'Working with' as a methodological stance: collaborating with students in teaching, writing, and research

Using critical ethnography guided by cultural sociology, this paper examines the role of `co' in teacher education; coresearching, coteaching, and cogenerating dialogue. The authors are a pre-service teacher and a college instructor, and through our multiple perspectives and positionings, we explore how collaboration served to dismantle teacher-student hierarchies and replaced them with complex relationships mediated by polysemic approaches to research. Pushing against traditional ideologies, we utilize a multi-voiced approach to writing as we present our experiences and interpretations of data relative to the possibilities of collaboration in education and research. As we analyze our role in collaborative endeavors, we ask: How can we find ways to work across and around hierarchical institutional structures when working with our students? What are ways that we can examine our individual lived experiences together, and is it possible to work with each other to develop identities as teachers that are not predicated on power differentials?