The point of departure is “the Lade project,” a three-year action research project working with the overriding research question: “With the pupils’ learning as the starting point: How can teachers and researchers cooperate to develop teaching practice and school as a learning organization?” The project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council, was conducted in one school and a key premise was that the basis for research questions related to various sub-projects should be connected to the teachers’ own school workday and challenges and problems they experienced in their daily practice. The teachers were organized into three teams. Teachers in team 1 taught pupils in the first four grades, team 2 taught pupils in the fifth to seventh grades, and team 3 taught pupils in the final three grades. During the project period each of the teams collaborated with one or two researchers. Altogether, seven researchers were involved. I was one of the researchers and in this presentation I use an autobiographical approach when focusing on the activities taking place in the researchers’ team or at the research group level. There are three reasons why focusing on activities in a researcher team is important. First, in the application for funding we presented various goals for the project. Parallel to working and cooperating with the teachers at the school level we also wanted to conduct research on these processes. We wanted to publish scientific texts nationally and internationally, and we wanted to present results at national and international conferences. Furthermore, we wanted to write a book on the project. Within the scope of the project, all these goals were achieved. From my perspective, as one of the researchers in the project, it has been useful to reflect on this “success,” which is the “local” reason that explains why the paper is important. Second, for many years, the Norwegian national authorities have encouraged researchers to cooperate in teams. For example, the new programme initiated by the Norwegian Research Council, “Education 2020,” stipulates that the programme will fund projects that “contribute to building strong researchers’ teams.” The emphasis on researchers’ collaboration is not only a Norwegian phenomenon, as we find it in all Western countries. This paper does not offer any universal and fixed solutions when it comes to the question of how to build strong researcher teams. It is, however, a contribution to knowledge production on the theme, which is a more “global” reason for why it is important. The third reason why the study is important is that other researchers will be able to use it as a thinking tool (Gudmundsdottir, 2001) in their efforts to develop teams and cooperate in projects.

According to Taylor and Bogdan (1984), autobiography is defined as a description of important experiences and events in a person’s life told by the person her- or himself. While Creswell (1998) recommends that autobiographical texts should be written in chronological order, Walton (2008) argues that various ways of writing such texts should be tried. For this paper, I will present what I define as crucial activities for this particular researcher team. These activities are: Developing the project, Regular team meetings, Scientific conferences, Writing seminars and Social gatherings. The overall theoretical framework for the study is narrative theory (for example Bruner, 1984; Denzin, 1989a,b; Elbaz-Luwisch, 2005; Moen, 2006/2009; Polkinghorne, 1988), and the activities are analysed in light of relevant theoretical concepts within this theory. Data used for developing the paper include mental and emotional remembrances or memory pictures (Fottland, 2004), and log book entries or memos (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) from the researcher group meetings.

The “Developing the project” activity focuses on the initial stages when the group members negotiated an intersubjective understanding of the project. The “Regular meetings” activity focuses on discussions connected to both presenting situations in the sub-projects and future planning. The “Scientific conferences” activity looks into the fact that throughout the entire project period we presented results from the work at both national and international conferences. The “Writing seminars” activity was conducted because we wrote a book on the project, and finally, there was an emphasis on “Social gatherings” throughout the entire project period. One crucial question is what would have happened if one or more of these activities had not taken place? For example, what would have happened if there had been no emphasis on regular team meetings? Bearing this kind of reasoning in mind, I argue that each of the activities had a value of its own, and I further argue that the activities should be looked upon in connection with one another and as interwoven. It is their connectedness that gives them impact, and I claim that due to this intertwining factor, what characterizes the researcher group activities is intellectual and social wellbeing.