Keywords

1 Introduction

This chapter analyses and describes obstacles, experimenting with and changing processes in an interdisciplinary partnership project and proposes the concept of collective resilient digital agility to describe these processes. While resilient agility is a novel concept (Prieto & Talukder, 2023) used in workplaces to describe individuals’ and organisations’ rapid change towards new digital solutions, less studied and conceptualised is how interdisciplinary teams crossing the borders of sectors such as the early childhood sector, both kindergarten staff and the staff of municipality agencies and researchers at university, respond rapidly in times of crisis. The study narrated and theorised in this chapter involved four early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions in Norway, called kindergartens, representatives from the ECEC institutional authorities in the city of Bergen, Norway (the ECEC agency) and researchers at the KINDknow Research Centre at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.

During what was considered a crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, the interdisciplinary team had the experience that after all activities and collaborations were first closed, the team started to solve problems. In the retrospect, one can see that resilience arose among the participants. In what were considered challenging times for all citizens and especially frontline workers, such as kindergarten staff, and by researchers with designs that required being alongside children and staff in everyday life, new sustainable practices for partnerships across sectors developed.

The study is a response to the problem of a low degree of interdisciplinarity and collaborative practices, especially across academic and societal stakeholders (Ministry of Education & Research, 2020). The benefits of interdisciplinary collaborations have been recognised both professionally and politically (Bærheim et al., 2022; Kemmis et al., 2013; Wallerstedt et al., 2023). Despite a high understanding of the purpose of such partnerships, few comprehensive empirical studies have been conducted at the micro level, where core local stakeholders in the ECEC field work together to co-create new relevant knowledge, and few studies have reported on the role of digital platforms as a tool for strengthening resilience in the ECEC sector and their partnerships with researchers.

When the pandemic crisis closed off every possibility to meet in person, this interdisciplinary team explored possibilities for continuing the partnership research, overcoming obstacles, such as the respective institutions using different brands of communication systems, by using one common digital platform as a tool for collective writing. Sectors such as municipalities and universities will have different mandates, communication systems and logics to achieve work tasks. While, at a policy level, sectors are encouraged to collaborate across sectors and organisations, these organisations are not set up for interdisciplinary collaboration at a systemic level. As organisations operate as separate units at the systemic level, being able to work together as partners, crossing organisational borders, is not straightforward. At a policy level, we are reminded of the relevance of interdisciplinary collaboration, and while engaging in it, we all experienced the benefits of understanding problems in depth and found it rewarding to collaborate. Such cross-sector partnerships, however, require extra effort. Since the participants need to understand more, not only their own areas of practice, but also those of their partners, they will need to establish a common agreement, often called the third space (Martin et al., 2011), to achieve success in their shared endeavours.

A premise for this inquiry was that resilience needs to be collaborative as a prerequisite for operationalising resilience in ECEC. As particular dynamics of collaborative working and the co-creation of knowledge are likely to promote resilience, there is a need to explore the underlying collaborative mechanisms through which processes of collective resilience occur and, more specifically, the processes facilitated through digital tools, such as digital platforms.

Based on the final theoretical positions of Vygotsky and other Soviet authors and researchers further developing this legacy internationally, attention and new conceptualisations have been given (Edwards, 2005; Fleer et al., 2021; Gonzalez Rey, 2015; Hedegaard et al., 2012). Research in this tradition defines motives on a scale from a specific quality of subjectively shaped systems, where motive is a process of subjective configuration (Gonzalez Rey, 2015), to positions where motives are defined as mediators between society and the person involved (Edwards, 2005; Hedegaard et al., 2012) and defined as a formative process, ingrained in time, space, relation and artefact, involving body and language (i. e. discursive practices) (Ødegaard, 2015, 2021a, 2023).

The purpose of this chapter is to outline, narrate and conceptualise how interdisciplinary teams and a tool, a digital platform, strengthened collective resilience for the co-creation of knowledge to occur in relation to resilient ECEC staff, leadership of kindergartens and researchers in partnership. The research questions are: How can we understand and conceptualise the changing processes occurring when an interdisciplinary team transitioned from face-to-face workshops to a shared digital platform space in a historical time of crisis?

In this chapter, we first briefly narrate the case of what happened when an interdisciplinary team transitioned from face-to-face workshops to a shared digital platform space in a historical time of crisis. Next, we present the methodology with some crucial concepts for further conceptualisation. Here, we include examples from the writing workshop. This chapter proposes the concept of collective resilient digital agility to encompass the team narrative.

2 The Crisis and Move from Physical Workshops to Digital Platforms

In 2019, the KINDknow Research Centre at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and Bergen City received funding from the Regional Research Fund for a pilot project called Kindergarten Teacher as Co-Researcher—Innovation Project for Testing an Exploratory Research Design for Knowledge Development in the Kindergarten Sector (RRFVEST—305,594). In this project, which lasted from December 2019 until March 2021, four kindergarten schools and Bergen City’s administration, as well as researchers from the KINDknow Research Centre, worked together and implemented a workshop methodology called Exploration and Pedagogical Innovation Laboratories (EX-PED-LAB).

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the project encountered several obstacles, including lockdown with the closure of ECEC institutions, researchers being sent to home offices and transport restrictions for all citizens. Continuance of the project in these circumstances was not straightforward. The most obvious solution was to put the project on hold and cancel or postpone the activities. However, we very soon decided to work out alternatives, and the most apparent solution was a digital solution.

During the first lockdown phase, staff in the ECEC institutions were needed in place to take care of the children of emergency personnel and to keep in touch with vulnerable families by telephone and by greeting families outside through the windows. In the next phase, staff were organised in small cohorts, and all meetings and lunch breaks were cancelled. Subsequently, when the institutions opened for all children, they were still organised in outdoor cohorts, and physical meeting places for all were avoided. In the third phase of the pandemic, the number of people allowed to meet was still restricted.

During the lockdown phase, we soon experienced the fact that the strengths of this project included the participation of the ECEC city authority. The ECEC agency legitimised and encouraged us to find solutions. The staff found it valuable to have a place for discussion among their peers, and the researchers were comfortable continuing. We soon agreed to try to meet up in digital versions of the workshops. However, this decision soon revealed other obstacles. The first was that the digital platforms allowed in the municipality were not the same as those used in the university. Leadership policy decisions were soon made so that we could meet on the same platform. Yet another obstacle needed to be crossed. We experienced the situation that the researchers’ homes varied in wi-fi capacity, and the ECEC institutions did not necessarily have access to wi-fi in all rooms. When one was supposed to work in a cohort and not cross from one zone of the building to another, this caused new problems. The kindergarten staff did not have individual computers for all staff, and with pandemic sanitation regulations, sharing of computers was also a problem to be solved. While the kindergarten managers had high-quality offices and computers, other staff sometimes worked on older computers with limitations for new software. The new city regulations during the first phase included opening hours for the children from 9 am to 3 pm. Despite these stumbling blocks, we found a way forward to continue the partner collaboration. We all agreed to meet up in two-hour sessions in the afternoon. Many people, including staff in the kindergartens, the city authority staff and the researchers, met up in the afternoon from their homes, but some preferred to stay in the kindergartens for the afternoon sessions. Most kindergarten staff then used private computers, and the internet facilities worked better from many homes than from the kindergartens. The researchers had home offices with professional computers and updated software and had meeting-from-home facilities.

Before the pandemic, the partners had vaguely presented the idea of writing a book about the project together. When the digital platform was established, this soon came up again as a triggering idea for realisation. The researchers started to contact publishers. While some publishers were reluctant to include non-academic writers, we succeeded with a contract with an established and renowned publisher, which boosted the group’s energy and work joy. A book contract was a strong incentive for us all. For the kindergarten managers, the staff at the agency and the teachers, this was their first published text. For the researchers, this occasion would be the first book written in such a joint and interdisciplinary manner, experimenting with writing genres. To reveal the end of the story, a common digital platform became an artefact that situated the space for collaboration. We achieved our goal of publishing (Birkeland et al., 2022) and included a virtual celebration. We could identify renewed energies elicited through learning to know each other outside the institutional frames and the pleasure of progress and achievement in difficult, solitary times.

3 Methodology—Exploration and Pedagogical Innovation Laboratories

Exploration and Pedagogical Innovation Laboratories (EX-PED-LAB) is a workshop methodology starting to develop through the above-mentioned pilot study. The methodology stems from a long tradition of systemic, ecological and transformative learning frameworks (Kemmis et al., 2013; Mezirow & Taylor, 2010; Pascal & Bertram, 2012; Senge, 2006), is inspired by design-based research (Barab & Squire, 2004) and builds new theory with inspiration from selected cultural-historical concepts and methodological approaches. The concept of collaborative exploration was first developed to capture collaborative exploration as a primary educational genre in which children and teachers (adults) navigate a landscape of relations by sharing the same place and situation but meeting up as subjective bodies with different cultural histories and societal conditions. To further elaborate on what collaborative exploration can entail in our situation of a team working together on a shared digital platform, we created a design in which collaborative exploration entailed collaboration in an interdisciplinary team. In this context, collaborative exploration refers to a process where the partners in the early stage are new to each other and live the conditions and the logic of their institutions. Collaborative exploration can also be identified in a certain leadership style: a pedagogical positioning of the leader, of taking responsibility for facilitating and distributing a space for exploration and collaboration.

Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1986) metaphor of the loophole, collaborative exploration implies a dialogical understanding of pedagogy as dynamic and responsive to activities in the short term and extended past time. Through the loophole metaphor, Bakhtin indicates that a loophole signifies a side glance or a shift of focus. In our crisis context, this can mean that the participants can be ambiguous about activities and even their own writings. The metaphor depicts pedagogy as movement, process and change. The loophole indicates the metaphor and shape of the team’s movement and manoeuvres. Moreover, the loophole metaphor implies the possibility for leaders to adjust to the multitude of voices and events taking place in practice, as one can encircle and unwind a problem. Rather than understanding problem-solving as a linear movement of going from a to b, as a research protocol would, the metaphor of a loophole opens up problem-solving as responsive, a systematic, sensitive and open circular way to learn, change and innovate (Ødegaard, 2020, 2021b).

EX-PED-LAB contains a series of workshops and intermediate work in interdisciplinary teams. The related concept is relational agency. Ann Edwards developed this concept in the context of interprofessional activities, where shared knowledge is built in interactions at the points where the boundaries of practices intersect (Edwards, 2005). Relational agency puts activities, practices and the conditions in the institutions that shape them at the forefront of the research design. In line with Edwards’s concept, in our context, while experiencing a pandemic crisis, we proposed that interprofessional teams learn from each other, from the affected agents, from the staff and from using artefacts. We came to understand team reflexivity as interactions between minds, orchestrating each other with common ideas, thoughts, attitudes and bodily actions. In such a team, intersubjective reflexivity can be created when team members resonate, giving a shared feeling of developing mutual and common ideas, concepts and understanding (Bærheim et al., 2022).

Exploratory activities are, as described above, dynamic and dialogical. EX-PED-LAB methodology creates a space for exploration where ‘knowledging’ (Nonaka, 1994), is an encouraged result, understood as practice development and change on the one hand and research on the other. These processes entail the systematic creation of research data. These are audio-recording of dialogues, videos, photos, fieldnotes and reflexive narratives of self and others. Through collaborative exploration, different types of knowledge and skills are recognised. In essence, the workshops functioned as a space for knowledge creation between the kindergarten teachers and the researchers involved. For ‘knowledging’ (Nonaka, 1994) to occur, meeting arenas that make it possible to share and create knowledge and learn from each other are required. Consequently, we agreed upon the shared use of a digital platform that was easy to access and ethically safe, with co-writing possibilities and open dialogue opportunities.

We were interested in inquiring about the ‘knowledging’ processes of interprofessional activities. Since we soon experienced that the interprofessional team could rapidly identify the problems and obstacles and address them quickly, collective resilience (Glynn, 2021) also became a conceptual thinking tool (Wartofsky et al., 1994) for identifying the processes undertaken by the team. Collective resilience leans on cultural-historical theorisations of how team members reinforce each other to strengthen risk situations, overcome them and use them as sources of supporting joint development of practices and co-research. As a construct, resilience is built on the underlying assumption that an individual or organisation has undergone a situation of ‘significant adversity’ and adapted positively (Hormann, 2018, p. 91). Resilience is the maintenance of positive adjustment under challenging conditions, and collective resilience is attained when team members adjust to one another and the situation under crisis or harsh conditions.

According to a cultural-historical perspective, resilience can be understood as a higher psychological function resulting from collaborative processes (Wertsch, 1988). As such, collective here refers to a group of people that shares a sense of common interests or identity and that transcends the individual level of agency in a crisis. Our team was from the start professional and formal, but during the crisis, these formal relations were transcended as it became a ‘new normal’ to check how people were coping, who was sick and talking about the new workplace, the place one worked from and the fun of experimenting with virtual backgrounds. Since some researchers in home offices also had school children at home who sometimes needed attention, the personal and the professional needed to be manoeuvred in new and often unexpected ways. We invited collaborative and individual writing with feedback loops. The researchers warned the staff that writing processes can be hard and time-consuming, but this warning seemed to be encouraging. It was soon established by collective agreement that we should spend unexpected time together and flip the crisis to success for the partnership. The invitation for collaborative writing was a response to an idea from a brainstorming workshop in the initial stage of the partner project, where some participants mentioned publishing opportunities as a trigger for their wish to partner up with researchers. We learned that some of the staff members were highly motivated for extra effort.

The idea was embraced by many of the participants, and the positivity spread easily. Thus, the solution of elaborating writing genres for interdisciplinary teams was born. We decided to explore the ‘field book’ as an open genre inspired by Peter Senge (2006). The researchers held introductions about writing genres and explored the blending of genres for our collective field book. The staff associated writing heroes with a wide range of genres. By stepping aside from academic papers as the only superior genre, we opened up a variety of genres (e.g. self-narrative, visual narrative, narrative inquiry and case studies of selected activities, experiments, poems and guidelines, etc). There is a historically institutionalised supremacy of researchers (academics) in relation to teachers, in which researchers have the right to define the problems of their investigations. This situation has led teachers to take on a subordinate role: researchers are given the role of experts, who can share established knowledge, and teachers take on the role of a learner from the one supposed to build competence (Ødegaard, 2023b).

4 Golden Rules: A Genre Expressing Collective Resilience

The diversity and richness of speech genres are endless because the various possibilities of human activity are infinite and because each sphere of activity contains an entire repertoire of speech genres that differentiate and grow as the particular sphere develops and becomes more complex. We placed special emphasis on the heterogeneity of speech, including short responses of daily dialogue, everyday narration and writings in the diverse social, political, didactic and pedagogical worlds. Each separate utterance is individual, but in each culture or share in which language is used, it will develop its own relatively stable types of these utterances. Bakhtin (1986) names these speech genres.

Even if the team is motivated to work together and make extra efforts, in challenging times, this should not be assumed to be easy. After all, language intersects with life experiences, education, culture and persons and their societal conditions. An utterance and a sentence, a paragraph or a narrative can therefore be a significant node of problems. The digital platform, with the opportunities for collective writing, opened up questions, multiple answers and negotiations. It became important to establish transparent responsible authorships, and dialogue with the publishers supported finding solutions and ending negotiations.

Here, we present an example of a writing genre we call golden rules. The content of these golden rules also sum up the tensions and their resolutions among the partners and colleagues. The golden rules are a concentrated form of experience and will live on in other partnership projects (Fig. 21.1).

Fig. 21.1
An illustration lists the 15 golden rules for being an exploratory co-researcher. Some of these are to be open, select what engages you, accept nothing is certain, notice, listen, see, remember the collective, breathe, indulge in play, and use your professional knowledge of observational methods, analytical skills, and imagination.figure 1figure 1figure 1

15 Golden Rules (first printed in Norwegian: Birkeland et al., 2022)

Full size image

These 15 golden rules of partnership synthesise our experience with the research project, working in interdisciplinary teams over the historical period of the Covid-19 pandemic. One can see that some of the rules point to being safe (e.g. breath, while others refer to the collective—remember collectively. All 15 generate a summing up of the knowledge created in working with the genre of golden rules; it was a ‘collective knowledging’. This was similar to what has been found in a study of resilient agility, where this was connected to the mediation of safety to a willingness to embrace change, workplace belongingness, job satisfaction and creativity (Prieto & Talukder, 2023).

The genre itself was created as a process of first sketching out experiences in a mind map, studying literature through a scoping review with an interest in systemic leadership (Birkeland et al., 2021) and case studies of exploration, co-creation and transitions (Fleer et al., 2021), inviting the team for its response before further modelling. In this way, this genre and this piece were co-created.

We communicated in asynchronous time on a digital board and shared our writing in folders on the digital platform for writing in shared documents. Interdisciplinary writing buddies were organised, and we met the whole group five times and met in additional smaller co-writing groups and in sessions on request for learning more about writing genres. The researchers responded to tensions and trouble by addressing them in new sessions and bringing them up in writing. Later, we could also meet up face to face for the latest revision processes.

The digital shared space created a new situated presence of spaces in between home and the respective workplaces in the university, at the city hall and in the kindergartens. During the pandemic, home was the workplace for some, and the new digital platform became a third meeting place, belonging first and foremost to the team, not to the academics, the staff at the agency or the staff in the kindergartens. The digital third space was socially produced through disrupting the historical power relations and establishing social interactions in new ways. In third-space collective sites for collaboration and innovation, both joint and individual sense-making occurs (Gutiérrez et al., 1999).

5 Collective, Resilient Digital Agility: Summing up the Role of Digital Platforms

In this chapter, we have examined collective resilience through a narration of a period of time during the Covid-19 pandemic based on cultural-historical concepts. The findings highlight the importance of the artefact of a digital platform being a third space, a collective space to explore, write, negotiate and rewrite together.

These experiences with the EX-PED-LAB methodology underline its processes, with development of ideas and identification of nodes of tensions and problems, multimodal co-creation of data, analysis, fabulation, testing and knowledge-sharing, including its innovative potentials. The components involved sharing dilemmas and disturbances of practices, as when we struggled with finding a shared digital space accepted by the two institutions: the university and the city agency. The components also reveal how collaborative exploration of writing genres, such as the field book genre, led to engagement, constructive negotiations, dialogue and collective resilience. The writing process in shared documents opened up the sharing of recognition and hope in times of crisis, but also reflexivity, critical assessment, dreams and imagination (Ødegaard et al., 2023).

To be able to work together as partners is not straightforward. In the case presented here, the teachers and researchers rapidly solved the problem of using different communication systems and dealing with different working hours when the pandemic crises made it impossible to meet up face to face and to meet up within regulated working hours for the early childhood sector. In this chapter, we have considered how a common digital platform, a technical artefact, can create the possibility of teachers as co-researchers, leading to the development of an interdisciplinary team towards a collective. Inspired by cultural-historical theorisations of collective resilience, we have described how team members reinforced each other to strengthen risk situations, overcome them and use them as sources of supporting joint development of practices and co-research, supported by a software artefact. We call this collective resilient digital agility. According to a cultural-historical perspective, resilience can be understood as a higher psychological function resulting from collaborative processes (Wertsch, 1988). The chapter has reported on the results and impact and the changes from planned on-site, face-to face workshops to digital collaboration, emphasising the writing process and exploring writing genres. The inquiry showed that the crises of the pandemic and the shift to using a new artefact, a digital platform, changed what it was possible to do, strengthening resilience and ways of working together and opening up a co-creative writing genre. With this study and conceptualisation, we can enhance interdisciplinarity and partnership research.