Keywords

Introduction: A Long-Term Collaboration

In this chapter, I will reflect upon mutuality in a collaboration for professional development (PD) within early childhood education and care (ECEC) from my perspective as a researcher within this field.Footnote 1 A development project, entitled Children’s Wellbeing and Learning: Focus on Multilingualism and Home-Preschool Collaboration in Preschool, aimed to contribute to decreasing differences in the living conditions of young children through knowledge of and support for teaching and learning multilingually in preschool (Kultti et al., 2016; Kultti, 2021). The project was initiated and funded by the local region working for wellbeing, Region Västra Götaland,Footnote 2 and it was offered to municipalities in the region. The planning and carrying out of the project were grounded in research. Kirsch et al. (2020) have pointed out that there is a gap in research when it comes to multilingual teaching and learning in ECEC as content of PD. During a period of six years, four–six preschool teachers, the preschool heads, and (some) preschool education officers/people in charge of quality work in each municipality (a total of six) participated in the collaboration. Collaboration in the project is seen as a dialogical activity between the actors: not only preschool teachers and the researcher but also the stakeholders in the municipalities as well as the local region (cf. Lendahls Rosendahl & Rönnerman, 2006; Olin et al., 2021). The collaboration came to include mapping, in-service training, and follow-up (see Fig. 9.1).

Fig. 9.1
An image represents the series of lectures and conference presentations with their components and recorded lectures to be used by all participants.

Design of the in-service training

Full size image

Mapping, In-Service Training, Follow-Up

Training, reflection, and coaching have been shown to be useful and valuable tools in long-lasting PD (Kirsch et al., 2020). The project started with a mapping of the experiences and needs in the participating municipalities, in order to create mutuality through grounding the project in content of relevance to be developed in the participating municipalities (cf. Kirsch et al., 2020). This was done through a questionnaire: for preschool children aged 5 years as well as their teachers, their guardians, the preschool heads, and the leaders responsible for preschool education, in four municipalities with different characteristics of socio-economy and setup (Kultti et al., 2016). The questionnaires were developed together with, and tested by, some of the participants as well as preschool teachers and guardians outside the group. Based on the analysis of the results and discussions between the participants, extensive in-service training was planned by a researcher and offered to preschool teachers in the six municipalities, of which five chose to participate (Kultti, 2021).

The in-service training held at the university included four lectures for a large number of staff from the preschools and coaching for 24 preschool teachers from the five municipalities. The specific aims of the coaching were (i) to increase theoretical knowledge of teaching and learning multilingually and (ii) to help participants practice these skills in teaching; (iii) to help participants develop skills for reviewing and analyzing their own approach to multilingual children’s learning; and (iv) to develop a dialogical approach to home-preschool collaboration. Support for disseminating and grounding the content in the municipalities included (i) a conference with all the participants, (ii) a regional meeting with the participants in each municipality, and (iii) two recorded lectures.

The researcher conducted a 2-year follow-up at the end of the in-service training (Kultti, 2021). The follow-up included an evaluation but mainly entailed further guidance of the teachers’ pedagogical work (cf. Kirsch et al., 2020), showing the positive effects of external support in PD, this time even more closely related to the practices of each preschool (see #2 later in the text). The researcher met with the preschool teachersFootnote 3 in each municipality twice a year for developing reading activities to support multilingual children’s learning.

At the beginning of the follow-up, increased dialogue with guardians in the municipalities (one of the aims) was clearly evident. However, the aims of teaching with support for multilingual children’s learning and metacommunication in reading activities were developed by only some of the teachers. This outcome is in line with the study by Kirsch et al. (2020), which showed that teachers’ development of attitudes and knowledge in PD does not automatically lead to changed practices.

At the follow-up, it was evident that two of the municipalities were implementing and evolving the project content. At the same time, two municipalities were fading off (cf. Kirsch et al., 2020; see #3 later in this chapter). This opposite way of evolving the project content shed light on aspects of promoting preschool teachers’ opportunities to become and be recognized as genuine contributors to mutual knowledge-building practices in collaboration, such as (i) the preconditions for PD in the preschool/municipality; (ii) the engagement of the leaders (preschool heads; leaders of ECEC/quality work) and the organization of the project participation; as well as (iii) the external support for PD. These aspects will be reflected on and discussed below as lessons learned.

Lessons Learned

The chapter content relates to the field of research on professional learning communities (PLC: terminology in O’Brian and Jones (2014) and Lendahls Rosendahl and Rönnerman (2006); continuing professional development (CPD) in Stoll et al. (2006); models of CPD in Kennedy (2014); professional learning in Boylan et al. (2018); PD in a multilingual ECEC in Kirsch et al. (2020); and practices of leading in Grootenboer et al. (2015)). The present text is directed towards an aspect within this field of research: collaboration. A characteristic of collaboration in the preschool context, for example, in a development project, is two professions (preschool teachers and researchers) coming together (Lendahls Rosendahl & Rönnerman, 2005) within a frame, which can (also) be understood as the one reviewing/evaluating the work of the other, aiming to bring about improvement (cf. Gustavsson & Löfving, 2020; Liljenberg & Nyman Alm, 2020). Even though it helps in understanding the development of one’s own practice in positive terms, a collaboration grounded in a need to develop someone’s profession involves unequal relations and power aspects. For example, in a study of practice-based research (Olin, Almqvist & Hamza, 2021), these aspects are analyzed using recognition as a concept for understanding the other’s and one’s own contributions as equally important.

  1. 1.

    Teacher Ownership Through Dialogue and Organization for PD

A dialogue between participants has been shown to be essential for mutuality in projects including teachers and researchers (Gustavsson & Löfving, 2020; Lendahls Rosendahl & Rönnerman, 2005; Stoll et al., 2006). Yet, the character of dialogue is not to be taken for granted. For example, depending on the project initiator and how the project is grounded in the participating preschools (cf. top-down/bottom-up), dialogues might have different meanings and functions for the various participants. Another aspect that is important but not unproblematic is the leadership role in PD (Grootenboer et al., 2015; Lendahls Rosendahl & Rönnerman, 2005). Without the preschool head involved, teachers are left alone in the actual project and/or in PD (and the opportunities for preschool improvement can be diminished). However, with the preschool head involved, teachers are expected to reflect on possible shortcomings in their work and/or lacking competencies in front of their superior (e.g., the preschool head), or the participation can be experienced as controlled. I will exemplify this with my experiences based on the collaboration described here.

How to support the application or integration of the content of the in-service training in the preschool practices, while also disseminating it to other preschools within the municipality, was considered at the beginning of the project. Concretely, each municipality was asked to nominate a coordinator with organizational responsibility. Another effort entailed encouraging the preschool heads to involve at least one more teacher already during the coaching phase. This was done not only in case the original teacher later became unable to participate but also to enable a shared responsibility for the integration. In addition, the expectation that the preschool heads would disseminate and establish the content was repeatedly communicated. Thereby, the preschool heads were invited to participate in the lectures within the coaching as well as the two conferences: to share the ideas about dissemination in the municipality with each other and to discuss the content in relation to the actual municipality – where they were in their process and what their needs and challenges were. When the collaboration was evaluated at the end of the follow-up, there was an evident connection between these initial ideas and the teachers’ reflections. For example, the teachers expressed that it was important for the staff to know about the project and its aim(s); that the preschool head legitimated the teachers’ participation in the project; and that they received support for the collegial learning for which they had become leaders (see #3 later in this chapter). In other words, the importance of the preschool head when it came to dialogue and, in PD, strengthening the teachers’ ownership (cf. Hyppönen & Melin, 2020) was noted by the participants, in line with previous researchFootnote 4 (Grootenboer et al., 2015; Lendahls Rosendahl & Rönnerman, 2005).

A lesson learned was that a shared understanding of project content and organization, and thereby mutuality and ownership among teachers, cannot be taken for granted. For example, even if all actors agree on the need for a coordinator in a project, this might not come to pass for different reasons. Therefore, instead of (only) encouraging participants in this regard, an explicit agreement involving the responsibility for supporting, integrating, and disseminating emerged as important. In addition, as there will likely be changes within the leadership in a long-term collaboration, there is a need for at least one person corresponding to each level of leadership (cf. systemic leading, principal leading, and middle leading, in the terms used by Grootenboer et al., 2015): in our case, a preschool education officer in the municipality, a person with a mandate to work with development/quality issues in preschool (cf. a coordinator), and a preschool head took on these roles.

  1. 2.

    Teacher Ownership Through External Support for PD

PD in preschool involving external agents, such as a researcher, can be understood as someone supplying something to a receiver (Lendahls Rosendahl & Rönnerman, 2005). Neither a perspective seeing “the new” as contributing and evolving nor one that sees it as colliding and defending, will necessarily contribute mutuality in collaboration, based on the experience of the project discussed here. Instead, activities closely connected to the participants’ practices as well as educational research seemed to create a shared focus in the discussions between the teachers from different units/preschools and the researcher. This can be illustrated by the following. The observations at the beginning of the follow-up showed that the content of the in-service training – metalinguistic awareness – was not appropriated as part of the teaching in reading activities. Therefore, the content was (again) focused on through coaching during the follow-up. This time the discussions were grounded in the shared observations of reading activities. This kind of close relationship with the teachers’ own teaching practices (see Lendahls Rosendahl & Rönnerman, 2005, regarding the importance of collaboration in closely related practice) contributed to creating a common ground for the discussions. It was followed by changes expressed through the observations and dialogues, such as (i) languages as assets, fun, and enriching; (ii) developing teaching and knowledge of language development; (iii) bilingual communication and dialogue with guardians; (iv) cooperation with mother tongue teachers; and (v) awareness in the use of digital tools (teaching) in multilingual reading activities. The activities and discussions opened up for not only reproducing something but also going beyond the in-service training, thus implying teachers’ ownership of the knowledge generated. In other words, the insights and knowledge that were developed, and the teaching activities that were elaborated, became visible through the facilitation of PD externally, relating it closely to the teachers’ own practices.

A change in approach and/or practice takes time and effort (Lendahls Rosendahl & Rönnerman, 2005; Stoll et al., 2006), indicating the importance of PD of relevance to the practice at hand. A continuous process (instead of independent activities), understood to support mutuality in collaboration through the time aspect – a long-term process – for people to know each other and their practice, to develop understanding of the process/content at hand, and to handle the content in several ways, emerged as useful and critical in the project. Expressed in other words, external support for PD integrated in the actual practice is interpreted as opening up for teacher ownership: intersubjectivity and meaningfulness, as well as confidence and trust in mutuality. This in turn involved equalizing discussions in terms of everyone contributing from and with their own perspectives and experiences.

  1. 3.

    Teacher Ownership Through Internal Support for PD

According to the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (Skolinspektionen, 2018), external PD that includes only a small number of staff is not followed up by either colleagues or the preschool head. For the part of the project discussed here, PD was externally supported (in-service training and follow-up), through organized implementation of the content at hand as part of the everyday work in the preschools. That is, the external support occurred simultaneously with internal support/work in the preschools/municipalities where the project was integrated and elaborated (cf. teacher ownership). As an example, the preschool(s) in the two municipalities that actively participated until the end of the follow-up are characterized by a task- and process-driven organisation, to phrase it in Nehez et al.’s terms (2017):

Certain generative mechanisms were found to have important impact on the emergence and growth of task and process driven organisations. The generative mechanisms are: staff opens for visibility, cooperation across borders, improved deliberative structure of meetings, better coupling between leadership and staff, getting staff ownership from many tasks and wide participation in activities, more systematic developmental processes, improvements visible for children and students, in-take of news from other sites and research. (Nehez et al., 2017, p. 6)

At the organizations in the two municipalities, the teachers did not separate the projects they were involved in but rather referred to them, and took them on, as integrated aspects of their work. Another reflection at these organizations was that PD seemed to open up for the staff to develop knowledge of the content in the project. In saying this, I am arguing that legitimacy and intersubjectivity are not guaranteed by the fact that the entire staff participate in each and every part of PD but rather the opposite and that it is necessary to share the responsibility for the PD through both external (such as lectures) and internal (such as collegial learning – see below) efforts. In addition, these preschools were shown to have an interest in research-based PD after the follow-up, for example, through participating in doctoral projects and practice-developing research.

In the two municipalities where the project content was elaborated, the PD was distributed through collegial learning (Grootenboer et al., 2015). In other words, collegial learning presupposes distributed leadership through preschool teachers having the role of middle leaders. As a middle leader, a teacher has an acknowledged leading position next to their teaching commitment. It is argued here that this type of position ‘“bridg[ing]” both the work of institutional leadership/management and the development of classroom teachers’ (Grootenboer et al., 2015, p. 525) contributes to the understandings of practices of leading. To give an example, the terms used for the participating teachers were learning/process leaders for collegial learning. When describing their tasks and responsibilities, the teachers expressed legitimacy and intersubjectivity for participating in the project and implementing the content. In addition, in their teaching as well as their guidance of their colleagues’ work, they had to put effort into understanding and implementing the content of the in-service training. In this way they became owners of the content, which was expressed, for example, through discussing issues they considered and experienced in their practice (as opposed to expectations regarding the researcher’s input). Thereby, ownership can (also) come to entail balancing power aspects in the collaboration between actors in different positions.

Closing Thoughts

Mutuality in collaboration as an issue of practices of leading, including systematic and principal leading as well as collegial learning and preschool teachers as middle leaders (cf. Grootenboer et al., 2015), is based on the experiences gained through a 6-year collaboration. Practices of leading within the collaboration are interpreted as having contributed not only to ownership among the participating teachers but also to the continuity and evolvement of the content at hand. Evolving knowledge of practices of leading for mutuality in ongoing PD in ECEC is regarded as a field for further research.