Academic Discourses on School–Based Teacher Collaboration: Revisiting the Arguments

Purpose: After decades arguing the necessity of transforming schools into collaborative workplaces, teacher collaboration has been taken up by various discursive logics offering different viewpoints of the concept. This article reviews some of these discourses and looks at their main arguments, pointing to the contradictions and tensions between them and highlighting the contested and cooptive nature of teacher collaboration.

Proposed Conceptual Argument: This article differentiates provisionally between five discourses on teacher collaboration: Cultural discourses describe teacher collaboration as being embedded in cultural forms that blur the boundaries between personal and professional and stimulate interdependency and collective responsibility. School effectiveness and improvement discourses depict teacher collaboration as a product of cultural management led by the school's principal. School–as–community discourses embed teacher collaboration in a vision of schools as communities, where contractual models of relationships are transcended in pursuit of more inclusive environments. Restructuring discourses elaborate the idea of a “new professional” capable of getting involved in collaborative practices within an ever–learning organization. Finally, critical discourses articulate an approach that integrates democratic practices, community participation, and shared reflection on teaching as a social and political praxis.

Implications: Although valuable lessons can be learned by considering these discourses as providing a complementary grasp, they also advance differing arguments as to the purposes of teacher collaboration, the differentiated way in which it is approached, and the position of conflict in collaborative processes. As value–embedded frameworks, discourses orientate the practice of collaboration toward substantially different projects of school change resulting in conservative or transformative practices.