Negotiating Beliefs and Practices in School–University Collaboration

Abstract

This chapter examines the discursive construction of collaboration as systems of beliefs and knowledge in a Hong Kong school–university partnership collaborative action research (CAR) project. This case study was situated in a context when key educational reform was being introduced in secondary schools at the time, with school–university collaboration seen as a way to build teachers’ capacity to implement new assessment practices in English language classrooms. The notion of beliefs (‘truths’) refers to the analysis of the explicit word choices and attitudes stated by the teachers and researchers in the textual data collected from the case study. This chapter also critically examines how these beliefs reflect or contest discourses about school–university collaboration in the broader sociopolitical context of Hong Kong, for example, how statements about collaboration are located in other discourses. The objective of this chapter is not so much to judge the beliefs stated by the teachers and researchers, but to explore the ways in which ‘truths’ were foregrounded in the case study and how these beliefs shaped the construction of CAR as a social practice. The analysis of the textual data in this chapter suggests that the school–university CAR project was predominantly shaped by the curriculum reform and partnership discourses that were circulating in the sociocultural context at the time of the study.