A Person-Centered Approach for Analyzing Multidimensional Integration in Collaboration Between Educational Researchers and Practitioners

Abstract

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This study was conducted in the context of a development project for teacher education, establishing a collaborative format called Transdisciplinary Development Teams (TDTs). The aim of this study was to investigate (a) how participating TDT members assess focal dimensions of integration characteristics (DICs) with regard to success factors and challenging aspects. DICs are operationalized as (1a) mutual learning and (1b) knowledge integration, (2a) perceived trustworthiness, and (2b) appreciation within the team, and (3a) collective ownership of goals. In addition, they seek to (b) differentiate the types of actors characterized by particular assessment patterns. The study employs a person-centered approach (cluster analysis) and uses a data corpus with 62 response sets. Subsequently, this study offers a genuine conceptual approach to frame interorganizational collaboration in teacher education. On this basis, empirical insights that provide further practical implications to support future collaboration at the boundary of educational research and practice have been generated.

Keywords

• cluster analysis
• collaboration integration
• research-practice partnerships
• teacher education
• transdisciplinarity