“Working with” as a methodological stance: Collaborating with students in teaching, writing, and research

Using critical ethnography guided by cultural sociology, this manuscript
examines the role of “co” in teacher education; coresearching, coteaching, and
cogenerating dialogue. The authors are a pre-service teacher and college instructor, and
through our multiple perspectives and positionings we explore how collaboration served
to dismantle teacher-student hierarchies and replaced them with complex relationships
mediated by polysemic approaches to research. Pushing against traditional ideologies, we
utilize a multi-voiced approach to writing as we present our experiences and
interpretations of data relative to the possibilities of collaboration in education and
research. As we analyze our role in collaborative endeavors, we ask: How can we find
ways to work across and around hierarchical institutional structures when working with
our students? What are ways that we can examine our individual lived experiences
together, and is it possible to work with each other to develop identities as teachers that
are not predicated on power differentials?