Negotiating Interpersonal Relations in School–University Collaboration

Abstract

This chapter examines the discursive strategies that were used in the emails of two university researchers and two school teachers to negotiate and manage collaboration while engaged in a collaborative action research project. This case study was situated in a context when key educational reform was being introduced in secondary schools at the time, with school–university collaboration seen as a way to build teachers’ capacity to implement new assessment practices in English language classrooms. It examines the complexities of negotiating collaboration as a social practice in institutional cultures in a non-Western sociocultural setting. A major theme in this chapter is to examine how collaboration ‘talk’ constitutes the enactment of interpersonal relations. The findings suggest that the discursive construction of interpersonal relations in school–university collaboration is highly complex in the Hong Kong sociocultural context.