Conference Agenda

This study seeks to investigate how school-based mentor teachers navigate institutional boundaries within an initial teacher education partnership initiative. The motivation for this investigation stems from the enduring challenge faced by teacher education programs in effectively leveraging the expertise within schools, particularly that of school-based mentor teachers guiding teacher candidates in their professional practice. Ongoing educational reforms worldwide aim to establish more collaborative and less hierarchical partnerships between universities and schools. In the Norwegian context, the strategy outlined in Teacher Education 2025 emphasizes strengthening partnerships through mutual commitment to program development and research in Initial Teacher Education (ITE). The overarching goal of these partnerships is to cultivate more effective teacher education programs by sharing resources, expertise, facilities, and decisions to achieve mutual objectives.

The study is theoretically anchored in Engeström's (2001) concept of horizontal expertise, specifically exploring how expertise is distributed across activity systems where participants share common goals but operate in different organizational contexts. Horizontal expertise acknowledges equal contributions from professionals to collective activities, fostering collaboration on a "shared meeting ground." Additionally, the study employs Akkerman and Bakker's (2011) concepts of boundary crossing and boundary object, illustrating how collaboration can transpire at the intersection of schools and the university through a shared boundary object.

To facilitate collaboration, school-based mentor teachers, primarily employed in primary schools, were seconded (20%) to collaborate with university-based teacher educators on various activities such as curriculum development, lesson planning, co-teaching, and assessment.The study addresses the following research question: How do mentor teachers experience crossing institutional boundaries as joint faculty in an initial teacher education partnership? The further builds upon existing research examining how teacher practitioners navigate institutional boundaries and how their situated knowledge and expertise can complement the expertise of university faculty.

Consistent and transparent communication is essential in education for parental engagement, partnership, and trust in schools. Modern educational communication is vastly digitalized, which makes it fast, clear, and efficient, but it often lacks context, may be too general, or does not correspond with parental needs, leading to mistrust. Though trust is considered a foundation for parent-school partnerships, it remains underexplored in academic research, often being treated as a peripheral factor rather than a central subject of study.

Parent-school trust is considered as a result of parental engagement and partnership in education, when educational institutions and their representatives are competent and professional, act in the legal framework, and share with parents common educational goals (Bormann et al., 2021). Some researchers underline, that trust is situational and results from consistent, understandable and caring behavior of teachers, school principals and other educators (Hoy & Tschannen-Moran, 1999). Though parent-teacher trust may depend on social and cultural background (Ross et al., 2018), it is affected by the quality of communication and availability of educational information (Neuenschwander, 2020) and also by the communication channels and instruments (Hamm & Mousseau, 2023).

Digital communication can prevent inequality and improve access to the high-quality education (Bosch et al., 2017), increase availability of educational opportunities (Kraft, 2017). Many parents even prefer digital communication to the face-to-face contact (Bordalba & Bochaca, 2019), as it is prompt and efficient, gives opportunities to be heard (Bosch et al., 2017), and participate as real partners in education (Kuusimäki et al., 2019). Digital tools and resources vary depending on the purpose of communication or information-seeking (Hutchison et al., 2020), availability and promotion of certain instruments (González et al., 2022), and familiarity with them (Laho, 2019) and include e-mail and messengers (Bosch et al., 2017), scool formal and informal web-sites and school social media (Bosch et al., 2017), education resources, and special tools and mobile applications (Yavich & Davidovitch, 2021).

But with the opportunities come the drawbacks. To ensure parental trust to schools and education, digital tools and resources must be familiar to parents and user-friendly (González et al., 2022). If the resources or applications are not abligatory to use, and parents face technical problems, they are more likely to qiut using these resources or even cut off regular communication with school (González et al., 2022; Laho, 2019). If parents are obliged to use certain resources, and face technical and other problems, it may have greater negative impact on the parental trust.

Thus studying parental experience with different digital education resources and instruments is vital for understanding how parental trust to schools is build. Our work surveys how the digital resources as a part of parent-school communication, affect parental trust.