-analysis, a protocol to analyze communication in dialogues or discussions, highly relevant. Our data material mirrors a process over time with the aim to develop new practices regarding collaboration across institutional boundaries through dialogues, and the focus in Middleton’s protocol is on communicative evidence of learning and claims concerning knowledge states. The third step in our analysis then, was to analyses the data material following Middleton’s five phases named as “deixit”, “definition and delination”, “deliberation”, “departure” and “development” (Middleton, 2010, pp. 96–97). We present the findings from our D-analysis through narratives constructed by using terms from the D-analysis under the headings; “The issue at stake”, “How to deal with it”, and “Ending with a solution”. In the discussion we return to the findings from the preliminary analysis, discussing the three categories in the light of the participants focus on how the different perspectives (activity systems) are heard and how the work in the CLs leads to a community for development creating relevance and usefulness for all.

The CLs seems to be a collaboration arena bringing forward the voices of all the participants advancing communication and community building. The communication related to the R&D assignment seems to have meaning and brings forward a motivating power to do the work (Sannino et al., 2016). All the participants are on their way to create a new form of societal activity, a new form of collaborative work between university and schools that is collectively generated (Engeström, 1987, p. 174), and the voices of the participants in each their activity system are heard in this collective work. The collaboration processes lead to an agreement related to focus and design of the STs’ R&D assignment. However, the study also shows that it is necessary to use time to reach such an agreement. In the studied project it took more than a semester. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that the participants need to develop an understanding of a collective motive and how the school and university can collaborate to meet all the participants’ needs for learning and development. Such an understanding and awareness gives direction for how STs’ R&D assignments are designed. This study presents findings from a study of CLs containing participants from one school and one university. More studies are needed to understand why and how schools and universities should collaborate when focusing on STs’ assignments. However, the findings presented may have transferability and resonance beyond their context if readers of this text use it creatively as a thinking tool (Gudmundsdottir, 2001) adapting it to their own context. This means that the findings can contribute to the development of collaboration between school and university in other settings as well.

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