This paper concerns collaboration between teachers in school-age educare and class teachers in grades 1 to 3. It is based on an ongoing project where five different schools collaborate and conduct research together with four teachers/researchers from Malmö University.

Questions that form the basis of the project are how collaboration is defined both in policy documents and in practice? How is collaboration regulated? What does collaboration look like in practice? What is collaborated on – and what is not? What examples of good collaboration exist and what characterizes them?

The theoretical framework is professional theory (cf. Parson; Brante). Professional theory concerns the emergence of occupations that have certain common characteristics that classify them as professions, such as requiring higher education with a degree and having a specialized professional language. Professions are also associated with power and status. Teaching professions are considered semi-professions. They are considered to have some of the elements required to be called professions but not others. A trend toward professionalization can be observed among teaching professions, for example through the introduction of certification. We also use Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus, and capital to analyze and understand what happens in the interaction between two categories of teachers.

The research network consists of five schools as well as Malmö University. Four municipalities are represented. Two different municipal administrative departments are also directly involved in the project. From each school, teachers in school-age educare, class teachers, and principals or assistant principals participate. The network meets two to three times each semester and holds workshops lasting about three hours. The conversations are recorded and become empirical material. Between meetings, we familiarize ourselves with previous studies and methodological articles. Some participants have also conducted small pilot studies. Currently, we are working together to develop an overarching and systematic methodological design.

Previous research in the area has identified various types of barriers to collaboration, such as lack of time, organizations that do not promote collaboration, different professional cultures, and hierarchical positions. The ambition of this research project is to take a step further by examining good examples of collaboration. The overarching purpose we seek to answer is: what is required for collaboration to work? A question highly relevant for teacher professions today.

We have seen that different factors play a significant role, both organizational and more personal. The examples we have observed often seem to be person-dependent, for instance, that people work well together in a collaboration and that personal traits therefore become crucial for achieving good collaboration. This makes collaboration vulnerable. We therefore see a need for structural factors to be in place, such as certain regulations and conditions regarding planning time, scheduling, explicit role descriptions, and specification of tasks. There is a need for a common language and terminology (cf. professional theory). We can also see that the different professions' capital needs to be made explicit (cf. Bourdieu).