Conference Agenda

This paper analyses empirical data collected in the course of an interdisciplinary collaboration between an academic from the University of Oslo’s (UiO) Department of Education (author Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke, hereafter Tone) and an academic from the Faculty of Dentistry (author Anne Møystad, hereafter Anne). Although the two worked together on an academic development project often pursued in higher education – how to improve student supervision – rarer are the ways in which their collaboration grew to include research on how a profession (dentistry) contributes to a public good. Concerning public good, we draw on McLean and Walker (2012) who argue that professions and society have a contract, where in exchange for professional autonomy and prestige, a profession contributes to public good by sharing its expertise as a public service to the social system. We argue that what has led to Anne’s and Tone’s contribution to public good has been a collaboration marked by a high degree of academic hospitality. Their academic hospitality helped them overcome challenges as they arose in their ten-year (and counting) collaboration that has brought about a change in the dental faculty’s cultural values and approaches to teaching, learning, and assessment. The dental faculty now discusses, reflects on, and lives out ideals for teaching students how their work contributes to public good.

The work of Anne and Tone led a faculty to change fundamentally their supervision and assessment practices, to develop practices designed to ‘make’ students, rather than ‘break’ them, as they prepare for professional work. The case details how Tone and Anne, with painstaking attention to language and to hearing each voice at the Faculty of Dentistry, worked to align dental academics’ often widely varying views on their dentistry’s professional standards. They worked to make suitability assessment formative for dental students and academics alike, giving each ample information about whether students are suitable or not for professional work (Solbrekke & Møystad 2022). Because the assessment occurs over the course of each semester, students have opportunities to reflect on and then change their behaviors.

Our purpose is to dissect Anne’s and Tone’s collaboration to highlight its inner workings and then generalize about collaboration in interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary education. To analyze their collaboration, we draw heavily on the concept of a specific type of collaboration as enacted through academic hospitality (Phipps & Barnett, 2007). Academics engage in academic hospitality when colleagues: share ideas, methods, and concepts with each other, whether from the same or different disciplinary tribes (epistemological hospitality); provide resources to each other or students (material hospitality); welcome fellow academics who travel to new locations, whether across the globe or from across a campus (touristic hospitality); and use language to develop a shared repertoire to communicate across disciplines or educational environments, such as across clinical and non-clinical teachers. We also draw on Imperiale et al’s (2021) reconsideration of academic hospitality’s emphasis on conversations as the modes of engaging in academic hospitality, as well as their exploration of how academic hospitality is lived out in relationships.

Teamwork is now the basic work structure in most industries (Deepa & Seth, 2013), and teamwork skills are considered one of the most important soft skills needed (Burrus et al., 2013). Organisations need to actively and systematically support teams for their benefit as well as for the benefit of the members and the team (Wenger et al., 2002)

This paper presents findings from a practice-oriented research project which revolves around the collaboration in facilitator teams in the course Experts in Teamwork (EiT) at the Norwegian University of Technology and Sciences (NTNU). EiT is a compulsory master’s degree course at NTNU in which students develop interdisciplinary teamwork skills by collaborating to develop a project. EiT was developed to respond to the expressed need from business and industry for graduates with the enhanced ability and skills to work and collaborate in interdisciplinary teams (Sortland, 2015). Approximately 3,000 students take the course each year. Students are divided into classes of 30 students, called villages. In each village, a facilitator team, normally consisting of one teacher and two learning assistants, facilitates students’ learning. The teacher and the learning assistants have complementary roles in the village, with the teacher having the overall responsibility for the course and particularly the development of the project part. The learning assistant’s role is to facilitate the students` interdisciplinary teamwork processes and support the development of students’ collaboration skills

An educational unit at NTNU called the Experts in Teamwork Academic Section conducts training seminars for teachers and learning assistants – separately and together. One seminar, The Village, specifically focuses on the collaboration between the teachers and learning assistants in facilitator teams. This seminar is the facilitator team’s first meeting and ensures the facilitator team becomes acquainted, converses and plans how they want to work together in the course.

The notion that a proportion of the facilitator teams did not develop a collaborative practice that greatly supported the team in their tasks sparked the project and became the starting point of the practice-oriented research project. An important prerequisite supporting the development of students’ interdisciplinary collaboration skills is that the facilitator team has collaborative practice and uses each other’s complementary knowledge and roles.

The social learning theory of a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) was chosen as a theoretical framework to develop the training seminars in this project and was used as a lens to enquire into facilitator teams’ experiences collaborating during the course. A community of practice is formed by people who share a domain of human activity and who engage in the process of collective learning within that domain. Wenger et al. (2002) propose a structural model with three constituent elements that define a community of practice as a social structure: a shared domain, a community and the practice they develop. The combination provides a social knowledge structure for developing and sharing knowledge and supports collaboration and developing a practice. To actively and systematically cultivate a community of practices to develop and strengthen will benefit the members and their organization (Wenger et al., 2002).

This paper aims to explore the following research questions:

What supports and challenges collaboration between teachers and learning assistants in the facilitator team at EiT?

In which ways can we support teams’ collaborative practice by using communities of practice as a theory and structural model?

Universities and colleges are expected to develop systems to value good teachers, promote their academic careers and raise the status of education (Ministry of Education, 2016). It is emphasized that the students become part of the collaboration, where it becomes a shared responsibility to seek ways to improve, by working together and thereby strengthening the quality work in the education sector (Ministry of Education, 2016). Quality in teacher education (TE) is characterized by a clear vision of good teaching, a clear connection between theory and practice and a practice that gives the opportunity to test and evaluate teaching (Hammernes & Klette, 2015). Several studies have been done on teacher collaboration in TE (Stoll & Louis, 2007), but so far there is little research examining the importance of teacher collaboration and professional learning among teacher educators. The purpose of this paper is to examine how collaboration between teacher educators takes place in TE in Norway, with the intention of studying teacher collaboration as an indicator of quality in TE programs. The paper is a part of a PhD-project, that seeks to develop knowledge about how different professional learning communities among teachers in TE contexts may contribute to increased quality of teacher educators` teaching work. The research question is: In what ways may professional learning communities among teachers potentially have an impact on quality work in teacher education, and in higher education more broadly?

The paper will explore the purpose and possibilities of strengthening professional learning in TE. Research in schools indicate that learning in professional communities gives individuals, groups, the whole organization, and the school system the opportunity to be involved in and influence learning over time (Aas, 2021), but professional learning can hardly be developed in a school without support from leaders at all levels. In today's debate about educational leadership and school development, the term professional learning is one of many concepts used to capture the distinctiveness of the school's collegial community (Aas, 2013). There seems to be broad international agreement that the term professional learning includes a group of people who work within a collective enterprise and who critically examine their own practice through systematic processes that deal with learning and development (Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Wallace, & Thomas, 2006). Higher education institutions are characterized by self-governing departments, a strong subject orientation and identity among teachers, a strong degree of autonomy among teachers and a weak tradition of collaboration (Huffman et al., 2016; Stoll & Louis, 2007). Studies from upper secondary schools, show that it can be extra difficult to establish professional learning communities in these institutions, but that it can be possible to develop and organize collaborative arenas for teachers if school leaders support the work, and if the teachers, over time, have good conditions for knowledge development (Helstad, 2013).

The Norwegian strategy plan Teacher education 2025 – National strategy for quality and cooperation in teacher education (Ministry of Education, 2017), refers to research showing that more systematic collaboration between teachers in teacher education, and teachers with updated practical experience gives positive results. The students' experience of relevance and coherence in the education is important for them to be able to acquire knowledge and skills (Smeby and Heggen, 2012). The knowledge base we have about quality in higher education, and about teacher education more specifically, indicates that we need more knowledge about the importance of, and organization for collaboration between teacher educators. So far, development of professional learning communities has been highly described in schools, whereas professional learning among teacher educators needs to be further explored.