The Challenges of Collaboration between Teachers and Other Professionals in Inclusive Schools: a Meeting of Glances
This study aims to better understand the challenges of collaboration being built, or not, between teachers and other professionals in Swiss and Canadian inclusive school contexts. It examines the results from four empirical research projects which, in spite of specific theoretical backgrounds, adopt a psychosociological approach to education and use various data collection methods within the qualitative and comprehensive paradigm. The results create a picture of a professional collaboration which permeates the relations between professionals in schools, while being most often misunderstood and practiced without thinking, as well as being shaped by wishes and needs of the actual actors, their mandate and their institutional positioning. The results also reveal that creative and contextualized collaborative practices can be constructed if school professionals turn away from acting as technical experts and accept to engage in an iterative process of negotiating and coconstructing their role with teachers.