Amplifying teachers’ voices? An innovative collaborative book project foregrounding perspectives from practice

The voices of preschool and school teachers have been largely absent from knowledge production, creating a gap between research and practice and limiting the potential of research to enhance education. While collaboration between researchers and teachers has been promoted to bridge the research-practice gap, its promise can be undermined by power imbalances, in which researchers’ higher status risks silencing teachers’ contributions to knowledge production. This is especially the case when collaboration unfolds in traditional research settings. Therefore, there is a need for research on attempts to collaborate in new ways. This study examines the possibilities of a collaborative book project to mitigate asymmetries in collaboration and amplify teachers’ voices in knowledge production. The model used in the project was intentionally designed to foreground practitioners’ perspectives while integrating both research and professional insights. Grounded in cultural-historical activity theory and based on observations and interviews conducted by an external researcher, the study shows that the collaboration process provoked tensions in relation to differences in practices, status and positionings. Yet its organisation enabled participants to address these tensions and develop agency. The collaboration model showed potential to amplify teachers’ voices, fostering a more democratic knowledge infrastructure by positioning teachers as active knowledge producers.