Collaborative Approaches to Learning: Some Research Issues

Mike Doyle, m.doyle@salford.ac.uk

Abstract
Positive and promotional discourses of ‘collaboration’ and ‘partnership’ are dominant in public policy, including education. Research which problematises the premises for this is limited, is under-theorised, and is often itself ‘captured’ by the discourse. This paper reflects on methodology used by an ‘insider’, a researcher-developer, using an ‘interventionist’ research strategy (Activity Theory), to access boundary data on initial conceptualisations of the partners collaborating on an emerging curriculum
(a Foundation Degree), and how they prioritise and oversee its implementation. The methodology involves contextualising the emerging practice within dominant discourses, as well as evaluating how partner discursive practices influence the prioritising of interpretations and their implementation.

This paper deals with research in progress. After briefly outlining the research rationale and context, the ‘connectionist’ theoretical lens through which the data will be analysed, Activity Theory, is explained. This is necessary as the theory frames the methodology, which, after Engestrom (1987, 1999a, 1999b, 2001), is designated ‘interventionist’.  However, this paper is an ‘insider’s’ analysis of utilising this interventionist methodology, within a collaborative approach to learning provision, in the sense that I as researcher have also played a part in the development. It raises a range of methodological issues, which are explored.

Engestrom (1999b:2) situates ‘interventionist research methodology’ within what he calls ‘developmental work research as an agenda of application’. As researcher and developer it therefore is highly appropriate for me. In this conceptualisation ‘research makes visible and pushes forward the contradictions of the activity under scrutiny, challenging the actors to appropriate and use new conceptual tools to analyse and redesign their own practice’ (1999b:6). The paper therefore raises and explores a range of methodological issues relevant to this process.

Context and Purpose of Research
The focus is a collaborative approach to curriculum design and delivery involving constituencies from higher and further education and the employers of the students who work full time in local government. The initiative is a prototype foundation degree, which prioritises work-related learning and employer involvement.

Foundation degrees are expected to make a major contribution to the delivery of New Labour’s targets of 50% participation in higher education for 18-30 year-olds by 2010. They are expected to equip students with a combination of academic knowledge and technical and transferable skills demanded by employers, while facilitating lifelong learning for the workforce and enhancing the ‘diversity and differentiation’ of higher education (Neave, 2000).

Collaboration, and more particularly ‘partnerships’ dominate the discourse of public policy implementation, particularly in education, and proposals for the design and structuring of learning in the post-16 sectors. Such strategies of widening participation to learning through inter-agency collaboration rest on an approach characterised by ‘instrumental rationality’ (Sanderson, 1999), premised on an assumption that partnerships between further and higher education institutions and employers can and will develop and deliver policy through appropriate curriculum delivery. 

This research aims to problematise assumptions underlying collaborative approaches to curriculum design and delivery. The meanings and interpretations of the collaborating communities in the process of active development of the curriculum, rooted in priorities shaped by situated practices, need to be explored and analysed. In this case this is particularly relevant given the dominant economic discursive framework within which this curriculum is situated (Doyle, 2003). An intended outcome is to further an understanding of conceptualisations, interpretations, development, and implementation of curriculum within a multi-agency framework. Its topicality and relevance is based on the policy strategy of collaboration as the vehicle to deliver lifelong learning. 

My research approach has been to contextualise the activity to be studied within dominant textual and discursive representations of policy. However, also in the process of contextualisation, I will include a brief textual and discursive analysis of proposed activity through the bidding documentation (the local response) for the funding for the actual collaborative activity.

Within this rationalist framework of policy and funding stimulus and localised rationalist textual/discursive response, I investigate how what is required in policy, and what is claimed to be delivered is decoded and developed by the collaborators charged with responsibility for implementation. The process is reflected in Figure 1, moving from the outer layer of policy documentation, through the response of bid documentation to the focus of the study, the emerging practices framed within this discursive framework (Fairclough, 1992).  

Figure 1: Discursive Context for the Research of Curriculum Practice
The focus of study of practice has been the development team, representatives of the three sectors in this activity, and its practice of curriculum development across the first semester of the programme for the first two cohorts of students. This paper deals with theoretical and methodological issues in researching the development of practice.

Theoretical Perspective
The subject of this research is complex: the developing understandings and practices of representatives of five colleges, five local authorities and two schools and an education development unit of the lead university – a constellation of distinct social practices. My approach is constructivist, and is linked into an understanding of development, which is contextual and emergent. To facilitate analysis of collaborative practice I utilise what Knight (2002) calls a ‘connectionist theory’ (Activity Theory), and will offer a critical evaluation of this as an analytical device. 

Activity theory is associated with Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of mediation between subject and object, and was subsequently developed by Engestrom (1987, 1999a, 1999b, 2001) with the concept of the activity system (see Figure 2).

Alternative connectionist theoretical perspectives include Actor Network Theory (Latour, 1987, Law, 1987), and Communities of Practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991, Wenger, 1998)

Figure 2: Activity System (Engestrom, 2001)

Activity theory has its roots in dialectical materialism. Contradictions within the system are the basis for development, and what Engestrom refers to as ‘expansive learning’. Engestrom has developed a learning cycle to explain this. Engestrom’s cycle enables individuals and groups to connect the current level of understanding about practice to emerging ideas to transform practice. Its advantage over communities of practice theory is that it is dynamic, facilitating analysis of transition in the learning and practices of the members in the pursuit of the ‘object’. However, it has been criticised as functionalist (Trowler and Knight, 2000), and my view is that it will prove problematic when faced with issues rooted in power differences and competing or alternative partner discursive practices, particularly in articulating the ‘object’. Nevertheless it is a useful heuristic for analysing the emerging practice. 

Activity theory is useful for organising thinking about learning in institutional environments, and will be used to help configure the approaches and perspectives, which the different communities bring to the process. The model of analysis for activity theory focuses on the emergent object, the ‘horizon of possible actions, a permanently unfinished project’ (Engestrom at Lancaster University, 24.1.02).  At this seminar, Engestrom, in dealing with ‘multi-voiced’ discussion and ‘shared notion of objects’, claimed these were not given, but constructed by actors as they ‘grab and mould the materials…they…enact foci for actions and activity in ‘projectedness’’. He also claimed that the objects are not constructed arbitrarily on the spot: they ‘have histories, built in material affordances and unpredictability’.

Yet Engestrom’s (2001) development of Vygotsky’s (1978) cultural historical activity theory, developing the triangular model of subject, object and mediating artefact, can be adapted and reconfigured to identify and analyse the discursive and social practices that all of the collaborators as ‘subjects’ (Figure 2) bring to the process of expansive learning, facilitating a critical analysis of that development. This is more phenomenographic, facilitating an evaluation of the emergence of the object. Indeed, he recognises the need to do this in his discussions on interfacing activity systems (Engestrom, 2001), yet he fails to address the issue of power within ‘multi-voiced’ discussions. 

The learning theory underpinning this approach is distributed and social in nature, rather than individual and cognitive. Engestrom uses Vygotsky’s concept of the ‘zone of proximal development’ to develop this; and it provides a theoretical framework for the concept of the ‘learning organisation’. However, Young (2001) rightly questions the utility of the concept of expansive learning when questioning within the activity system is seen as challenging and threatening to existing power relations. 

Engestrom (1999) argues the need for an ‘interventionist research methodology’ aimed at ‘pushing forward, mediating, recording and analysing cycles of expansive learning in local activity systems’. This methodology is being applied more frequently as ‘an emerging new wave of contextualist studies of work’, and is reflected in the methods used in this research.

Focusing the Lens – Applying an Interventionist Methodology
In designing my research I am seeking answers to the following:

•	How do policy and discursive contexts impact on the framing of learning and how it is prioritised in this context?

•	What are the initial conceptualisations of the learning priorities across the collaborating communities and how do these develop through emerging practice?

•	How are organisational, cultural and structural perspectives in this context reflected in decisions made about the curriculum and normative frameworks for the structuring of learning?

•	How is ‘power’ best conceived in this context, and how is it exercised within the process of collaboration?

•	What are the effects of the process of collaboration on the perspectives and practices of the communities involved?

In particular I wanted to explore how the range of collaborator perspectives, rooted in situated and discursive practices, impact on and influence conceptualisations of ‘learning’ priorities, and how these develop through ‘partnering practices’ in this context. The research therefore focuses on emerging and developing practices and understandings in the context of the original policy and discursive parameters.

My research design therefore needed to provide me with access to initial conceptualisations of learning priorities across the range of collaborators, and a means of building in evaluating development and transformation. In this sense the design needed to be ‘interventionist’ (Engestrom, op. cit.), either in the sense that the research instruments brought the collaborators together at key stages of the development, or that the research used equivalent ‘naturally occurring’ events in the phased implementation and evaluation of the curriculum. Such naturally occurring data sources have included formal and informal meetings, minutes, and curriculum review meetings. 

Data Collection
To obtain data on individual perspectives and their development I used semi-structured interviews and an equivalent of Engestrom’s (2001) ‘boundary crossing laboratories’ (BCL), structured as ‘expert panel’ focus groups across two intakes of students:

The purpose of such a research design is to involve them (experts) not only in finding explanations for a particular problem, but also to motivate them either to find solutions in their own practice or to collaborate in collective projects to solve a problem (Chioncel et al, 2003). 

This meant individual interviews with representatives of the partner organisations. These individuals represented the ‘boundary spanners’ (Fullan, 2000) of the intersecting activity systems. The initial interviews took place at the end of semester one with intake one, and these were followed up with the first BCL (BCL 1).

The initial interviews explored a range of issues, starting with understanding of the policy issues behind Foundation Degrees, moving to their understanding of the primary learning goals of the course, leading to asking individuals to prioritise actions or changes for the second intake of students to improve delivery of their conceptualisation of the primary learning goal. The outcomes of this final question were anonomysed and used to initiate discussion in BCL 1.

Engestrom’s BCLs have a formula linked to the phases of expansive learning. I structured the phases of the first BCL around this cycle, starting off with issues arising from the interviews relating to conceptualisations of the primary learning goal (Engestrom’s ‘questioning’ - I termed these ‘what’ issues, stimulating discussion based on interview data, which also to an extent tested the validity of that data). 

The second phase of BCL 1 was structured around ‘why’ issues (Engestrom’s ‘analyzing’), enabling the group to reflect on problems in the delivery of the planned curriculum, and reasons for variation in interpretation and priorities. The final phase of BCL 1 focused on ‘how’ issues: priorities agreed by the group for change to be implemented for the second intake of students (individual confidential written feedback in the form of a reflective evaluation was provided after the BCL). This phase mapped against Engestrom’s ‘modelling’, and ‘concretizing’ the new model.

At the end of the first semester for intake two I again conducted interviews with each of the collaborators, reminding them of their initial interpretations of the primary learning goal, of the outcomes of BCL 1 and exploring the extent to which the primary learning goals had changed for them. They were asked to reflect upon the extent to which the outcomes of BCL 1 reflected their priorities, and how they had subsequently interpreted and prioritised them in terms of their own practices for intake 2. The final BCL (BCL 2) returned to the stages of the expansive learning cycle, evaluating espoused transitions (outcomes from BCL1- the proposed new model) in terms of actual practices; effectively Engestrom’s later stages within the expansive cycle of reflecting on process and evaluating practice.

Data Analysis
The methods selected, and the analytical framework of Activity Theory, have provided me with an inductive and deductive coding framework. The deductive element, linked to research questions, is framed by Activity Theory (tools, roles, rules etc), while the inductive element has enabled me to identify a range of codes linked to emerging practices, such as perceptions of the policy framework, educational philosophy, values and normative frameworks, perceptions of others, power, collaborative effects, as well as a processual coding within the interviews and BCLs enabling data gathering on issues such as ‘supporting’, ‘agreeing’, ‘contradicting’, ‘blocking’.

My strategy has been to use the coding to conduct a detailed analysis of the data from the phase 1 interviews and BCL 1 to identify particular  ‘critical sites’, linked to my research questions, to focus the analysis of phase 2 data. Examples of these sites include: conceptualisation of learning priorities (effectively, understandings of the ‘object’), assessment (divergent priorities – for example, ‘skills’ versus ‘ knowledge’), curriculum structures and practices (eg. for HE the foregrounding and impact on practice of dominant discursive structures such as modularity, compared with the more flexible and responsive practices in FE and employer training departments), student support (is HE as responsive as FE to student needs?), quality and standards (can FE deliver HE level work?), training versus education (can FE and HE meet the training and human resource requirements of the workplace?) and issues of roles and rule governed behaviours across these emerging partnering practices. 

Reflections on the Design
In reflecting on the process two issues stand out. Firstly, the process of ‘intervention’ and my role in that process. The second is the suitability of the theoretical lens of ‘activity theory’ to analyse the unfolding data. I will briefly summarise my position on both.

On Insider Intervention
In designing my research I am conscious of what I am engaged in as development in emerging practice. In this respect I feel there is a more ‘natural’ aspect to this design than that carried out, for example, by Engestrom in his use of ‘boundary crossing laboratories’ (2001) or ‘change laboratories’ (1996) where the researchers as ‘outsiders’ are applying an interventionist methodology. In my research the ‘interventions’ are more ‘insider’ driven, both by the developing practices of the research ‘subjects’, and through my role as researcher-practitioner.  In this respect the process, setting and design might be more accurately described as ‘naturally occurring’ (Flick (2002), Silverman (2001), Lincoln and Guba (1979)), and the results of the ‘intervention’ are ‘valid’ in the sense that the BCLs, if not the interviews, were a form of fieldwork observation. 

However, this does raise the issue of my dual role of researcher and developer, both within the interviews and the BCLs, particularly within a design that is ‘interventionist’, and therefore rather unconventional in research terms.  This would have been extremely problematic from a realist perspective. However, my constructivist ontology is reflected in the research design.

This ontology does not mean that I eschew the importance of data or of empirical material.

Empirical material cannot unambiguously falsify or verify theories, but it can generate argument for or against the championing of theoretical ideas and a particular way of understanding the world…But data cannot prove anything, [other than supporting interpretations].
(Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2001)

Nor does it mean that I have difficulty with ‘objectivity’ and the way I apply this in my approach to my research. Phillips (1993) distinguishes between ‘objectivity’ and ‘certainty’:

Objective is a label we apply to inquiries that meet certain procedural standards, but objectivity does not guarantee that the results of inquiries have any certainty.

A complication in discussions on ‘objectivity’ is my role in this interventionist research process. I am researching something that I have an active, professional involvement in. From a realist perspective this will be questioned. However, given my epistemological position I agree with Silverman’s (2000) view that in quasi-scientific terms the value of interview statements is in many cases limited in terms of their capacity to reflect reality ‘out there’. Fontana and Frey (1994) suggest that the researcher may reject ‘outdated’ techniques of avoiding getting involved, and engage in a ‘real’ conversation. Yet I am mindful of more postmodern critiques of ‘toolkit’ approaches to interviewing, the status of resultant data and the bases of claims that might be made (Alvesson, 2002). In taking on this approach I recognise the significance of the ‘insider/outsider’ debate (Miller and Glassner, 1997), and the need for a critically reflexive approach to the analysis of the data. 

I have been generating and co-constructing data in active interviews, rather than extracting from ‘empty vessels’ (Holstein and Gubrium, 1995, Mason, 2002). In this sense, and given my insider status, the interviews were not necessarily snatches of decontextualised opinion giving, but active and developmental episodes of constructing meaning and sense-making. I was as much a part of this process as the interviewees. In my process of data analysis I have been careful to consider:

the dynamic interrelatedness of the what’s and the how’s…The focus is as much on the assembly process as on what is assembled
(Holstein and Gubrium, 1995).

In the process of analysis there will also need to be a sensitivity to forms of narrative and discourse in the construction of sense-making. My interview approach has used narrative, episodic and question and answer approaches to ‘realize the triangulation of different approaches as the basis of data collection’ (Flick, 2002:109). In coding my data I have looked for themes across the interviews and group sessions, but have also coded episodes and narratives of emerging co-constructed discussion around themes within individual interviews and the group sessions.

Alvesson (1998) has developed the concept of ‘self-ethnography’ as a response to limitations of interviewing and conventional ethnographic methods for ‘insider’ research, particularly for researching own practices within a University:

Participant observation is thus not a good label in this case, observing participant is better… The idea of self-ethnography is to utilize the position one is in for other, secondary purposes, i.e., doing research on the setting of which one is a part (Alvesson, 1998).

The challenge of such an approach is:

…a struggle of ‘breaking out’ from the taken for grantedness of a particular framework and of creating knowledge through trying to interpret the acts, words and material used by oneself and one’s fellow organizational members’ (Alvesson, 1998).

The benefit is that ‘deeper and more profound knowledge of the setting’ may lead to theoretical development that is more well grounded in experiences and observations than is common. In my engagement in developing practices within the emerging activity system/community of practice I am observing and participating in the construction of meaning systems and practices. I know the subjects of the research and my roles as participant/researcher are understood and accepted by them – I have ‘access’ and ‘entry’ (Ball, 1993).

Such an approach, however, has to be built upon a critical reflexive interpretation, facilitating ‘de-familiarisation’ (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000), and for a researcher in my position, a means of ‘breaking out’ and creating distance from the ‘every day’.

As the research is framed as an ‘emerging’ case study, depending on ontological perspective, it will need to address issues of validity and reliability. While the context for this research is a single study of collaboration on a particular curriculum, it is intended to reflect wider issues around assumptions policy shapers make about the effectiveness of collaboration in the interpretation and delivery of policy. However, there is no explicit attempt in this to offer an example of evidence-based practice, nor of transferability of practice in the sense of reproducibility. 

In this sense ‘naturalistic generalization’, after Stake (1978), and Lincoln and Guba (1979), sit more comfortably with the approach of this study. In this, the external validity of an enquiry is of less significance than the provision of sufficiently ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) to allow someone interested in issues of lesson transfer to make a judgement. The work will involve a significant analysis of data sources to enable an understanding of the institutional contexts within which the social practices, values and attitudes are developed. 

However, criticisms are likely to be framed within an approach to generalisation which is empiricist rather than analytical or inductive. Pre-occupation with causality, transferability and ‘evidence based practice’ need to be answered. For example, Gomm, Hammersley and Foster (2000, 238 - 239) assert:

…explanations rely on assumptions about general causal relationships which cannot be validated solely through study of a single case,

 and go on to assert the need for case studies to be compared:

Comparative method requires that data be available from more than one case…such that the effects of various candidate causal factors can be controlled or assessed.

In contrast to this Alasuutari (1995:156-7) argues:

Generalisation is …(a) word…that should be reserved for surveys only. What can be analysed instead is how the researcher demonstrates that the analysis relates to things beyond the material at hand…extrapolation better captures the typical procedure in qualitative research.

My theory building is rooted in empirical data. 

On Using Activity Theory

The second reflection is on the theoretical lens of Activity Theory. Activity Theory provides a useful heuristic to frame the design and analyse the development for several reasons. It provides a theoretically coherent model for developing practice, incorporating processes of mediation between subjects and the emerging ‘object’, and acknowledges operational contexts, which are rule governed and dependent on divisions of labour. It also provides a conceptual and theoretical basis, through, for example the  ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky, 1978), to analyse ‘collaboration’ and its development and emergence. 

Engestrom’s third generation of Activity Theory (2001) also incorporates collaborating activity systems and further develops the concept of ‘expansive learning’, which can provide in this context a means of conceptualising transition and development within the practices of the collaborators. Roles within the activity, operating within rule governed behaviours and existing and emerging ‘partnering practices’ based on prioritised ‘sites’, linked to the emerging ‘object’, will provide a means of constructing an interpretation of the collaborative activity, evidenced through dominant discursive structures and practices around these sites. 

My purpose in this is to access power dimensions within the activity system, which I believe have been under-emphasised and under-theorised within Activity Theory. In this respect Activity Theory provides an important analytical tool, but one that I believe will be limited in its effectiveness in determining issues such as ‘whose ‘object’, whose priorities, and whose discursive practices constitute the collaboration?

The use of this ‘interventionist’ methodology is unconventional, but my ‘insider’ status as a researcher has facilitated the researching of transition and development in a naturalistic way. The practices of self-ethnography have also been utilised in the application of methods of de-familiarisation to enable ‘breaking out’ from the perspective of the researched. 

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