Teachers and academics co-constructing the category of expert through meeting talk

It is not uncommon for education university academics and schoolteachers to create opportunities to collaborate in projects of various kinds particularly professional development and research activities. While a number of studies have highlighted the advantages of school-university partnerships, there has been little work investigating how these partnerships actually work. This study shows how one such partnership was managed interactionally, focusing on how the participants undertook the delicate and complex work of partnership building. Specifically, the study investigated how a group of teachers and academics developed a project to improve Mathematics teaching in the school. The activity was collaborative, occurring in the context of on-going Professional Development. This paper focuses on one episode of meeting talk to show how the participants constructed the business of doing partnerships. In so doing, they constructed categories of ‘expert’ in their meeting talk. . The meeting talk was audio-taped and analysed using membership categorization and conversation analysis. Of particular interest was the emergence of expertise as a co-constructed category accomplished by participants. Teachers and academics alike constructed themselves as experts. This paper shows that the practical tasks of the meeting were concerned with connecting expert status to the business of partnerships. Such orientations shape what can be said in meeting talk, who gets to speak, and the types of relationships that can be constructed. Introduction: the idea of school – university partnerships For many years, the notion that schools and universities might co-operate in any way was predicated on meeting the needs of the university. In particular, these needs related to two specific kinds of activity. First, university education faculties, as providers of pre-service teacher education programs, needed school sites to provide practical teaching experiences for pre-service teacher education students. Second, university staff needed sites to undertake research activity to meet the requirements of their institutions regarding the quantum of published research. In the context of these scenarios, the benefits of co-operative activity were seen clearly to be directed to the university, its students and its staff. A supply of qualified teachers, familiar with school environments, was a tangential benefit to schools and school systems. Around the mid-1990s, recognition emerged that there could be mutual benefit to schools and to universities, to school teachers and to university staff, and to school students as well as to pre-service teacher education students – from the development of new relationships. These new relationships between schools and universities were now being described as partnerships. The new relationships were proposed as having more equal participation by all parties; more clearly defined outcomes, benefiting all parties; and clearly defined roles for all participants.