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This article contributes to discussions of transmethodology by drawing on experiences from conducting practice research aimed at the development of theory and practice through research collaboration. We analyze efforts to build research communities where researchers and professionals work together to perform analyses and develop knowledge. A collective research project exploring children’s possibilities for participation in school is used as a case for exploring how a research problem develops through such collaboration. This research project was designed to explore school life from the perspectives of children, parents, teachers, school leaders, and psychologists, and to analyze conflicts situated in everyday practices while considering political struggles concerning the school as a historical institution. The article emphasizes the often intangible and overlooked processes involved in research collaboration and details how we worked to build a research community comprising researchers and professionals that enabled collective multi-perspective analyses. Building on a dialectical approach, we conceptualize conflicts as part of historical processes and as an immanent potentiality that arises from people’s engagement in common but contradictory matters. Hence, the different perspectives of the participants in the field can be seen as linked through common matters, while also being differentiated by their allotted tasks in relation to children’s school life. This approach continuously challenged the researchers to analyze everyday conflicts grounded in the different perspectives of those involved, the different forms of reasoning, understandings, and standpoints, as well as how the different perspectives are connected through the participants’ engagement in a common matter – providing good schools for children. The article concludes by arguing that the discussed approach to theory development can be linked to a situated concept of generalization.

This article examines a general question about how we in research develop the knowledge we write about and present as ‘result of research’. It scrutinizes research processes as a social practice, where several parties participate, collaborate and learn from a process where researchers involve themselves in exploring specific problems across societal contexts. In this way, the presented discussions can be seen as a critique of tendencies to approach research as an isolated endeavour, where results are produced by applying special methods and techniques that prevent influence from the social world and, in this way, creating knowledge about the world by ‘leaving it’. The article argues for approaching the development of knowledge as a social practice in itself. Research processes transcend different contexts, involve different perspectives, and the researchers seek to analyse connections in a common world by exploring how an explicit problem is connected to social conditions and interplay, thereby achieving a deeper understanding of the problem. In the article, we build on 25 years of practice research projects and involve a specific project as an example in a general discussion of the development of knowledge. Among other things, this project inspired these thoughts because of the following exchange between a researcher and some professionals from the family centre where we were conducting our research (a residential institution for families and children in trouble)

The school as an institution for the education of future citizens is a central site for debate about how to develop a democratic society – and hence for social conflict. Many parties participate in making school what it is. On one hand the school connects these different parties in a shared engagement to make good education for all children on the other hand the different parties are distributed into different tasks and concerns in relation to the school.In this symposium, we have all worked with school problems seen from the involved parties’ different perspectives and the background for our common research project is analyses of the widespread displacement of problems between places and parties. The involved parties (children, teachers, school leader, psychologist, parents) have different perspectives on school problems and discuss for instance whether a problem should be understood related to a child’s family life, a teacher’s competence, the social dynamics in the classroom etc. In psychological investigations of the problems such conflicts are seldom involved explicitly – investigations often focus on pupils’ individual behavior, deficits or shortcomings. In this way, you could say that social problems - and disagreements about them - are displaced to individualized categories. In previous research we have discussed how such categorizations of individual children imply different ways of understanding them and different social conditions for the children in the classroom. We have discussed such processes as situated inequality (Højholt, 2016). In this symposium, we want to focus on the conflicts that at the same time seem to dominate these kind of processes in the school – and to disappear in the terminology about school problems. We want to illustrate how these conflicts relate to societal conflicts about the school. To do so we analyze social situations in the school from different viewpoints through the different presentations you will meet today and Friday in two connected symposiums.

Børneforskere skriver kritisk om det forsvundne børneperspektiv i børnepolitikken og sætter en ny dagsorden