Working Relationally in and across Practices A Cultural-Historical Approach to Collaboration

Three core ideas are at the heart of this book: relational expertise, the capacity to interpret problems with others; common knowledge, which consists of knowing what matters for professionals in other practices; and relational agency, which involves using that common knowledge to take action with others. These ideas are based in cultural-historical approaches to learning and change, and give coherence to the arguments presented. This is not a recipe book; the ideas are offered as resources for reflecting on and developing professional and research practices, and the conditions in which they occur.

1. Revealing relational work Anne Edwards; Part I. Working Relationally in the Professions: 2. Expertise, learning, and agency in partnership practices in services for families with young children Nick Hopwood; 3. Learning and deploying relational agency in the negotiation of inter-professional hierarchies in a UK hospital Joce Nuttall; 4. Relational agency, double stimulation and the object of activity: an intervention study in a primary school Annalisa Sannino and Yrjö Engeström; 5. An analysis of the use of relational expertise, relational agency and common knowledge among newly appointed principals in Chile's public schools Carmen Montecinos, Verónica Leiva, Fabián Campos, Luis Ahumada and Sergio Galdames; 6. Building and using common knowledge for developing school-community links Prabhat Chandra Rai; 7. Building common knowledge: negotiating new pedagogies in higher education in South Africa Shirley Walters, Freda Daniels and Vernon Weitz; Part II. Working Relationally in Networks: 8. Networked expertise, relational agency, and collective creativity Kai Hakkarainen, Kaisa Hytönen, Jenna Vekkaila and Tuire Palonen; 9. Relational agency and the development of tools in service networks Laura Seppänen and Hanna Toiviainen; 10. Creating a system of distributed expertise: the Oxford Education Deanery narrative Nigel Fancourt; 11. Common knowledge: the missing link in hybrid value chains? Marc Thompson, Catherine Dolan, Colin Mayer, Kate Roll and Ruth Yeoman; 12. The relational agency framework as a tool for supporting the establishment, maintenance and development of multidisciplinary networks of professionals Marilyn Fleer, Iris Duhn and Linda J. Harrison; Part III. Working Relationally in Research: 13. Research as relational agency: expert ethnographers and the cultural force of technologies Cathrine Hasse; 14. When daycare professionals' values for transition to school do not align with the educational demands from society and school: a practice developing research project for daycare professionals' support to children's transition to school Mariane Hedegaard; 15. Relational approaches to knowledge exchange in social science research Anne Edwards and Eleni Stamou; 16. Designing the epistemic architecture for Galaxy Zoo: the case study of relational expertise in citizen science Bipana Bantawa; Epilogue: 17. Using and refining the relational concepts Anne Edwards.

Anne Edwards writes extensively on cultural-historical theory and professional learning. After chairs at the University of Leeds and the University of Birmingham, she joined the University of Oxford Department of Education, where she co-founded the Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research. A Visiting Professor at Universitetet i Oslo, she holds honorary doctorates from the University of Helsinki and Universitetet i Oslo for her work on relational expertise. She has been President of the British Educational Research Association and editor of the British Educational Research Journal. She has also co-edited the journal Mind Culture and Activity and is a founding editor of the journal Learning, Culture and Social Interaction. She is currently researching social inclusion in Chile and South Africa.