Without a Whole: When Framed Agency in Cross-professional Partnership is Lost

This paper presents the outcomes from a research project where a complex set-up of professional development in school settings was carried out in partnerships between schools in two Danish municipalities, a teacher education university college and a university. The aim of the project was to develop an increased interest to natural sciences by creating what was conceptualised as a natural science mindsetamong teachers and students. This should be done through professional development of all teachers within the field of natural sciences to improve their competences to facilitate the students’ learning and motivation in authentic learning environments in the local area. Furthermore, the goal was to establish an internal collaboration within the school settings cross-over professions as well as external collaborations focusing on the surrounding business community. Here, the focus was to build bridges between schools and private communities to open up for new authentic learning environments. The role of the university college was to provide the schools with professional development and the role of the university was to evaluate the project through formative and summative approaches. When an organisation wants to modify the way they "do things" and, like in this study, provide the members (teachers) with a new vision for the future, international research shows that most organisations fail to do so. There are different reasons for this. A central reason, relevant for this study, is that organisations' knowledge for how to plan, frame and implement such organisational changes (e.g. establishing a new kind of cross-professinal partnerships internally within the school setting and externally with the business community) is limited. Furthermore, international research on professional learning and action emphasizes the importance of capturing a capacity to align people's thoughts and actions to establish a common ground to respond to, for example, a professional change of "doing things". This concerns a capacity to work with others and to draw on resources they offer, which, in turn, requires strong forms of agency for professional practice in cross-professional settings. In other words, individual agency can expand through a capacity of joint action. This paper focuses on what is lost when such agency is not recognised as important when framing and establishing cross-professional partnership in education. The theoretical framwork of the present study is a sociocultural perspective on communication and learning. However, in this study the theoretical interest is directed towards an object-oriented activity rather than a mediation-focused direction. This is to say that the understanding of establishing cross-professional partnership is based on an interpretation of tensions and contradictions within multi-voiced systems rather than in mediational relationships existing is such systems. In the paper, the analysis look beyond communication in the form of dialogues to the purposes and conditions of joint actions in partnership with others. The paper contributes to the contemporary debate on the increasing collaborations between different actors in education. It is based on an empirical study in which Danish teachers and school leaders participate in a professional development of natural science education in primary and lower secondary schools to, through partnership, create a new natural science mindset.