Collaborating alone? Teachers’ and pedagogues’ unequal cross-professional collaboration and what it means for their professional learning in Danish schools

Abstract

Cross-professional collaboration in schools is a prerequisite for professional teaching practice and thus for professional development in many post-industrialized societies, yet little is known about how teachers with different professional backgrounds make meaning of and internalize cross-professional collaboration and how inequities in legitimacy and power in cross-professional collaboration affect professional learning. This article examines cross-professional collaboration and the professional learning it initiates between teachers and pedagogues (Danish term for childcare professionals) in Danish schools. Drawing on situated learning theory, critical psychology and Pierre Bourdieu, it explores teachers’ and pedagogues’ professional learning in conflictual cross-professional collaborations. The findings of the study document that cross-professional collaborations are spaces for negotiating and drawing professional boundaries and for producing hierarchies of different forms of professional capital, thereby re/producing dominant understandings of what constitutes teaching professionalism for teachers and pedagogues. The article concludes that cross-professional collaboratory practices may position and draw boundaries between the different professional groups, thus limiting productive learning.