Chapter 19: Synergies of Collaboration: Creating Brave Spaces

This is a retrospective article on work since our initial collaborations as graduate students in the 1980s at the University of Illinois. Alan Peshkin, our faculty mentor, created the “Fat Data Group” and invited a half dozen doctoral students to share and respond to each other’s research and writing. Our work together in that setting inspired us to re-create our individual conference papers into a woven presentation. More than four decades later, our collaboration continues. Here we reflect upon ways collaborations have unfolded in our professional lives. Even though our settings differed, what keeps the link among us alive is our collaborative impulse.

In this chapter, Corrine’s focus is on collaborations that centered arts-based approaches within and beyond the graduate classroom. Carolyne elaborates on connections between an urban school and a university classroom, producing a collaborative journal with doctoral students, and a partnership with Hopi and Navajo teachers in culturally-responsive education. A middle school curriculum inspired Colleen’s multi-year teaching of an undergraduate social justice course about young people as activists in the Civil Rights Movement, one that brought middle schoolers, undergraduates and Civil Rights elders together.

All our approaches worked to create a sense of community that nurtured care and belonging among participants. What we learned through our early collaborations, we have adapted to different contexts, including and extending faculty collaborations. Our experiences echo Peshkin’s original collaborative model of sharing and giving feedback and expand beyond it.