Telling Stories about Collaboration: Secrets and Lies?
Morwenna Griffiths [morwenna.griffiths@ntu.ac.uk]
Faculty of Education, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Hall, Nottingham NG11 8NJ

Prepared for the Second International Conference
on Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices,
Herstmonceux Castle, UK,
August 16-20, 1998

1. Why collaboration matters.

I want to write this paper in order to reflect on the question of working collaboratively when doing educational research. I hope that the paper will suggest some openings for facing up to the realities of such enterprises. So I intend to discuss the pleasures and problems of collaborative educational research. I also want to place this discussion within the context of the near impossibility of using ordinary empirical evidence to do so, given the constraints of ethics and micro-politics.

I am interested in collaboration in educational research for three reasons. In the first place I am of the view that collaboration leads to better knowledge. (This is explained a little further, in Section 2b; also see Griffiths, 1998.) Second, even if the quality of knowledge were not enhanced, collaboration is ethically desirable. Educational research is better done ‘with’ others rather than ‘on’ or even ‘for’ them (see Griffiths, 1998). Third, even if ethics were not a consideration, collaboration is desirable for the practical reasons that it solves gate-keeping problems and increases the chances that the research will make an impact where it counts. All this pre-supposes that the process of collaboration is possible. This is a practical question (see Section 2c below).

In this paper I am thinking specifically of research related to teacher education, so the relevant impact is on teachers and the students they teach. That is, I am thinking of research with and by teachers, including teachers, like myself, who do not work in schools.

It is important to acknowledge that collaborative research is carried out with a range of aims and methods. It may be carried out with the purest of intentions to improve ones’ own teaching and learning, and to improve the education of children and students. It may also be the way to career advancement. It may be a way of getting funds for a pet project. Other aims include: giving a voice, getting empowerment, developing new knowledge, acquiring skills or gaining wisdom. There are many and various suitable methods. Educational research characteristically spans the methodologies of the social sciences and humanities, and has some of its own as well. Educational researchers routinely use action research, philosophical reflection, ethnographic investigation, large-scale surveys, life-history, discourse analysis, historical records, and many other methods. All of these can be done collaboratively.

Q: Collaboration is a word that bears some examination. It is not entirely clear what kind of thing is meant. Is it the same as ‘partnership’, for instance, or as ‘participation’ or ‘co-operation’?

.....At its simplest, it must mean ‘work together’: co-labour. However other connotations are also included, since working together also fits the other terms mentioned. It has the connotation of being between different parties, as do partnership and co-operation’, but something closer than either of those are intended. In this it is closer to ‘participation’, to joining in. At least this how I understand current usage of the terms. Collaborators do not stick to defined roles (as partners might have) but neither are they simply individuals in a team (as ‘participative’ implies) (Pugh, quoted in TES, 1998; Wallace, 1998). This kind of working together is not ‘research as usual’: our University has refused to fund collaborative research on the grounds that research could not be carried out by so many people! (See below.)

Q: Surely it is important to be clear about what is meant by ‘educational research’, especially as there is such a raging debate about it (at least in the UK, and other English speaking nations.

.....It is important, especially as only some educational research could count as ‘teacher education’. I have discussed this in quite a lot of detail in Griffiths (1997, 1998) My view is that educational research is ‘research that improves the education of children and students...a personal and political improvement, and ...there must be a strong ethical underpinning’(1997: 192). In doing that, it can fulfil a number of aims and use a number of methods (as the right hand column indicates). However, this definition leaves the discussion at a very abstract level. Some concrete examples of the kinds of educational research that are being discussed would help. I am limited by space, or I could give a number of examples. Giving only one example could give the misleading impression that I am focusing only on one mode of educational research. I hope that two contrasting examples will be adequate.

Example 1: In 1995, I began a project in which I, a university researcher in educational theory and philosophy, worked closely with senior teachers and advisors to create a set of principles for getting fairer schools. We proceeded through interviews, individual discussions, meetings and the pursuit of our own individual professional interests in social justice issues (Griffiths 1997, 1998).

Example 2: A team of my colleagues, lecturers on the initial teacher education programme, are working together with teacher-mentors in school to get clearer about the processes of medium-term planning in primary schools, and about how it should best be taught to new teachers. This is the project that the University refused to fund. (See above.)

2a. Experiential pre-occupations

As I explained in the previous section, there are theoretical and practical reasons for considering processes of collaboration. In the next two subsections (2b and 2c), I look at the reasons directly. Before I do that, there is a another, related, set of reasons to be addressed. Theorising and practical actions take place in a social or emotional context. Feelings intervene. These underlie the experiential pre-occupations which are so often unacknowledged by academic writers.

There is a clear experiential basis to my interest in collaborative research. I like working with other people. Moreover, I find that it is increasingly required by the conditions of my job that I do so. So a significant part of my life is taken up working collaboratively with others. My experiences of it are very variable, however. I find that times when I have worked collaboratively on educational research have been some of the most rewarding and productive episodes of my working life. They have also included some of the most frustrating and destructive ethical minefields that I have ever encountered.Sometimes the same project can produce both. One example may clarify this. I was involved in a UNICEF project in Ghana designing action research to improve girls’ attendance at school (Griffiths and Parker Jenkins, 1994; Akwesi et al. 1994). Some of the collaboration in Ghana was extremely rewarding, leading to longer term understandings and knowledge. The papers cited above are examples of this. Other aspects were both personally difficult and emotionally upsetting. We found that we distrusted some of the members of the team to the extent that it became increasingly difficult to work with them at all. Some situations were ethically very difficult. Some of the difficulties are presented in an anonymized and abstract form in the papers, but it is not possible to be explicit - or even to discuss some of the most serious ethical problems that faced us. To do so would be to make serious allegations. I say more about this in Section 3, below.

Q: The terms ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ are always difficult, and always attract controversy. Surely it is important to be clear about how far they are separable.

.....I have returned to this question again and again in my writing (e.g. Griffiths, 1987, 1997). Theoretical understanding can be distinguished from practical action - but neither can be isolated from the other. If they were identical we could dispense with one of the terms without loss of meaning. I find this impossible. At the same time, each term can only be fully understood in terms of the other. Theoretical understanding is understanding of practical actions, and practice is (either explicitly or implicitly) based on theoretical principles.

Q: It is questionable whether this section on experiential pre-occupations is relevant to the argument. It could be argued that the genesis of ideas is mere autobiography and does not affect the arguments per se.

.....I know and understand this argument but I think it is misguided. I am convinced by the feminist, anti-racist, post-colonial, epistemological arguments which reason that knowledge bears the imprint of its knower (Griffiths 1995, 1998). In other words the knower is epistemologically significant. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge those parts of the self where experience has a bearing on the framing of question and choice of methods.

My account of experience is personal but not confessional. The tradition of autobiography in the West, is of a confessional, personal, individualised account of feeling and experience, as if that experience could be simply told. Against this view, I have argued for a ‘critical autobiography’ which is told by a self who acknowledges the social and political construction of self (Griffiths, 1995). I can never be sure what social aspects of myself are relevant to my perceptions and actions. However, I cannot help but make a judgement about it, in the act of choosing what (not) to tell you of myself, in relation to the particular context at issue.

2b. Theory (from and into practice)

The immediate impetus for considering collaborative work comes from my continuing project to develop approaches to achieving social justice - both in schools and in educational research generally. This is a project which uses a philosophical framework to consider real-life examples (and vice-versa). My commitment to working collaboratively is strengthened and underpinned by philosophical arguments about the self and also, relatedly, about epistemology, social justice and power. These arguments include the view that the generation of knowledge and wisdom requires different perspectives to be taken into account. The approaches to social justice which are emerging from this project rely strongly on the injunction to root educational research and development in consultation and collaboration with a range of people: with different roles, social backgrounds and experiences (including those related to race, gender, sexuality, and social class). This is all very well, but it implies that such collaboration is possible. As I remarked above, my own experience is that collaboration is a chancy business. There have been times when it has felt easy, but at other times it has proved next to impossible.

Q: Although the section is entitled ‘Theory (from and into practice)’ it is not very explicit about the particular practice which underlies the wording of the title.

....I have tried to work collaboratively, on and off, since starting to write up research. When I began work at Oxford Brookes University in the mid-eighties, I found myself among a group of staff who were trying out innovative methods of collaborative action research. Collaboration at Oxford meant working not only with each other but also with teachers and students. Since then I have taken part in projects working with teachers, children, community groups, colleagues in other disciplines in other Universities, LEAs, and government. All of these were a preparation for the experience of the social justice project, trying to work across institutions, professional roles and with different gender, race, class and sexual identities. I found the whole process of collaboration fascinating.

Q: I have written the whole of this section in the first person. This might imply that the issue is one which may be a merely personal one, unique to me and of little wider interest, however theoretical it is.

....The epistemology of perspective (the politics of knowledge, to put it another way) and its offshoots are widely discussed. The connection with collaboration is not made so widely, but I think it is a logical one.

2c. Practice (from and into theory)

If collaboration is a worthwhile but chancy business then it needs investigation. Investigations might help answer such questions as: What conditions are needed? What are the possibilities and pitfalls? How can it be nurtured and sustained? However, when I turned to the literature to find illumination, I found that systematic empirical evidence was lacking. I also found that theoretical discussion tended to by-pass empirical evidence, but dominate explanations of process. An influential example is theory derived from Habermas’s notion of the ideal speech situation. Another is the idea of Liberal political theory that ‘rational men will agree’. In both sets of theories we find underlying assumptions of openness and explicitness.

These assumptions are influential. They seem to have structured reports of the processes of collaboration (where I could find them). They remain unconvincing. In most accounts of collaborative research differences between partners were only mentioned when they had proved finally irreconcilable. It was more usual for the success of collaboration to be taken for granted in the write-ups, with all differences resolved under the term ‘we’, with the implication that all was now open and agreed. It is striking that the few exceptions which do discuss processes of collaboration demonstrate clearly that such openness and agreement should not be assumed. Collaborations of which I have personal knowledge also demonstrate the limitations of assuming openness and consensus. New theory is needed.

Q: The brevity of the summary has led to some sweeping statements being made about the available literature on collaboration.

... I am uncomfortably aware that I may have missed any previous work. It is not a straightforward exercise to locate previous arguments about abstract issues which underpin research. One purpose of the workshop is to find other useful sources. Certainly some work exists. It includes Pam Lomax’s continuing project (email and others) reported at the earlier Castle conference. It also includes Somekh (1994) and Bell and Raffe (1991). There is also work by those who report collaborative projects and the lessons to be drawn from them, but withoutincluding detailed systematic evidence of the process (Clandinin 1993; McTaggart, 1994). I am interested also in the ‘dog that didn’t bark’: the other contributors to Walford ‘s (1991) accounts of the processes of research who hardly mention the processes of collaboration. Similarly for the accounts in Bryman and Burgess (1994). There is also some attention paid to collaboration in the context of the educational market in the UK (Bridges and Husbands, 1996; Wallace, 1998) or ‘in the postmodern age’ (Hargreaves, 1994).

Q: It is possible that the lack of literature (if there is one) indicates that the issue is not much of a problem, generally speaking.

A: As I point out later the problems and pleasures of collaborative relationships are a mainstay of academic gossip. That serious issues underlie such gossip is demonstrated by the felt need that resulted in various Research Guidelines produced by the British Educational Research Associations(and see Punch, 1994).

3. Investigating collaboration

Abstract arguments about collaboration suffer from the lack of empirical evidence. There exist no useful principles based on sound theory and tested practice. In particular, it would seem that openness and agreement might be easiest for like-minded people to achieve. Thus it would be likely that the chances of successful collaboration would diminish in those cases where there are serious differences of perspective, culture, power and skill among the collaborating parties. But these are exactly the kinds of collaboration which I would want to encourage. Principles, based on interlocking evidence and theory, could explain how it might be achieved. I have tried to build up theory which would explain and guide collaborative research, but such theory draws too closely on my own personal experience. I need more evidence.

Unfortunately, it is easy to see why there is so little evidence. The ethical, political and epistemological problems of publicly discussing a failed - or even a successful - collaboration are enormous. The problem is that anonymizing is particularly difficult when the educational research community is relatively small and individual characters are likely to be easily recognized. This situation contrasts with publishing anonymized accounts of teachers and heads, for instance. There are more of them, and they usually do not read the academic journals which publish the research. Meanwhile such issues are a continuing mainstay of private anecdote and gossip. How to break this impasse is the subject of this paper.

Q: Peter Bowbrick (1988) tells this story of a kind of failed collaboration. One sunny afternoon a student dreamt up a possible new piece of economics, and, being careful, also listed a couple of pages of caveats. He presented both the analysis and the caveats to his supervisor in a tutorial. Shortly after, the student realised that the caveats were indeed needed, so much so that the analysis was too flawed to be useful. The supervisor meanwhile, presented the analysis to an international conference. Rather than acknowledge any collaboration, he claimed that he had completely re-worked the analysis using new data. The student noticed with considerable annoyance that the analysis had been plagiarised wholesale, and not been re-worked. He also noted, with considerable delight that the flaws in the analysis were pulled apart by the audience. The supervisor was left with no-one to blame but himself.

This is the story as originally presented, in anonymized and fictionalized form. In fact, now the man is retired and the incident long forgotten, Bowbrick is happy to inform the world that he himself was the student, and the episode occurred at his time in Cambridge when he was not, in fact, a research student (as the story implies) but a research assistant. It is obvious that it is only now that the story could be told in anything other than a fictional form.

Another kind of reason for not discussing collaboration publicly is that it shows the powerful how the less powerful are managing to resist them. I have belonged to several groups of women who have organised themselves for academic purposes. They include: women in philosophy, in educational research and in (more than one) Department of Education. In each case we booked a room and gave the group a name. In each case we were few in number and not even sure what we might discuss. In each case some of the men suddenly felt angry and excluded and tried to attend - or to have their wives attend! (Though when open meetings were arranged for both men and women to discuss the issues, remarkably few men turned up.) In the case of some groups we were able to organise conferences and get some publicity. Again there were furious representations from some men who felt that they might be missing out - even though they were not working on the inclusion of gender relations into their own work.

Each of these groups have worked in generating knowledge and confidence in the worth of that knowledge. However I cannot, I find, say more about the details. It would be to give too much away about how to bend the rules and present impressions which lead a group to prosper and grow strong. It would also implicate people still embroiled in struggles with their institutions. Unlike Bowbrick’s story, it is all too recent.

4. The possibilities of fiction

Problems of preserving the anonymity of items of evidence are often solved through fictionalization. Perhaps fiction is the answer? Fiction is routinely contrasted with fact. Yet fictionalization is not deemed to diminish the significance of a research report. The point is that such accounts have to be presented in a way which allows the audience to assess them critically. The question is then, what kind of ‘fiction’ or ‘fictionalisation’ might be useful. I make some suggestions here.

(1) Anonymized stories: details of name, appearance and geographical location are concealed or changed.

(2) Quotations are presented without the context in which they were made being revealed.

(3) Stories are presented with the structure intact but the content changed. This draws on the tradition of didactic fables (Aesop), fairy tales or myths. All of these are claimed to contain deep truths.

(4) The imagined perspectives of various participants in a anonymized piece of research (the research director, the contractor, etc.). The extent to which the account draws on actual experience could be made known. The format could be, for instance, imagined letters or diaries.

(5) Parody and pastiche: the use of well-known stories, like Alice in Wonderland, on which to hang the new narrative, blurring the lines of fact and story (Smith and Porter, 1989)

(6) The conventions of short stories and novels can be used to tell the story as if it were a full-blown fiction.

Q: The term ‘fiction’ has been used and a few examples given. It could appear naive to introduce the idea so cursorily.

....I have no intention of engaging with the large tradition of literary scholarship on this subject. Nor even with the fairly large one of biography and autobiography. I acknowledge that this scholarship exists, but my interests do not necessarily overlap with its concerns. I am only interested in getting evidence through the use of a narrative form which is not straightforwardly factual. Such truth may overlap with the kinds of truth claimed for other areas of scholarship, but how far that is so would be a study in itself. It is not this study. Rather I am attempting a kind of exploratory, ostensive definition of ‘fiction’, useful for the precise purpose of getting evidence about something which is difficult to anonymize. Once some examples have been established it should be possible to work out some principles and connections. (This is another example of the relation of practical action and theorising, discussed above.)

For the present, and for the purposes of this paper, I propose that I quote (out of context) from a novel by Stephen Fry: ‘Nothing you read happened. Everything you read is true‘. The question, of course, for researchers is: ’How far can we trust this statement made by the author’? Recent writing in educational research is beginning to explore such questions, even in the context of ‘research as usual’. There are some interesting case-studies of the limits of trust in Stronach and MacLure (1997) using deconstructive methods to interrogate their own, apparently standard, social science methods.

5. With a little help from my colleagues.

The purpose of the workshop is to try out the possibility of fictionalization/fiction and to consider its value in getting clearer about the realities of collaboration. There are two parts to the workshop.

(1) Task: Write a story (or the outline of a story) and tell us if it is true. The question ‘Is it true?’ is, of course, the focus of Part 2, the discussion.

(2) Discussion: Is there any point to this idea? Can truth be told in fiction in a way that would help understand the dynamics of collaboration.