when involved in ITE. Student teachers will, I suggest, experience more coherence
in ITE programmes where there is understanding of and mutual respect for these
different motives, than where it is absent.
37.3 Relational Expertise, Relational Agency
and Common Knowledge in Teachers’Learning
Over the last decade or so, I have drawn on cultural-historical theory to develop the
idea ofrelational expertise, seeing it as a form of expertise which augments one’s
specialist expertise as, for example, a mathematics teacher or university tutor, and
makes responsive collaboration possible (Edwards 2010 , 2012 ). In brief, it involves
the ability: to take the standpoints of potential collaborators; recognise what matters
for them when working on an object of activity such as a learner’s trajectory; make
visible to them what matters for you in the task; jointly expand the interpretation of
the task; and calibrate responses so that you can work together on it. This kind of
work occurs atsites of intersecting practices(Edwards 2010 ), where people from
different backgrounds or practices come together, suggesting that relational
expertise is relevant for institutional collaborations such as school-university
partnerships, for mentor-student teacher encounters and for teachers’interactions
which aim at practice development.
Relational expertise enables the exercise ofrelational agencywhen people work
together on a complex object of activity (Edwards 2010 , 2012 ). Relational agency
involves expanding the interpretation of a phenomenon by bringing to bear the
different expertise or conceptual resources offered by collaborators. This expansion
means that more aspects of the phenomenon are recognised and worked on. The
wider interpretation is then responded to while drawing on the strengths of each
collaborator. In ITE, the phenomenon to be worked on is likely to be the learning
trajectory of a student teacher. The trajectory is likely to be enhanced if teacher
mentor, university tutor and student teacher all bring to bear their knowledge to
interpret its development and to negotiate how to support it.
These interpretations and negotiations are mediated bywhat I have termedcommon
knowledge(Edwards 2010 , 2012 ). The concept of common knowledge developed in
my research on inter-professional collaborations, where I noticed that successful
collaborations were mediated by a resource, which consisted of a mutual under-
standing of the motives of each collaborator. I came to describecommon knowledge as
a respectful understanding of different professional motives, what matters for one as a
professional, which can mediate responsive collaborations on complex problems.
In this sense common knowledge is what most Vygotskians would recognise as
a second stimulus. In brief, thefirst stimulus is the problem or phenomenon being
worked on and the second stimulus is made up of the cultural resources or tools
available to interpret and work on it. The second stimulus provides possibilities for
action and enables an actor to control her behaviour as she tackles the problem.
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