The goal in question: a proposed framework for understanding teacher collaboration/cooperation between interconnected practices

Abstract

Collaboration as means for development purposes is a widely desired goal within educational organizations and encapsulates an array of different actors linked to school operations as well as interconnected practices. While this holds true, implementing collaborative structures is associated with multiple hardships and challenges in practice. The aim of this study was to explore processual aspects of collaboration between two interconnected practices in the Swedish school system: the compulsory school and the Swedish school-age educare, and through this exploration propose a framework for understanding how these aspects might affect collaboration between interconnected educational practices. Designed as a qualitative study, individual practice studies through questionnaires were collected from teachers in the Swedish school-age educare and principals responsible for the educational program. The findings of the study highlight factors hindering and enabling collaboration (and cooperation) between the interconnected practices, and based on these findings propose a framework grounded in interorganizational relationship-theory as a tool for future research on similar collaborative processes.