Abstract :
[en] This is the story of a teacher-researcher collaboration within a school-university partnership that supports primary teacher professional development in science education in Luxembourg. The Luxembourgish education system is highly stratified (Eurydice, 2022), and Luxembourgish, German, and French are languages used throughout primary education, adding another layer of complexity to the system. The SciTeach Center is a resource center, where pre-service and in-service teachers have access to materials (e.g., books, models) and professional development courses, that aims to support primary teachers to implement inquiry-based science education. Here, the center is acknowledged as a school-university/research-practice partnership (e.g., Goodlad, 1991; Coburn et al., 2013) that operates as a third space, both physically created and negotiated (respectively, Bhabha, 2004; Gutierrez et al., 1999), and it hosts different projects, such as this one. This partnership enables teachers and researchers to come together and co-develop and co-teach professional learning opportunities for other teachers in Luxembourg. Currently, the team consists of eight researchers, eight primary teachers, and two administrative staff. The teaching team members work together to be contextually responsive, also addressing emergent uncertainties (e.g., Manz and Suárez, 2018). Within this context, the workshop Science and Language was co-developed between 2021 and 2022 and co-taught during the school-year 2022-2023. Using qualitative research approaches, including participatory research and critical ethnography lenses, data sources comprised field and observation notes, video recordings and interviews, from which patterns emerged. Participants included researchers, in-service primary teachers, and workshop participants. Through interpretive analysis, this research examines how team members span their boundaries as part of a community of practice (manuscript 1), how the partnership navigates uncertainties (such as language diversity, teacher profile and changing curricula), discussing contextual complexities faced by teachers and demonstrating how the partnership tries to respond, by creating a safe and trusting space for dialogue and reflection (manuscript 2) and how learning happens in three levels, identified as: individual, as one teacher and one researcher learn from co-researching; project, as the team became aware of several concerns of putting science and language into dialogue (such as the structural challenge of the teacher profile); and partnership, from where three events show how the partnership changed the shape of the organization (manuscript 3). The emergent research has worked with different conceptual frameworks, including discussions from collaborative structures, community of practice, distributed leadership, co-generative dialogues, and boundary spanning, resulting in an analytical framework over interactional structures and achievements. Findings reveal the partnership’s dynamics (built on a reflect-dialogue-act process – Wilmes, te Heesen et al., 2018) and highlight the potential of structured partnerships for sustainable teacher education, offering insights for ongoing open dialogue and trust-building.
