Social changes in today’s global, networked and fluid society are challenging for the schools and educational institutions especially in the growing metropolitan regions. The civil society change also because of changes in relationships to truth and authority – knowledge is no longer definite and constant (Bauman, 1998; Castells, 2001; Jewey, 2009:3). New reforms in schools press forward the inclusive education for paving the way into future. The key elements in inclusive education are cooperative and multiprofessional activities between teachers as colleagues and most of all, collegial talk. Especially, during teacher meetings the collegial talk appears as a relevant communicative tool to use in negotiation for a deeper understanding of how the interactive talk process is performed. Moreover, collegial talk promotes the professional development and continues in the classroom for instructive cooperative actions during for instance co-teaching and co-leadership (Vine & al, 2008) However, extensive research on teacher collaboration and multiprofessional teamwork has been done recently, very few have actually concentrated on the process of how the phenomena in interactivity is expressed in the negotiation between teachers as colleagues. This study examines the results, with the concept of collegial talk, from the analysis of the interactive negotiation during teacher meetings between schoolteachers from two urban schools in different regions.

The research question is how teachers express the collegial talk to each other during negotiations in teacher meetings? The aim is to deepen the insight of how teachers, as collegiums are conducting cooperative activities and professional development in the daily work together for instance in co-teaching. The objectives are to systematically analyze video recorded teacher meetings with the concept of collegial talk, with multimodal interaction analysis, MIA and thus, advance new aspects on analysis of interactive negotiations. Following the new reform, collegial talk is regarded as essential in co-teaching and co-leadership as well as building up social networks between and within schools in the cities.

The starting point in the theoretical framework is the phenomenological part in Bourdieu’s analysis of habitus where professionals in the same field, in this study teachers, shape mutual awareness. The complexity of the research question leads to a combination of three approaches. The first approach is micro sociology according to Goffman (1964, 1981); the second refers to interactional sociolinguistics with Hymes (1974), Gumperz (1982, 2005) and Tannen (1989) and the third use education as an environment with Hargreaves (1998, 2003) teacher cultures. The approaches direct the analysis abductively from the theoretical to the data video records and simultaneously back again.  In addition, the investigation scrutinizes the possibility of developing the MIA, with emphasis more on empirical data. Finally, the two urban schools are located in different regions with one of the schools placed in a growing metropolitan capital district. Even if the similarities are more evident, the growing region as a metropolitan highlights certain differences as the growing amount of students per class.

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