Skolutvecklingssamverkan i tider av förändring

Abstract

Abstract Title: Partnership for School Improvement in Changing Times. Nine perspectives from SKUL. Language: Swedish with an English summary ISBN: 978-91-86857-31-8 This anthology explores contemporary school development collaboration as a complex, relational and knowledge-building practice. Grounded in the research environment School Development and Educational Leadership (SKUL) at the University of Gothenburg, the volume brings together nine chapters that examine “school development collaboration in times of …” from several complementary viewpoints. The chapters span democratic and ethical dimensions of collaboration, the infrastructural and organisational conditions that shape improvement work, and the shifting professional roles and identities that emerge when researchers, school leaders, teachers and doctoral students work across institutional boundaries. Read together, the contributions depict school development collaboration not as a technical activity or a set of discrete interventions, but as a long-term, value-laden and context-dependent practice. They show how collaboration is shaped by ethical judgement, by the capacities and constraints embedded in schools’ organisational infrastructures, and by the ways in which actors navigate different knowledge logics, expectations and time horizons. The anthology identifies a set of competencies necessary for researchers engaged in such work, including ethical and democratic orientation, system and infrastructure literacy, the ability to work with complexity, relational and communicative skill, translational competence, and sustained reflexivity. The concluding synthesis argues that this form of collaboration constitutes a knowledge practice in its own right. It requires academic environments to recognise school development collaboration not as a peripheral “third mission”, but as an integral arena where research, education and societal engagement meet, interact and develop together.