The Challenge of Studying Collaboration

This is a response to “Collaboration as Dialogue: Teachers and Researchers Engaged in Conversation and Professional Development” (Clark et al., 1996), a narrative account of teacher-researcher collaborative research presented in Readers Theater format. The authors identified a powerful value tension in collaborative research—the unequal benefits that accrue to classroom teachers and academics engaged in research and publication—and suggested that this inequity could be surmounted by collaboration in the form of dialogue. Although the authors argued against generalizing from their experience or constructing an integrative theory, their observations are concordant with other collaborative situations where inequality exists. Our response proposes ways to address the issues they have identified without losing the power of a theoretical analysis. We contend that, by looking for commonalities and differences across settings, tasks, working methods, goals, and values, a framework for understanding collaboration can be constructed that preserves the benefits of rich descriptive accounts.