Researchers and professionals

A student welfare group (SWG) can be seen as a special knot in the fabric of different kinds of practices taking place in Finnish schools. In the meetings of SWG professionals come together in order to plan communal development of the school, and, on different occasions, to discuss individual problems that have come into sight in the everyday work of teachers, principals, special educators, and other professionals. Two researchers with a qualification of a psychotherapist participated SWG-meetings for an academic year. In this paper we describe the collaboration between the researchers and professionals whose outgrowth was 1) choosing the advancement of students’ responsibility as a specific common goal of the SWG, 2) a focused discussion on the advancement of student responsibility in the professionals’ everyday work, with the aim of concretizing and sharpening the common goal through focusing on the everyday practices where professionals found that they had succeeded in advancing the students’ responsible action, 3) a further specification of the common goal through brainstorming everyday practices that would enable the group to collaborate more effectively in achieving their goal. Special attention is given to the collaboration between researchers and professionals as a subject-scientific way of conducting research. Further, we describe the collaborative analyses of discussions, as well as tentative results of these analyses.