Collaboration in teaching and learning: Insights from TULIP (Tertiary Undergraduate Literacy Integration Program)

The means by which the aim of collaboration was brought about was by teaching the teachers involved about literacy and literacy teaching in a way that supported their classroom activity with first year students. Through action research, five lecturers and approximately one hundred students from the disciplines of Education, Social Science, Environmental Science and Nursing at the University of Ballarat, and Australian Catholic University (Aquinas Campus) were involved in developing, trialing and implementing a series of literacy learning and teaching strategies to be used within the usual tutorial sessions as the content of each subject was taught. Each lecturer engaged in an action learning process with his/her particular group of students, centred on using literacy teaching strategies.

The Project found that tertiary teachers welcomed the opportunity to talk about their teaching with others who similarly valued the reality of classroom life. They found it useful to have teaching strategies about literacy explained to them, both as an expansion of ideas of how teaching might occur, but also as a way of exploring the notion of literacy. They found the group based action learning approach to making changes in their teaching to be powerful and challenging. They found the challenges of talking about student literacy and their classroom teaching to colleagues of different discipline backgrounds confronting, and conducive to critical interrogation of existing understandings. However, the challenge of talking across disciplines was to seek a language that was 'common enough' to enable all participants to talk to each other. Not only was this more difficult than we envisaged, but we also found that we did not always share similar beliefs and values regarding teaching and learning. Further, the nature of collaboration in the Project was somewhat uneven in power relations, in that the teachers were required to follow our agenda of incorporating certain literacy strategies into their usual teaching practices. Thus the collaboration process was not one of equality.

One of the insights from the Project is that the notion and practice of collaboration is problematic. Collaboration, we found, needs to be flexible, critical, and practical. Flexible and critical collaboration was central to the processes of changing the social and discursive practices and understandings of participating teachers. But it is this very centrality, we believe, that problematises what is generally understood by the term 'collaboration'. Collaborative processes, we suggest, are not defined by shared beliefs and values, nor by common social practices. Rather, we find it useful to think of collaboration as a process of community building, a process of involvement in social meaning-making practices and interactions that are relational and hybrid. When we collaboratively discussed our actions and judgements, along with our nagging doubts and glimmers of insights, the conversation gradually became more inclusive. We developed a 'community' that articulated divergent practices and that confronted multiple realities in education. In doing so, we were led to examine the social functions and effects of the meanings we made; the politics of our texts.