Keywords

FormalPara Key Message

Any innovative transformation within a whole-school organism implies introducing tensions within a system that is already tense. Finding pathways towards coherence on sustainability education within a whole school is hence not straightforward; it is no instrumental pathway. The message from this study is to instead position the question of coherence explicitly within a transformative perspective, building cultures of inquiry that attune and align their processes. Shared inquiry processes that embrace liminality will also cultivate transformative coherency.

1 Introduction

In a recent systematic review of whole-school approaches to sustainability in education, Jorrit Holst (2022) points to the key challenge of having continuous and participative organisational learning processes aimed at institutional coherence regarding sustainability. His underlying question is one of finding pathways towards coherence on sustainability education within a whole school. It is the same question we will address in this chapter. Through the entry point of a team of teachers, we explore possible pathways for transformative coherency. As process facilitators, we design and explore a facilitation model to support them and the whole school in developing a sustainable entrepreneurship programme at a vocational upper secondary school in Norway. We situate the study within the wider discourse on school–university partnerships (see, for instance, Martin et al., 2011) and particularly approaches for sustainability education (Mathie and Wals, 2022). We hope this study can contribute to, and even lead the way for, similar school-based sustainability projects that coherently align and affect the whole-school context.

We will first briefly frame the research perspective and situate the context and methodology of the study, before presenting the alignment facilitation model and its rationale. Thereafter, we will distil lessons learned from the facilitation process and then finally review the model and contextualise our findings in the crosslight of theories on transformative entrepreneurship education and whole-school approaches to sustainability education.

1.1 Tensions and Liminal Spaces in Transformative Entrepreneurship Education

In his analysis of entrepreneurship education, Zhang (2020) emphasises the different tensions that schools and educators necessarily will face in developing entrepreneurship programmes. First and foremost are the tensions that come with the fact that only the students can own the entrepreneurial process, which means teachers must step back from directing and controlling, whilst at the same time remaining responsible for the process. Brown (2015) calls this role ‘maieutics’ and compares the mentor role in entrepreneurship education to that of a midwife. Second, huge tensions arise in having to combine instrumental learning outcomes with this creative process and, moreover, in aligning learning outcomes with assessments (Biggs, 2003). Finally, the development of enterprises often will require more authentic learning environments outside the limited classroom of the school, and managing this implies a whole field of tensions of space and time management. Emphasising the need for authenticity in the entrepreneurial process, Macht (2016) similarly points out how most tensions can be sourced back to a lack of authenticity and proposes ‘authentic alignment’ as a framework for entrepreneurship education. Not only are teachers challenged in their delivery role in entrepreneurship education, but, in the same way, students are also challenged in their habitual role as educational receivers. Again, the major tension is between what the authentic process of creating their own business demands and the role students are used to, and often comfortable with, as recipients (Haara et al., 2016).

We will use the concept of alignment as an important lens in addressing these tensions and designing and discussing our facilitation model. Another important lens will be the concept of liminal spaces, as used by Savin-Baden (2020) in her analysis of transformative learning. The task and process of students creating their own business, with all its tensions, would in her view enable them ‘to learn how to live in the liminal: a beginning of engagement with risk’ (Savin-Baden, 2020 p57). A liminal space is a space where you learn to sustain the unresolved, and it is according to Savin-Baden (2020) to be likened with a tunnel; it begins with a portal or gateway triggered by a threshold or ‘disjunction’. The driving forces for movement through the tunnel ‘lay in the students’ inner motivations for learning, originating from the perceived meaning of the practical experience’ (Savin-Baden, 2020 p51). Savin-Badens’ (2020) concept of the liminal space is useful because it helps us link the dimensions of tensions inseparably to the processes of transformative education. Thereby, the concept of liminal space will serve as a lens of analysis applicable to the student journey, the teacher team process and the whole-school transformative process.

1.2 Attunement and Alignment in Whole-School Transformative Processes

School-based professional development entails intervention and interference with the current state. Any transition within a whole-school organism implies introducing tensions within a system that is already tense. Schröder (2020) found that contradictions and tensions initiate innovative changes and can lead to learning processes. However, to navigate and at the same time facilitate transformation within the school’s complex landscape may be challenging for insiders and outsiders. When educational innovation is driven by teachers, or teams of teachers as in our case, it easily creates noise in the school system, resistance from leadership or unintended collegial conflicts. The facilitation framework needs to situate itself within this crossfield of tensions and enable us, as facilitators, to help identify and explore them to build direction and the coherence of a common process.

The concept of coherence-making is often used in theories that address whole-school transformative processes (Fullan & Quinn 2015; Holst, 2022; Mogren et al. 2019). It implies aligning and attuning the aims, cultures and structures of the many layers of operations of a school and building shared understanding. Fullan and Quinn (2015) centre their theory of ‘coherence-making’ in schools around the notion that coherence in essence is shared depth of understanding about the nature of the work. Building on this concept, we argue that it is useful to distinguish clearly between the two perspectives of alignment and attunement. Attunement is a term sourced in music, which describes the process of tuning and listening in, so the performance is in tune. When used in social science, it operates in a human relational space (McIntyre Latta, 2004). We understand alignment to describe the operational qualities of coherence within and across educational processes, teacher teams and the whole-school organisation. To align tensions and incoherence means, first and foremost, to transform structurally or operationally.

1.3 Context of the Study

This study revolves around a development project for sustainable entrepreneurship education at a vocational upper secondary school in a major city in Norway. The school leadership group contacted the continuous teacher education group at our department and jointly applied for funding a project to improve an existing sustainable entrepreneurship programme through a national continuing education scheme. Seven teachers were set to teach the entrepreneurship programme the following school year, and all of them participated in the development project. The project aims were framed as collectively developing a more coherent and sustainability-oriented entrepreneurship education programme, improving collaboration and coherence within the team of teachers and attuning this team process to the whole school. Two project coordinators/researchers facilitated and managed the project from the university sector. One teacher was designated the coordinator of the teacher team, and the school inspector represented the leadership group. The collaboration lasted for two years, where 18 months involved co-working time with the teacher team.

1.4 Methods and Materials

Through a collaborative inquiry process, we explored how a facilitation model can support a team of teachers in developing a sustainable entrepreneurship programme as a means for finding pathways in a whole-school context. Design-based research was chosen as a suitable approach since it is ‘a systematic, but flexible methodology aimed to improve educational practices through iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation, based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners in real-world settings, and leading to contextually-sensitive design principles and theories’ (Wang and Hannafin, 2005, pp6–7).

Design-based research has been critiqued for pacifying and/or excluding participants (Barab and Squire, 2004; Engeström, 2011; Lorentzen, 2017; Wang and Hannafin, 2005). To include the teachers as well in the first phase, we started the project with a shared understanding of our roles and responsibilities in line with the earlier experiences of the second author (Iversen and Jónsdóttir, 2018). This meant that the teacher team, the leadership and the educational researchers clarified and shared explicitly their own goals within the project. We continued with making visible the different actors’ responsibilities in being part of the project. For instance, it was the teachers’ responsibility to transfer student voices in the project when the teachers undertook certain changes to their teaching. The leadership arranged workshops to define and align visions of this specific project concerning sustainability to the visions of the whole school. Lastly, it was our (the coordinators) responsibility to arrange seven workshops over the course of 18 months. The aims of these workshops were to step-by-step help drive the sustainability entrepreneurship project processes forward and to contribute with our considerations from an outside perspective.

The main data source is a semi-structured focus group interview conducted at the conclusive phase of the project. Here, almost the whole team participated: six of the teachers and the school inspector. The interview revolved around how the teachers experienced being part of this project, if it had made changes to their teaching, and questions related to the content of the WSAM. The last workshop was held in format of a world café on assessment. From this session, the teacher team generated six large note sheets that were put up on a wall. This session was held after the interview and focused more on assessment and the students. Longitudinally, we gathered process supportive data. The supporting data sources are e-mails and preparatory notes before, during and after workshops, questionnaires that the teachers filled out and notes from phone calls.

Concerning data analysis, we started by sorting the data corpus to get an overview of the whole 18-month-long process. The next step was to analyse the interview and find concepts and themes in the data material that could influence the WSAM being explored.

1.5 The Whole-School Alignment Model (WSAM)

The purpose of the WSAM was to attune the teacher team’s process in two directions: towards the students and their processes on the one hand and towards the leadership group of the school on the other hand (the three figure arrows in Fig. 9.1). We use the concept of attunement here for the vertical dimension because it entails harmonising three parallel processes. Towards the leadership group means we need to (1) anchor and dialogue our process and (2) attune it to the structure, culture and aims of the school. Towards the student process means we need to anchor and dialogue the programme innovation process to the revisioning and restructuring of the student process.

Fig. 9.1
An illustration depicts three right arrows labeled student process, teacher team process, and leadership process from top to bottom. The yearly lesson plan, aims, and assessment at the teacher-team process level are bi-directionally linked to student and leadership processes.

Whole-school alignment model (WSAM): attuning actors and aligning key processes

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To start, we agreed to work with the different dimensions of alignment in three steps. Since we were starting in early spring, it made sense to first focus on structural alignment, attuning and anchoring the next yearly plan of the entrepreneurship programme into the school’s plan. In addition, we wanted to provide an attunement instrument unifying the teachers and start with a concrete assignment that could quickly yield results. The second step would focus on working out a common understanding of the aims and core competences, and the third step would focus on aligning purpose (competence aims) to corresponding evaluation formats, assessment methods and criteria.

The model was proposed and its applicability discussed with the team of teachers in the initial phase of the project. It seemed to resonate well with all participants as a simple common understanding of what we were going to try out, how it could work as a tool for improvement of the entrepreneurship education programme itself and how it could at the same time serve as integration tool of programme improvement within a whole-school sustainability transition context. We could have included the students in the collaborative process but chose not to due to limited resources and time. Their voices speak only indirectly, through what the teachers share.

2 The Teacher Team Finding Their Pathways

In the following four sections, we present the teacher team’s experiences with their own process of finding their pathways to a shared understanding of the students’ entrepreneurship process and attunement of the teacher team’s own innovation process with the leadership of the school. We start with their reflections on the first steps of structural alignment, coming together as a team working with the lesson plans. From there, we move to their process of finding a clear shared understanding of the aim or learning objectives of entrepreneurship education and how these learning objectives should align with their forms of assessment. In the third section, we will present their process of renewing the teaching role and, in the fourth, how they experienced the change of the whole school through the project.

2.1 The Structural Alignment Process: ‘You Need to Start Somewhere’

Reflecting on the first phase of the process, the teachers describe a first major shift that took place in simply ‘gathering’ and sharing understanding. As Hermod reflects: ‘It was that first meeting we had together all of us about this project. It was the first time we teachers met up and gathered our thoughts about how [we see] this entrepreneurship formation path. That was very rewarding’. Idunn notes how ‘enduring the chaos’ is strengthened by a safe social space: ‘both the students and we must own it—and in a way stand securely in it—not feel that we are on shaky ground all the time. So, I think that’s very good, to be able to work together on it’. It seems that sharing experiences, mapping tensions, formulating goals and openly discussing the way forward were perceived as appropriate ways to start the project.

During the interview, they were asked how it was to start aligning structures through the school’s yearly lesson plan. Frigg answers: ‘you get an overview of the process you will go through during the year’. This is echoed by Freya: ‘it was a way to structure a common idea’. Tor expresses some concerns: ‘There were some bumps in the road with the planning [laughing] since we arranged for many things that, in retrospect, we shouldn’t have used any time on’. Idunn extends: ‘[The lesson plan] is a process of trial and error, and we discover things along the way: “Where do the student end up if we continue this path?”—and then we need to adjust’. Freya adds: ‘[In starting] with the yearly lesson plan, it was also possible to get everyone involved. Everyone can be on the ball [...] and make a joint effort’. Bringing in the school leadership perspective, Balder, the school inspector, points out that ‘the lesson plan is an adaptation to the school year and is the wheel of the school. The whole school needs to adjust the processes within the school year. You need to start somewhere, and you need to stop somewhere as well’. Hermod expresses a counterpoint by stating that ‘if I could do this again, I believe it would have been better to start with the students’ learning goals […] as we really didn’t know what we were doing’. His conclusion is that, in retrospect, he would have started with getting direction and learning goals in place and then the yearly lesson plan and, lastly, aligned this to assessment.

Both Freya’s answer and Balder’s summary echo back our intention that the lesson plan helps structure a process integration. However, Hermod does have a valid point: we all clearly saw that there are reasons for starting a process with the learning objectives to create an alignment or shared understanding of objectives and direction for the students’ enterprises. Our experience as facilitators during the start-up was that the first phase was perceived as successful because it yielded a ‘team feeling of achievement’ of something practical and relevant for their process. Also, it made their project and processes visible and anchored in the leadership. The leadership group clearly appreciated the approach of aligning structures onto a common map of activity.

2.2 The Process of Clarifying the Aim and Ways of Assessing: ‘We See a Goal on the Horizon’

The second process of clarifying the goals of the student journey became more challenging than we expected. It was as if the more the team worked to pin down the aims of the process, the more the essence of the student transformation process slipped. Balder describes their first internal workshop to map the students’ core competences of sustainable entrepreneurship as unsuccessful and how it led to a shift in approach: ‘We tried first by using a “reversed curriculum method”, with no success, and went on to use “understanding by design” and “backwards planning”. Then, we came closer to detecting what the goals should be. But we aren’t really there yet’. Freya adds: ‘a bit of a pain to deal with such things, but very useful. I feel like we’re getting a glimpse of a goal there, that we’re getting closer to… can’t quite see it, but it is getting clearer’. This connotation of ‘useful pain’ is worth noticing. It translates to a quality of perseverance in the team’s inquiry process, a sustaining of the unresolved over time. Freya describes it as a quality of constantly returning: ‘We were continuously returning to learning goals and asked: “What are the core competences when working with sustainable entrepreneurship?”’. And she lists some of the questions they have been working on: ‘What kind of professional competences should they [the students] end up with?’ and ‘How can entrepreneurship as a method help the students reach them?’ Similar questions trickled down to other work teams at the school and were discussed in regular team meetings. For instance, Frigg shares from the animal science programme that ‘in weekly meetings we’ve been discussing how students, regardless of their company role, may achieve the same competence’.

Another important question the teachers worked with concerning the students’ process was ‘what makes an enterprise sustainable?’ The importance of the social dimension of establishing a student enterprise arose repeatedly during the workshops and again in the group interview. Idunn expresses this core of the process this way: ‘It is a social form of teaching... They have roles, they are in real situations all the time, there are conflicts at the social level and directly connected to the work. It’s a way of working that gives great opportunities for a lot of collaboration, but [individual] differences become very clear in how the students work within such a frame’. Freya adds: ‘Thinking education in relation to social sustainability’. The skill of sustaining collaboration and working together within a long-term group process was seen as a core competence in entrepreneurship education.

The final step of the WSAM is student assessment. During this project year, the teachers changed the assessment method from a final report (used in the previous school year) to a student portfolio. They also made a template for teachers in selected subjects on how to assess the portfolio, based on the core competences they identified in internal workshops and with students. The portfolio was described as something dynamic, and this flexibility was used as a main argument for the change. As Freya exclaims: ‘We can adjust the content in the portfolio and its criteria, working with it in a continuous spiral process’.

There was later also a workshop focusing on students’ self-assessing their entrepreneurial process and ways of building assessment into various stages of their journey. In the final workshop, the team returned to the unresolved question of student goals and landed a collaborative first synthesis of core competences the students should gain from conducting sustainable entrepreneurship. In hindsight, what we see is a non-linear and meandering process, where student goals and assessments are worked back and forth, always closely linked.

2.3 Reversing the Teacher and Student Roles: ‘How Much should I Meddle?’

A recurring question that the teachers often discussed in the workshops was the role of the teacher in interaction with the students and their enterprises. Rose expresses: ‘I find it hard because it is the students’ companies. How much should I meddle and set guidelines? Tor comments: I agree [with Rose]. The students often become so passive. To realize that it isn’t me as the teacher who runs this company, it’s the students. You can’t hold the students’ company artificially alive. [Some of] the enterprises would have been bankrupt if they did this on their own. But there is a lot of learning in that’. He explains that what he is really waiting for in the student process is a shift, where ‘at last I experience that the student takes ownership of the enterprise’. He continues, ‘It’s incredibly difficult, that intersection as a teacher to feel that “if I go out now, nothing will happen”—but to go out anyway’. Freya later returns to what Tor was sharing: ‘It is very difficult to balance being able to create that ownership, and the feeling that you are an actor that makes a difference, [an actor] that is valuable in this context here. That’s perhaps what you achieve then, when you go out the door and leave them behind?’ Then, she adds: ‘And you’re still there!’ What Freya is saying here to Tor is that even though you step back, you are still there accompanying their journey. There is a core tension here in how much teachers should meddle in the student enterprise process. We noted that the teachers become truly invested in the students’ companies, and they want the companies to succeed, but without taking them over and running them for the students.

2.4 Renewing Identity: The Whole-School Transformation Process

In the beginning of the professional development, the teacher team leaned heavily on a model designed by a national NGO (non-governmental organisation) to help teachers conduct entrepreneurship education for youth. In the interview, some of the teachers describe their trajectory. Tor expresses: ‘The YEFootnote 1 model has been too governing in everything early in the process’. Freya elaborates: ‘We dared to take a step away from the YE model, when we shaped that yearly lesson plan to create something that is ours. It’s like we’re beginning to reach a goal about why we shall [do this] and why [in previous years] we have [done it]. We do not blindly buy into something’. And she comes back to the notion of ownership: ‘We are probably not there, you probably won’t get there either, but we are well on our way to creating something that is ours. It is starting to sort of come up with an objective about why “we shall”, why “we have”—about method and then using it... in contrast to blindly buying a scheme elsewhere, or copying something’. Freya appears to achieve ‘ownership’ and autonomy around knowing ‘why you do what you do as a teacher’. Idunn adds the importance of the ownership that the leadership has taken to the process: ‘I think it’s important that the work here is intentional. It’s anchored both in the college and within the management—and that it’s prioritized, that time is set aside’. She adds: ‘There are many things that are urgent, that should have been done, but this is a priority, or else nothing would have come of it—this is an important point’. Balder responds: ‘Yes, we meet and we talk and patiently believe we’ll find the answers to the core competences. I think it’ s very important to get there, then. And then you can see what the best ways to get there is. But I think perhaps that in the future, the yearly lesson plan will also have different content’. All in all, what the teachers describe here are dimensions of the school transformation process. What they describe is again a process of taking ownership and a process that leads to renewed identity. At the programme level, Balder describes the renewal as ‘moving from YE to SEE’.Footnote 2 For the teachers, this means renewed identity as a collaborative community of practice. Idunn sums it up: ‘It’s not random or just a feeling, it’s more reasoned and more... a bit under the umbrella here, as there are more of us here. We’re not just one or two teachers who runs this alone’. At a whole-school level, taking ownership means creating a unifying school vision and profile.

3 Narrow Passages and Recurring Motifs

Looking back at the inquiry process, there are some narrow passages that stand out. These are events of unsuccess, leading to new pathways and creating new insights. And there are some recurrent motifs that can signify transformative educational processes. In this section, we will discuss some of these recurring motifs in light of theories of transformative education and ‘coherence-making’ in schools.

3.1 Narrow Passages Through Liminal Space

Our attempted structured facilitation process clearly demonstrates that collaborative inquiry and alignment are in no way a controlled, straightforward pathway. On the contrary, breakthroughs often came as sudden shifts and often as the result of dead ends. In hindsight, we discover that it was Tor’s sharing of the pain and ‘the essence of what is most difficult in the mentor role’ that brought clarity to the essence and crux of the individual student journey. Similarly, it was through a painful failure in the instrumental attempt at pinning down the core competences and a sustained ‘churning ahead’ that new approaches to an open inquiry process started. Regardless of process or actor—the student journey, the teacher team journey or our own process of testing out a model—through entering liminal spaces, passages allowing insight opened to us. As described by Land, Rattray and Vivian (2014), they are triggered by a disjunction where old ways of seeing, doing, thinking or behaving can no longer be held onto. Savin-Baden (2020 p50) describes how this liminal space is characterised by a stripping away of old identities: ‘Learners move through the tunnel of the liminal space and emerge with a shift in learner subjectivity, a discursive shift, or a shift of a conceptual, ontological (e.g. identity shift), or epistemological nature’. The students’ painful passage into a position of ‘taking ownership’, which the teachers described, implies a liminal mentor role ‘enabling students to learn how to live in the liminal; a beginning of engagement with risk […] and uncertainty’ (Savin-Baden, 2020 p57). The stripping away of old identities also fits well with their own process, of letting go of the identity of the entrepreneurship programme and building confidence and ownership in their own unique programme profile.

In the course of a passage through a transformative process, not only one’s personal identity may change, but also one’s social and cultural identity. In his study on transitions in adult learning, Field (2012 p1736) presents the idea of liminal identity, which entails that such an identity can be ‘shaped through social and cultural processes which are formed and re-formed in dynamic relationships with others’. At this upper secondary school, professional development appears to have influenced how these teachers see themselves as part of the school, contributing to renewing its identity.

3.2 Recurring Motifs: Shared Ownership to Shared Questions

In essence, we started out with quite a linear model focusing on coherence-making. Fullan and Quinn’s (2015, p30) definition of coherence as the ‘shared depth of understanding of the work’ proved fruitful, but their instrumental approach to ‘coherence-making’ in schools gave us only the alignment side. We have seen that shared understanding of structures, aims and evaluation criteria is important, but more important is the community of inquiry and the values the school, teachers and students are sourced in. The collaborative action inquiry approach invites all involved actors (and also facilitators) into the non-linear and liminal space where coherence means shared ownership of shared questions. The core of the entrepreneurial process is that students learn to take common ownership of enterprise innovation. It means sustaining both big and small unresolved questions as they appear for as long as they take to resolve. The same goes for the team of teachers in their 18-month quest to gain clarity and identity of their entrepreneurship programme. They also need to share unresolved questions or tensions in their programme design and mentoring role. This is the very process that yields a depth of a shared understanding, an attunement of colleagueship and an alignment of structure and operation.

The common denominator of innovative cultures of practice is, according to Gillebo and Hugo (2007), that they shape their activities around intentional interaction, dialogue and inquiry with a long-term commitment: ‘They develop common tasks by uniting individual commitment to shared questions. And the intensity and ecology of the shared questions build the carrying capacity of the innovation culture’ (Gillebo and Hugo, 2007 p1). The endurance and perseverance of the teacher team in their long and winding process fit well with such a description. Their contribution to the process of evaluating and redesigning the facilitation model also proved valuable, as we now shall see.

3.3 Reviewing the Model: ‘These Arrows Should Perhaps Be Bent’

The teacher team’s feedback on the question of sequencing in the model was quite revealing; there are reasons for starting with structural alignment processes, and there are reasons for starting with goals for students and even assessment methods. Towards the end of the discussion of this paradox, after a little pause, Balder exclaims: ‘I think that these arrows should perhaps be bent... that this goes in circles’.

Bending the arrows is a good metaphor for moving from a linear to a non-linear understanding of the inquiry process. In hindsight, there was nothing inherently wrong with our linear model. On the contrary, as a tool of ‘coherence-making’ between the teacher team and the leadership of the school, it did prove fruitful. However, there was a condition for this fruitfulness: that both we as facilitators and as teachers allowed ourselves to leave the linear path—and not just leaving it but ‘feeling safe and secure in uncertainty’, as Idunn specified.

The revised model below is an attempt to capture this non-linear shift, placing the liminal space at the centre of the process of finding pathways. Here, the unifying light green represents the commitment to shared questions, the wheel and process of collaborative inquiry (Fig. 9.2).

Fig. 9.2
An illustration exhibits three interconnected arrows on the left denoting the attunements, a light-shaded circular structure labeled liminal and space, and alignments on the right that include structural-operational, aim-assessment, and arena-pedagogical.

WSAM re-designed: attuning and aligning a sustainable entrepreneurship education project in a transformative whole-school context

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On the left, the model still has the key actors and processes of attunement between them, which the small circles signify. On its right side, it still has three fields of alignment to secure institutional coherence. They are no longer in a sequence but entwined. The first field represents the alignment of structural and operational issues, the second the alignment of educational programme design issues (aims and assessment) and the third field the situational alignment (authentic arena and pedagogical process). These fields of alignment correspond to the fields of tensions in entrepreneurship education we discussed initially and which were described by Zhang (2020).

4 Conclusion and Implications: Facilitating Transformative Agency

In conclusion, the WSAM we started out with was able to aid a structured facilitation process of pathfinding and to connect our teacher–team process coherently to a whole-school context. Most importantly, it was able to support a collaborative culture of inquiry in which teachers gained ownership of their process and identity. At the same time, it clearly revealed the limits of a linear approach to sustainable entrepreneurship education and to the facilitation of institutional coherence on sustainability. A consequence of this realisation is a redesigned WSAM, where the liminal space of collaborative inquiry processes assumes the central role of navigating and attuning inherent tensions and aligning structures, programme design, space and pedagogies to co-create coherency. As a partnership tool, the WSAM has implications for ‘navigating the terrain […] in school-university partnerships’ (Martin et al., 2011). The next step would be to explore these implications.