I have been thinking a lot about collaboration recently as I’m working on a co-authored book about collaboration in interdisciplinary education. One thing we’ve noticed working on the book and the related research project, is how often collaboration is left to chance. That’s a recipe for disaster in contemporary education! Collaboration these days is often going forward in educational contexts that are under-resourced and where people fear for their jobs and futures. People are often trying to work together with colleagues with quite different world views and frames for the project under consideration. All of the political tensions that run through our wider society can surface when education is at stake.

So what can we do? We need approaches to collaboration that can be started quickly, without a lot of additional resource or time from participants. Yet these approaches also need to be grounded in a rich understanding of why collaborations often go wrong and well-meaning participants end up at cross purposes. Then the work needs to deepen and develop over time and adapt as new challenges arise.

To my mind this work needs good boundary objects. These are frameworks, structures for participation, or concepts that are adaptable enough so that collaborators with diverse perspectives can coalesce around them. A good framework or structure provides participants with step-by-step opportuntities to:

• think about which different worldviews and framings are strong in their space and how this variety can be an advantage;
• realise that difficulty achieving shared understanding is entirely normal and how to move past this;
• create shared rules of engagement for all participants to feel included and that they matter;
• work toward co-creating agreed goals and processes;
• reflect on the qualities and ways of being that underpin successful collaboration;
• work through and learn from understandable frustration at very real barriers;
• evaluate and adapt over time.

Photo by Pascal van de Vendel on Unsplash