4 Learning to partner while partnering – performing and exemplifying partnerships

Problems shared can be resolved

It is important not to see partnership as always warm and cosy. Just a short reflection will identify partnerships that have not succeeded or that have taken a great deal of work to establish and/or to keep going. Häggström and Schmidt (2022) suggest that partnerships will only succeed where the complexity, sharp edges, fuzziness and contradictions which constitute a shared situation are embraced. Just as Freeth and Caniglia (2020) showed that sustainability researchers learned best to collaborate while collaborating, learners will only learn the skills and understandings that are necessary to be an effective partner in a collaborative learning partnership. Collaborations can be spaces that comprise epistemic, social, symbolic, spatial, and temporal dimensions and that produce different degrees of comfort and discomfort in those that participate in them.

In creating the conditions necessary for learning to take place within a partnership, learners will also need to pay attention to the feeling of discomfort and risk which are experienced in any space where learning takes place. When learners are developing their understanding of how partnerships work, how to be a partner and how to learn within that partnership they will, of necessity, make mistakes, feel they could have done better and experience failures in some way. Sometimes the partnership itself will be at risk of failure because of lack of commitment, ineffective structuring of the partnership or because an important part of the partnership is unable to fulfil their commitments for some good reason. Therefore, recognition of the risks that learners take in entering that learning space is necessary, as is support to overcome any negative or uncomfortable feelings and when learning from the discomfort of making mistakes.