Grappling with collaboration: would opening up the research ‘base’ help?

Richard Rose, writing in this journal in his role as Research Section Editor (BJSE, Volume 29, Number 1), argued that teachers should learn to do research in collaboration with other professionals, as part of a drive to make teaching a 'research-based profession'. In this article, Joan Forbes, Senior Lecturer in Educational Studies in the Faculty of Education at the University of Aberdeen, explores this idea in greater depth from her perspective as course leader for an MEd module on inter-agency collaboration. She proposes that recommendations for collaboration to support children with language and communication disorders do not attend to the difficulties involved between professionals from different backgrounds who use different discourses and draw upon different research evidence as a basis for practice. Her paper draws on 'postmodern' research approaches and Michael Foucault's views of 'discourse' to examine a variety of theoretical perspectives previously applied to collaboration. It argues for the value of further theoretical diversity and methodological plurality and introduces discourse analysis as a tool for helping to understand the notion of collaboration. At the end of her challenging and intriguing paper, Joan Forbes offers some suggestions concerning the value of 'new' questioning kinds of analysis.