Conceptualizing collaboration: How teachers work together to support children with deafblindness

Although collaboration is a well-known and encouraged practice in teachers' work to support children with special needs, it is often conceptualized in either a vague or an overly idealized manner. Additionally, there is a dearth of research on how teachers work together and how this collaboration affects critical outcomes related to their working lives. In particular, there is a need for research on collaboration among teachers with various types of expertise and affiliations who educate children with multiple and complex support needs. In this study, I examined the collaborative practice of teachers who support children with deafblindness. The theoretical framework, communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), was used to guide the study and address three aims: (a) to describe how educational teams collaborate to meet the needs of children with deafblindness; (b) to understand how teachers' collaborative practices support or hinder teacher learning; and (c) to understand how teacher collaboration affects perceptions of professional identity.