Continuing conversations: looking back on a collaborative experience to harvest new insights for collective thinking and action

Abstract

Background The COVID-19 pandemic provided a fillip to operationalise the potential possibilities offered by technology for new ways to collaborate through distance. The online ISATT collaborative work, initiated during the pandemic, provided a conducive social space for participants working in the isolation of our individual contexts to come together virtually as a community of learners. Representatives from 29 diverse geographic and cultural contexts spanning five continents met in four groups every month over a year to analyze data that we had pooled about the ways in which we managed the exceptional circumstances caused by the pandemic. The findings from these investigations have been compiled into a section in the forthcoming ISATT 40th Anniversary Yearbook, Volume 3. We also participated in a hybrid mode at the ISATT Regional conference in October 2022 at Bordeaux for a live presentation of our findings. Objective and significance Moving on, we are now continuing our conversations by reflecting on our experience to investigate the social process of collaborative learning and open to discussion the rough path we negotiated by posing questions (uncomfortable) about the challenges a collaborative learning effort raises. We had a diverse array of contexts and participants in our project providing an ideal opportunity to experience first-hand what learning from and teaching to diversity means. However, there were also several constraints to getting the best out of this opportunity both for our individual and collective development as professionals. This symposium foregrounds the importance of dealing with the contentious aspects of a collaborative enterprise in line with the insight gleaned from Witgenstein who said, “We have got on the slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground" (1958, p. 146e). Session structure The four groups which comprise this symposium will analyse qualitatively the challenges of communicating across diverse languages, history, culture and sociomaterial conditions, besides personal and professional constraints that we had to negotiate based on data from recorded group deliberations and responses to a semi-structured questionnaire. Each group will also rise from concrete experience to the level of abstract by raising questions to invite the audience to dialogue thus heightening the social significance of the symposium for educators. Reference Wittgenstein, L. (1958) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell.