Creating an optimal environment for inclusive education: co-location and transformation in interdisciplinary collaboration

Abstract

Collaboration between teachers and child support workers is seen as a promising way to effectuate inclusive practice in mainstream education. This paper aims to explore how co-location of services promotes transformation of practice, and to expand an analytic framework for interdisciplinary collaboration. By combining these two perspectives, we intend to contribute to both theory and practice. The data consist of semi-structured interviews that explore the experiences of teachers and child support workers who co-work in three schools for secondary education. A template analysis was used to examine collaboration in co-location, and to further develop the framework with which we began our empirical research. The initial template consisted of dimensions of knowledge sharing in relation to dimensions of trust and dimensions of identity. The results showed that proximity can be divided into three different types, being spatial proximity, organisational proximity and personal proximity. These types of proximity, in turn, can be related to knowledge sharing, trust and identity. The contribution of the expanded framework for practice lies in its potential to shed light on how processes in interdisciplinary collaboration can be shaped.