Exploring teachers’ relational agency in content–language teacher collaboration in secondary science education in Australia

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Exploring teachers’ relational agency in content–language teacher collaboration in secondary science education in Australia

Minh Hue Nguyen¹ · Thi Kim Anh Dang¹

Received: 6 April 2020 / Accepted: 20 October 2020 / Published online: 2 November 2020

Abstract

The mainstreaming of English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) education neces- sitates collaboration between EAL teachers and content teachers to support EAL students’ learning in content areas. A question left open is how EAL and content teachers exercise relational agency through professional dialogue and collaborative practices. The current paper examined this question through the concept of relational agency grounded in sociocultural theory. Data include group interviews with and self-recorded collaborative conversations between an EAL teacher and a science teacher in planning and delivering science content in an Australian secondary school. Findings reveal professional dialogue and collaborative practices created mediational spaces for them to exercise relational agency. They actively worked together on a complex problem and shared motive, built and utilised common knowledge, and drew on relational expertise in responding to the demands of enhancing EAL students’ learning of language and content in the science classroom.

Findings have implications for promoting teacher agency and quality collaboration.

Keywords Relational agency · Sociocultural theory · Teacher collaboration · English-as-an-additional-language · Science education

Introduction

Around the globe, there has been increasing interest in teaching an additional language in conjunction with content through the use of a Content and Language Inte- grated Learning (CLIL) approach (Cross 2012; Johnson and Golombek 2020). CLIL was first developed in Europe over two decades ago and has been emerging in different forms in many international contexts. It was initially defined as “situations

* Minh Hue Nguyen

minh.hue.nguyen@monash.edu

1 Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

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where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught through a foreign language with dual focused aims, namely the learning of content and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language” (Marsh 1994, p. 2). Over the past two decades, it has been adapted, implemented, and reconceptualised in various ways, but the core feature remains constant, namely “an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language” (Coyle et al. 2010, p. 1). Examples of CLIL approaches include content teachers using English to teach their subject and subject specific language, language teachers using a theme-based approach to teach both content and language, and a content teacher and a language teacher collaborating in teaching both content and language. The collaborative CLIL approach mentioned above is the focus of investigation in this Australian study.

The Australian government schooling system has been providing English-as- an-additional-language (EAL) education to a large number of EAL students within mainstream schools (ACARA 2014) in response to “the country’s significant linguis- tic and cultural diversity” (Weeden and Bright 2020, p. 150). In the state of Victoria in 2019, 20% of the government school population is from language backgrounds other than English (Department of Education and Training 2019). Many of these students need support in developing the language skills needed to access the mainstream curriculum and transition to the Australian society. These students, many of whom have little prior schooling and EAL learning experience, study alongside non- EAL students in content classrooms. They follow a CLIL curriculum, which suggests great challenges for EAL students and the need for collaboration between EAL and content teachers in catering for these students’ needs. While such collaboration has been practised in Australia for decades (Arkoudis 2003), formal collaboration models have not been well established and researched in Australia.

Generally, content–language teacher collaboration has been identified as being important but challenging. On the one hand, quality collaboration has been found to be effective in promoting integration of content and language and responding to the needs of EAL learners in the content classroom (Dobinson and Buchori 2016;

Nguyen 2020; Turner 2015). On the other hand, in this collaboration, teachers have different roles and specialist expertise, which may lead to issues related to power relations (Arkoudis 2006). An important issue identified by Creese (2010) is the marginalisation of the language teacher and language students due to the under- mining of the language teacher’s contributions to the partnerships. Content teachers often do not have the language backgrounds or resources and/or confidence to address the language needs of EAL students (Filipi and Keary 2018). Likewise, EAL teachers do not necessarily have the in-depth knowledge and pedagogy in a specific content area. Arkoudis (2003, 2005, 2006) emphasised the importance of teachers’ agency in establishing productive content–language teacher collaboration.

However, a question left open is how content and language teachers exercise relational agency in their boundary collaborative practices (Edwards 2010) to draw on each other’s specialist expertise, collaboratively respond to the complex learning needs of EAL students, and develop professionally as educators. This study adopted an agency framework that involved the inter-related concepts of relational expertise, common knowledge, and relational agency (Edwards 2005, 2011, 2012, 2017) to explore the collaboration between an EAL teacher and a science teacher in teaching

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and supporting EAL students’ learning of science. Edwards’ concepts are useful to

“capture a capacity to recognise, respect and work with the professional motives and therefore what matters in the professional practice of potential collaborators”

(Edwards 2017, p. 8), like in the case of an EAL and a science teacher in this study.

Teacher collaboration, professional dialogue, and agency

Content–language teacher collaboration has been found to positively impact on teachers, teaching, and learning outcomes. For example, Gardner (2006) found that partnerships between mainstream and EAL specialist teachers in teaching a Grade 1 class had a positive influence on the teachers’ classroom practice and relationships. In the process of working together, the teachers developed a greater understanding and appreciation of their respective expertise and role. In terms of learning outcomes, collaboration between language and content teachers has been found to help students achieve success in their learning (Bell and Baecher 2012). EAL and content teachers’ team teaching has been found to be an effective approach to meeting the needs of EAL learners in the content areas (Dobinson and Buchori 2016; Turner 2015).

Previous research has reported characteristics of successful collaboration between content and language teachers. For example, based on teacher participants’ perspectives, Bell and Baecher (2012) found that in effective collaboration, teachers:

(a) plan with the learners in mind while creating unified goals for cohesive instruction, whether pushing in, co-teaching, or pulling out; (b) value each other’s expertise and share ideas, resources, and responsibilities, resulting in enhanced instruction; (c) enjoy equal status and support with each other and with the students; and (d) like working with and learning from others. (p. 505) Unified goals, appreciation of each other’s contribution, equal status, and reliance on each other’s expertise, which are mentioned in the quote above, seem to be commonly highlighted in some other studies as the key ingredients of successful collaboration (Creese 2010; Davison 2006; Nguyen 2020; Premier and Parr 2019;

Zappa-Hollman 2018).

Lacking one or more of these, language–content teacher collaboration can manifest ineffectively (Bell and Baecher 2012; Creese 2010). In the existing relevant literature, equal and respectful relationships are rare since “teachers with different roles are under different pressures in the classrooms and cannot achieve all aims equally” (Creese 2006, p. 437). EAL teachers are often found to be marginalised in this relationship by the content teacher, students, and the broader school community while the content teacher assumes the dominant role of planning and teaching the curriculum to the many (Creese 2010). In highlighting the dangers of positioning the EAL teacher as support teacher and EAL as special needs, Creese (2010) argued that this attitude did not help to develop successful collaboration between EAL and content teachers.

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In such challenging shared working spaces, EAL and content teachers’ ability to negotiate power relations and establish a shared space in working together is instrumental in successful collaborative relationships. In a series of studies on EAL–content teacher collaboration, Arkoudis (2003, 2005, 2006) demonstrated that EAL teachers’ efforts in negotiating a common ground and gaining authority in the content area played a significant role in ensuring the collaboration is productive.

Likewise, content teachers need to recognise EAL teachers’ epistemological authority and value the focus on language (Zappa-Hollman 2018). Further, Pappa et al.

(2019) highlighted the importance of a collegial community whereby teachers could

“discuss CLIL and instructional issues more deeply, co-design and tailor teaching material, complement another’s class (e.g. team teaching), and enhance their con- nection to the teacher community” (p. 601) in supporting teachers’ agency. Arkoudis (2003) suggested that critical in this process were ongoing dialogues between content teachers and EAL specialists, relating to the common goals of catering for the educational needs of EAL learners, so that equal partnerships could be developed.

This sentiment is also echoed in a focus on achieving common goals for teaching and learning in Martin-Beltran and Peercy’s (2012, 2014) studies on EAL and content teachers’ collaboration. Arkoudis (2003) further argued that the processes that sustained professional conversations between EAL and content teachers should be the central concern. Davison (2006) reiterated this argument in emphasising the role of “negotiation of a shared understanding of ESL and mainstream teachers’ roles/

responsibilities” (p. 456).

The literature reviewed above hints towards the important role of professional dialogue and teacher agency in effective collaboration between language and content teachers. The importance of professional conversations and teacher agency in collaborative programs is supported by sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1998), which highlights the role of social interactions in learning and development. In teacher professional development, a sociocultural perspective recognises teachers as actors, who are both influenced by and influencing their professional situations (Johnson and Golombek 2020). In EAL–content teacher collaboration, the roles of the teachers are different from their respective individual roles. In collaborative relationships, where teachers should aim to fuse their individual pedagogical epistemolo- gies (Arkoudis 2005), a third or shared space is created with its distinctive demands on the teachers. In this process, teacher agency allows them to draw effectively on their personal and contextual resources and use these in ways that correspond to the demands of the shared space.

Research aims

The literature shows increasing interest in professional dialogue in EAL and content teachers’ collaboration. Rather than an individualistic enterprise, agency is relational or dialogical (Edwards 2005). However, research that focusses on relational agency through professional dialogue and collaborative practices in CLIL is still scant. To probe into the gaps, this study investigated the collaboration of an EAL teacher and a science teacher in supporting EAL students’ learning in a Year 10

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science classroom in Victoria, Australia. It examined how these teachers exercised relational agency through professional dialogue and collaborative practices in this context. The following research question guided the investigation: How did EAL and science teachers exercise relational agency through professional dialogue and col- laborative practices? To support this investigation, we drew on the concept of rela- tional agency as conceptualised in the following section.

A framework for examining teacher agency through collaboration To investigate the question above, this study adopted the framework of relational agency that involves the inter-related concepts of relational expertise, common knowledge, and relational agency (Edwards 2005, 2010, 2011, 2017) because of their high relevance to the focus of the investigation on teacher collaboration. In her fundamental article on relational agency, Edwards (2005), from an activity theory perspective, defined relational agency as “a capacity to work with others to expand the object that one is working on and trying to transform by recognising and access- ing the resources that others bring to bear as they interpret and respond to the object”

(p. 172). It involves recognising that “work needs to be done to elicit, recognise and negotiate the use of that resource in order to align oneself in joint action on the object” (p. 172). In her later work, Edwards further developed the above concepts

“as gardening tools that have been used to build, nurture and sustain the expertise needed for collaborations across practice boundaries” (Edwards 2017, p. 8), such as those across EAL and science disciplines in this study.

The concept of relational expertise is defined as “a capacity to work relationally with others on complex problems”, which involves “the joint interpretation of the problem as well as the joint response” (Edwards 2017, p. 8). This capacity includes the ability to “(i) recognise the standpoints and motives of those who inhabit other practices and (ii) align motives mutually in interpreting and responding to a problem” (Edwards 2017, p. 8), and the willingness to work with others towards shared motives (Edwards 2011). The concept would be helpful to elucidate if the EAL teacher and the science teacher, who came to the collaboration with different expertise, had the capacity to recognise the standpoints and motives of each other and to align motives mutually in interpreting and responding to their EAL students’ learning needs.

The concept of common knowledge is an important feature of relational expertise (Edwards 2011). It is crucial to understanding if practitioners in collaborations are able to recognise the standpoints and motives of those from other specialised groups. Common knowledge refers to the knowledge of “what matters in each pro- fession, the motives that shape and take forward professional practice” (Edwards 2017, p. 9, emphasis added). In Edwards’ terms, what matters for EAL teachers dif- fers from what matters to content teachers. In building common knowledge, practitioners need to engage actively in professional dialogue and hold shared motives for their collaboration (Edwards 2012). In this study, common knowledge refers to the shared understanding of what matters for the EAL teacher and for the science

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teacher in their respective professional practices in response to the needs of EAL students in science education.

When “action needs to be taken”, relational agency is the third gardening tool for successful responsive collaborations (Edwards 2017, p. 11). The concept is “an attempt to conceptualise what is involved in working with the object motives of other practitioners when both interpreting and responding to a complex problem”

(Edwards 2010, p. 68), such as EAL students’ learning science content in this study.

Relational agency is concerned with both the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ aspects of collaborations (Edwards 2010, p. 68). It “involves working together purposefully towards goals that reflect the motives that shape the specialist expertise of each participant, and using the resources that each specialism can bring to bear” (Edwards 2010, p.

61). From a sociocultural perspective, relational agency “focuses on the interactional aspects of purposeful action and how they are mediated by the common knowledge generated in boundary practices, but it locates those interactions within an understanding of object-oriented activity” (Edwards 2010, p. 64). As such, the concept of relational agency is relevant to this research inquiry on a content–language teacher collaboration model that is aimed at catering for EAL learners’ needs. In Edwards’

terms (2010, p. 67), here the concept helps to explore how the two teachers collaborate to “manipulate” the EAL practices in which they both engaged in order to “propel” them forward in their “intentional actions” to support EAL students’ learning.

Methods

The present study was concerned with how teachers engaged with and made sense of their situated collaborative practices. Therefore, an interpretivist stance was adopted because it enabled the investigation of “meaningful social action, not just people’s visible, external behavior” (Neuman 2011, p. 102). The study used a qualitative case study design (Stake 2006), which allowed for in-depth examination of a small number of teachers’ practices in their natural setting, using multiple data sources. Ethics clearance and permissions for the research were obtained from the authors’ institu- tion, the Victoria State’s Department of Education and Training, and the school’s principal. Informed, voluntary, and written consent was given by the two teachers before data collection commenced.

Following a case study design, two participants were involved, including Anne, a science teacher, and Jane, an EAL teacher (pseudonyms). Anne and Jane had been working in a collaborative relationship for two school terms (i.e. about six months) and would continue for at least two more terms. The collaborating teachers formed the case study, which made it possible for the study to explore their collaborative practices and their interpretation of these in detail. The teachers were purposively selected (Merriam 2009) based on their EAL and content expertise and involvement in an existing formal collaborative relationship. Both teachers worked at a government secondary school in Victoria, Australia. The school had large cohorts of EAL students, and developing literacy was the key focus at the school. In addition to EAL teachers who taught separate EAL classes and provided support for EAL students outside content classes, the school employed three EAL teachers who worked as

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EAL coaches alongside content teachers in supporting EAL and literacy development across the wider curriculum in junior, middle, and senior years, respectively.

Jane was the EAL coach in Years 9–10. She had 30 years of experience as an EAL, LOTE, and Humanities teacher and three years as an EAL coach. Anne had five years of experience teaching science and maths at the school. In the existing collaboration, the participants collaboratively planned and taught the Year 10 science curriculum. Their common goal was to develop literacy and science knowledge for all students including EAL students.

In terms of researchers’ positionality, both authors were external to the school and did not have an existing relationship with the participants, so we were outsid- ers in terms of the collaboration and curriculum. However, we had researched and lectured in EAL teacher education, and the first author had investigated and lectured in EAL–content collaboration. Having these experiences, we also had an insider’s perspective, which we could draw on in our data collection and analysis from an interpretivist perspective (Neuman 2011, p. 102).

This study gathered data on the two teachers’ collaboration in planning and delivering a Year 10 science class over one ten-week school term. The class concerned included predominantly refugee EAL students; the majority of them came from Burma with limited or no prior schooling and beginner literacy in their first language and in EAL. Yet, these students were learning chemistry alongside their non-EAL peers in the Year 10 science class. This paper drew on a data set of 15 collaborative discussions between the two teachers and two semi-structured group interviews. The collaborative discussions were part of the teachers’ practices in the existing collaboration and were initiated by the teachers rather than the researchers. The discussions usually occurred in the classroom before or after lessons or in the staff room during recess. They were self-recorded by the two teachers over the second half of the school term, with each discussion lasting up to five minutes. The group interviews were conducted by the first author at two points in the school term:

one in the middle and the other at the end. The interviews lasted about 60 min each, were conducted in a vacant meeting room at the school, and were audio recorded.

The first interview focused on the teachers’ professional backgrounds and their perceptions of EAL students’ needs in the science class and the role of teacher collaboration in addressing their needs. The second interview was framed more specifically by the theoretical framework, including attention to the concepts of common knowledge, relational expertise, collaborative practices, and professional dialogue.

The questions were asked with reference to the specific curriculum areas, teaching materials, students’ work, and teachers’ notes to elicit data on collaborative goals and activities, individual contributions, and challenges.

The group interviews and collaborative discussions were transcribed and then analysed using qualitative content analysis (Merriam 2009). The two authors per- formed the analysis independently. We first coded data towards themes correspond- ing to the agency framework adopted to identify complex problems, shared motive, relational expertise, common knowledge, and relational agency (Edwards 2010, 2017). In this process, we also identified the mediational role of collaborative practices, professional dialogue, and relational agency in collaboration. We met and discussed our analyses to ensure a high level of agreement in our analyses.

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Findings and discussion

Anne and Jane planned and taught chemistry lessons to a Year 10 class together within their content–language teacher collaboration model. In working together, they demonstrated their relational agency through having a complex problem and a shared motive to jointly scaffold students’ learning of both science and English language, being able to build common knowledge to interpret and understand this complex problem, valued and relationally drew on each other’s expertise to tackle their shared motive.

Having a complex problem and a shared motive

An example of a complex problem the teachers were working on was teaching students how to write practical reports in the third person and past tense. Anne said,

“That is always one thing [science] teachers really struggle with, is students putting the method or procedure and experiments and reports into the correct tense, past tense, third person” (Interview 1). This was what matters to Anne and to science education for Year 10 students, as she said it “is what is needed in science in any school that is what we are instructed to do and especially if they do VCE¹ next year that is what they have to do” (Interview 1). However, Anne was also aware that this complex problem was more than a problem relating to science content only; it is also related to language and commonly faced by science teachers. Here, Anne referred to the Year 10 and VCE science curricula as mediational tools in their collaborative work, along the lines of Martin-Beltrán and Peercy (2012).

Further data showed how their relational agency was demonstrated in their close

‘engagement’ with the complex problem commonly facing EAL students and science teachers and engagement with each other’s expertise to jointly interpret the problem to expand their understanding. The interview extract below reveals how they worked together on the shared motive of catering for their students’ learning needs in learning both language and science content, with a focus on the EAL students:

Well, Anne would tell me ‘this is what I’m doing next’ and […] we would talk about what could we do to cater for the EAL students, how can we break it down, what activities can we include to help them…it was a lot of talking, looking at existing material that we had and what can we do to scaffold the EAL learners or to make it accessible to them. What is it that they need to know by the end of this worksheet, what are the important things, what are the terms or the words that the students will have trouble with and what do we focus on … And then what visuals can we add, what hands-on activities. So we can give them a richer, better understanding of the concepts. (Jane, Inter- view 1)

1 The Victorian Certificate of Education.

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The extract shows that the teachers shared the motive of ‘catering for the EAL students’, both in terms of language, “what are the terms or the words that the students will have trouble with”, and understanding of science, "a richer, better understanding of the concepts”. This shared motive appeared to shape the two teachers’

practices and collaboration, in a way similar to what Martin-Beltrán and Peercy (2012) referred to as sharing “common goals for teaching and learning” (p. 439) identified in the successful EAL and content teacher collaboration in their study. It also reflected “planning with the learners in mind” (Bell and Baecher 2012, p. 505), which is one of the key principles of effective content–language teacher collaboration. These two aspects of language and content were also what mattered to the EAL and science teachers, respectively, in this case. The extract also demonstrated that teaching materials (e.g. worksheet, visuals) played a mediational role in their professional dialogue, collaborative practices, and relational agency. The use of mediating tools has similarly been identified as helping EAL and content teachers make sense of their teaching goals when working together (Martin-Beltrán and Peercy 2014).

The teachers’ relational agency was also demonstrated in their intention for the joint response, knowing the how and why of their actions in navigating the demands of their practices. Through the entire process, both Jane and Anne clearly showed their responsibility to self (actions) and their students, and colleagues, in chang- ing the course of their social practices. In tackling concepts and new words “which would be really difficult for some of these Burmese students to comprehend” (Anne, Interview 2), they were able to help the students with “gradually building their knowledge” (Jane, Interview 2), especially of concepts “that a lot of kids would struggle with, […] even if they’re not EAL” (Jane, Interview 2). This reflects their shared goal and the mediational role of scientific concepts. Their collaborative practices and dialogue had a dialectic relationship with their relational agency. Similar to the findings of Pappa et al. (2019), their collaboration represented resources for relational agency to manifest, and their relational agency mediated their collaboration.

Building and using common knowledge

Working on complex problems and shared motive of enhancing students’ language and science learning, while acknowledging what mattered in each profession, helped to build common knowledge of the complex problem. Anne appeared to be aware of the language demand for writing a practical report in emphasising the use of the past tense: “try and write the procedure in the correct tense, in the past tense, ‘was labelled’, ‘was poured’” (Interview 2). This demonstrates Anne’s greater understanding of the complex learning problem which they are working on, or what Edwards (2010, 2017) called ‘expanded object of activity’, as essential for developing their common knowledge in their collaboration. Such expansion of objective was mediated by the symbolic tools including practical report and associated science language, as well as metalanguage such as ‘verb tense’. This supports the findings from Martin-Beltran and Peercy’s (2014) study on pairs of teachers using tools to

“co-construct their expanding knowledge base” (p. 727). The science teacher’s recognition of the value of a focus on language (Zappa-Hollman 2018) was an essential

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element in their common knowledge which mediated relational agency (Edwards 2011). Throughout their planning dialogues, Anne often invited Jane to make language specialist contribution to the planning before a lesson, and Jane asked Anne about her science teaching ideas and resources. That was an indication of building common knowledge of the complex problem (Edwards 2010). The teachers’ common knowledge seems to resonate to a certain extent with Davison’s (2006) emphasis on the need for a “shared understanding” (p. 456) of language and content teachers’ roles and responsibilities within collaboration. It also echoes the findings of Creese (2006) and Filipi and Keary (2018) alluding to the differing roles of EAL and content teachers, which led to different pressures they faced.

Together Anne and Jane collectively developed their common knowledge, which later became “a resource that can mediate responsive collaborations on complex problems” (Edwards 2017, p. 9). Their joint account of the experience shows their responsive collaboration in working on the identified complex problem. In the first interview, Jane started, “we looked at the language of an experiment, where they had to change the verbs”, then Anne continued, “That worked really well […] when a student does the experiment I give them the instructions then after the experiment they have to write what they did in the past tense”. When Jane, as a language expert, reminded, “then we had to change it to the third person as well”, Anne acknowl- edged her increased understanding of the complex problem: “Yes, third person so there was a lot involved in that” (emphasis added). From their collaborative profes- sional dialogue illustrated above, Anne appeared to expand her understanding of the complex problem she was working on. In this process, the mediating of scientific language and metalanguage was key.

Drawing on relational expertise

It is evident in the data that the teachers’ common knowledge was an important feature of relational expertise which in turn mediated relational agency (Edwards 2011). An example of how the teachers drew on relational expertise in planning for teaching can be seen in the extract below:

Anne: Then some students can go and do the poster and we might target individual students.

Jane: (interrupting) Or these kids, the [EAL] ones, when they get their report back they can look at the marks. […] and see what they can do, what could they have done to improve it.

Anne: That’s a good idea, great, ‘cause then I won’t put any results on Com- pass.

Jane: And then the others complete this with the poster.

Jane: Yeah, perfect. Great, tomorrow’s class done. (Collaborative Discussion 1)

In this extract, Anne suggested that early finishers in the peer marking activity could work on a poster as an extension task, and during this time the teachers could target individual students who had not finished marking. Jane, in turn,

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suggested letting students who were not extension students look at their peer’s feedback and improve their practical report at the end of the peer assessment activity. Anne expressed her interest in Jane’s idea and ended the extract with the affirming statement, “Great, tomorrow’s class done”. This shows that the teachers had drawn on each other’s expertise in their planning and come to a shared plan to meet their common goals. Contrary to the finding that in unsuccessful collaboration, EAL teachers were marginalised as supportive teachers (Creese 2010), the teachers in this study “value[d] each other’s expertise and share ideas, resources, and responsibilities”, which was found to enhance instruction (Bell and Baecher 2012, p. 505). Anne’s use of the pronoun ‘we’ in discussing the lesson plan also implied her view that planning and delivering lessons that met the needs of EAL students were their shared responsibility and goal, and each should contribute to building their relational expertise, which is considered as “needed for collaborative relations” (Edwards 2010, p. 35).

To execute the plan discussed in the extract above, the teachers discussed in detail how each could contribute to the lesson in the following extract:

Anne: So with Student 1 (S1), I might ask you to work one-on-one with S1 because she hasn’t completed this handout.

Jane: Ah, okay.

Anne: And maybe if you can, while we’re going through it, if you wanna work a few things on this? Would that be ok?

Jane: Yeah yeah.

Anne: And then I can do the peer marking (Collaborative Discussion 2)

Here, Anne deliberately asked Jane to work with S1 one-on-one during the lesson because the EAL student had had difficulty completing a previous task. In the meantime, Anne took up the role of managing the peer marking activity with the whole class. This division of labour demonstrated how the teachers lever- aged their individual expertise in delivering their common objective in the lesson, which was found to result in enhanced instruction (Bell and Baecher 2012). It exemplifies how relational agency was mediated by relational expertise developed through the professional dialogue of co-planning. This finding highlights the importance of ongoing professional dialogues between EAL and content teachers where common goals of meeting the needs of learners are central (Arkoudis 2003).

The data also reveal how the shared motive of working on students’ science and language learning was expanded as a result of their professional dialogue and sharing of expertise:

Anne: So today what we’re gonna do is we’re taking the experiment that we did the last day which was comparing metal reactivity. We’re looking at the instructions and we’re gonna use that to write our experiment report. So the students have been given a handout to guide them. So it’s broken down, it’s given headings for them to complete. Then we’re going through it together, what the title is, what the introduction is, which is their aim, they can take the aim or the purpose directly from the handout.

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Jane: It was really good that you modelled the sentence, how to write the hypothesis and you gave them an example so that they can, you gave them the if and then and wrote an example so they can model on that.

Anne: Yes. So hopefully that helped them a little bit. And then, I don’t wanna do it all for them so I’m getting them to write their materials that they used themselves, just guiding them, how many metals did they use, how many metal solutions, do they understand the word ‘solution’, they can see that it’s a liquid and the metal is a solid. And then try and write the procedure in the correct tense, in the past tense, was labelled , was poured (pause). (Collaborative Discussion 15)

The extract above reveals the mutual recognition of expertise in relation to the task of teaching science report writing. This recognition was a starting point for building their relational expertise. Being a science teacher, Anne talked about the standard structure of ‘experiment report’, ‘comparing metal reactivity’, and students’

understanding of scientific language, such as ‘metal solutions’, ‘liquid’, ‘solid’, and

‘solution’, which are what matters in science education. With her expertise as an EAL/language coach, Jane provided her expert insights into Anne’s scaffolding of student learning of the language of experiment reports, commenting "you modelled the sentence, how to write the hypothesis and you gave them an example”.

This extract reflects closely Edwards’ (2017) observation of successful collaboration where “each person recognised what mattered for the other and was able to listen to how the other interpreted the problem and how they were able to respond to it” (p.

11). This finding echoes Bell and Baecher (2012) in that it highlights the need to value each other’s expertise in collaboration between content and language teachers.

The science and language concepts used in the dialogue also served as tools mediating the discussion, collaborative practices, and thus relational agency.

How relational expertise mediated the teachers’ relational agency is further demonstrated in the group interview extract below:

Jane: Yeah we spoke a little bit about the writing as well, that’s where I spoke about the scaffolding, giving them cloze exercises, giving them things in order.

We looked at the language of an experiment, where they had to change the verbs .

Anne: That worked really well […] When a student does the experiment I give them the instructions then after the experiment they have to write what they did in the past tense so Jane gave me some really good strategies of, the students first identified the verbs and then convert the verbs into the past tense . Jane: Yeah, and then we had to change it to the third person as well.

Anne: Yes, third person so there was a lot involved in that but that is what is needed in science in any school that is what we are instructed to do and especially if they do VCE next year that is what they have to do. (Interview 1).

This extract exemplifies how the EAL and science teachers demonstrated their relational expertise through showing their “capacity to work relationally with others on complex problems” involving “[their] joint interpretation of the problem as well as [their] joint response” (Edwards 2017, p. 8). An account of their joint aligned

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response was reported using ‘we’ as in “we said you have to use the information you have here, highlight the verbs” (Jane). Jane’s use of the pronoun ‘we’ implied her view that planning and delivering lessons to meet the needs of EAL students were their shared motive, and each should contribute to building their relational expertise.

It was also demonstrated in Anne’s account, which emphasised an appreciation of the EAL teacher’s expertise in their coordinated response:

Jane gave me some really good strategies of the students first identified the verbs and then convert the verbs into the past tense” and “so that’s a really good strategy that Jane has given me for that, I will use now forever. It was brilliant. (Interview 1)

This recognition of their respective expertise was consonant with Gardner’s (2006) study on the positive partnership between mainstream and ESL specialist teachers.

The data discussed in this section have demonstrated clearly their relational agency when they worked “together purposefully towards goals that reflect the motives that shape the specialist expertise of each participant” (Edwards 2010, p.

61). Both Jane and Anne were aware of the rationale behind the process of having students highlighting the verbs, “us[ing] the same information, chang[ing] the verbs into the past tense, chang[ing] the verbs into the third person” (Interview 1) to achieve the intentional outcomes of the students being “able to use the right gram- mar in their method” (Interview 1). In Edwards’ (2010) terms, their collaboration reflected a strong sense of relational agency when both the why and the how aspects of collaborations were clearly shown. Within the literature, Arkoudis’ work (2003, 2005, 2006) also implicitly highlighted the need for both EAL teachers and content- area teachers to exercise relational agency in working towards the common goals of catering for the educational needs of EAL learners.

From a Vygotskian perspective, the findings also demonstrated how these two teachers worked together “to manipulate the social practices in which they engaged in order to propel [them] forward in [their] intentional actions” (Edwards 2010, p.

67) in responding to their EAL learners’ needs. Together they changed the common practices in working with EAL students, as reflected in Jane’s account: “Instead of saying to them just go off and write the method, we said you have to use the informa- tion you have here, highlight the verbs” (Interview 1). This account shows that the teachers not only focussed on the science content but also on deliberate teaching of language (i.e. verbs). Together they also worked on a ‘sticky problem’ facing many science teachers in teaching the method.

Conclusions and recommendations

The paper has reported on a case study on teachers’ relational agency in collaboration involving a science teacher and an EAL teacher in a Year 10 science class in Australia. The study drew on Edwards’ concept of relational agency (Edwards 2005, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2017) and used qualitative data from two group interviews and 15 planning conversations. The analysis revealed that both teachers exercised relational

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agency through developing and utilising relational expertise and common knowledge in responding to the complex problem posed by the shared motive of enhancing the learning of EAL students in the science classroom.

The teachers’ collaboration created shared mediational spaces for professional dialogue, collaborative practices, and relational agency. On the one hand, their professional dialogue and collaborative practices mediated their relational agency.

Specifically, through their professional dialogue enabled by dialogic planning talks and group interviews, and the collaborative practices of planning and teaching, the teachers negotiated a shared motive and identified a complex problem that mattered to them both. Both teachers recognised that EAL literacy and disciplinary knowledge were inter-related domains of knowledge necessary for the learners to develop in order to achieve their educational goals. In this process, they each also recognised the resources and expertise the other could offer and engaged in professional dialogue, collaborative planning and teaching to access each other’s resources and build their common knowledge and relational expertise (Edwards 2005). On the other hand, the elements of relational agency – shared motive, common knowledge, and relational expertise (Edwards 2010, 2011, 2012, 2017), in turn, mediated the teachers’ professional dialogue and collaborative planning and teaching. The teachers were able to draw on their common knowledge and relational expertise to collaboratively and dialogically tackle the complex problem and shared teaching goals to develop EAL literacy and science knowledge. In this process, their individual objec- tives were expanded to jointly focus on both science content and language.

In addition, the data demonstrated other forms of mediation within the above- mentioned shared mediational spaces. Similar to Martin-Beltrán and Peercy (2012), the present study found that the curriculum, together with teaching material and lesson plans derived from it, were found to mediate the teachers’ collaborative dialogue and relational agency. Similarly, symbolic tools such as language of professional dialogue, metalanguage, and science language also served as key mediational tools in these shared spaces. Moreover, how the teachers positioned themselves and each other in their collaboration also had a mediational role. In this study, the teachers engaged in a formal partnership with clearly defined roles and equal footing (Nguyen 2020; Zappa-Hollman 2018). Their power relationship was manifested dif- ferently from the findings in many previous studies which reported on less desirable collaborations between EAL and content teachers (e.g. Arkoudis 2006; Creese 2010;

Davison 2006; Zappa-Hollman 2018). Both the EAL coach and science teacher here demonstrated that they were “sustaining a core expertise alongside the more relational demands of developing the common knowledge that will mediate inter-professional interactions in the heat of action” (Edwards 2010, p. 61). This positioning enabled the teachers to activate and leverage their own expertise, while at the same time making use of each other’s expertise and establishing relational expertise. This has been found to be an important stance in content–language teacher collaboration (Bell and Baecher 2012; Creese 2010; Davison, 2006). Contrary to the finding that in unsuccessful collaboration, EAL teachers are marginalised as supportive teachers (Creese 2010), the teachers in this study “value each other’s expertise and share ideas, resources, and responsibilities”, which is a precursor to enhanced instruction (Bell and Baecher 2012, p. 505).

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The findings offer implications for promoting teacher relational agency in partnerships and effective language–content teacher collaboration. Firstly, the study rec- ommends that teachers should be empowered to position as equal in collaboration.

This can be achieved through a dual-focus CLIL approach that involves both language and content teachers (Coyle et al. 2010) and the formalisation of collaboration (Dobinson and Buchori 2016; Nguyen 2020), which allows the EAL teacher to gain authority in the mainstream classroom. In this study, the teachers were involved in a formal collaborative relationship where the EAL teacher was positioned as an expert/coach in EAL and literacy and was allocated time to work alongside the content teacher specialised in science. Their collaboration was planned and structured rather than ad hoc, and their roles were clearly understood. However, these conditions are not commonly available to many teachers working in CLIL, resulting in unsuccessful collaboration, as reported in the literature (Bell and Baecher 2012;

Creese 2010).

Secondly, attempts to promote teacher relational agency and effective language–content teacher collaboration may need to consider the affordances of contextual conditions in orchestrating fruitful EAL–content language teacher collaboration.

It is beyond the scope of this study to examine the broader school context where these teachers worked. However, their structured collaboration over an extended time period, which may attribute to their school’s focus on developing students’

literacy due to large EAL student cohorts and its positioning of EAL teachers as expert/coach, suggests an important role the school context played in mediating the teachers’ collaboration – a kind of collaboration not often observed in other studies in CLIL. Notably, empirical research on language teacher education has identified the shaping role of the broader macro-meso-micro contexts on teachers’ collaboration (e.g. Dang 2017).

Thirdly, the study suggests providing professional development for pre-service teachers and in-service teachers in the area of language–content teacher collaboration (Dobinson and Buchori 2016; Turner 2015). Important in these professional development activities is the awareness about and strategies for developing strong relational agency, effective collaborative practices, and productive professional dialogue. In this study, both teachers learned to develop a nuanced understanding of the complex problem of CLIL and build their common knowledge and relational expertise in order to work collaboratively to support EAL student learning. As they were working together on their student learning and had opportunities for ongoing reflection and collaborative professional dialogue about their practices, whether via the group interviews or planning meetings, they were agentively engaged in ongoing development of themselves as teachers of EAL students in secondary science through the process.

Although this paper has reported a case of a successful collaborative relationship, the study is not without its limitations. One of these is the involvement of only one pair of collaborating teachers in a specific context. This means the research results are not readily generalisable to other teachers and contexts. We instead provided a detailed description of the research setting, participants, and data collection and analysis processes to help readers determine the degrees of pertinence to their contexts. Moreover, although dialogic data were central to this research on professional

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dialogue, collaboration, and relational agency, we acknowledge the possibility that the teachers’ power differentials might have impacted upon the group interview data.

We tried to reduce this possibility by asking questions that invited descriptions and perceptions based on curriculum and teaching materials during the group interviews and asking the participants to self-record their existent co-planning conversations over half a school term to use as a cross-reference. In relation to this potential issue, we recommend future research use individual interviews to provide a more private space to explore more critical issues, such as conflicts and emotions, which teachers may otherwise not feel comfortable discussing in a group interview.

Finally, we believe that the research design provided opportunities for professional dialogue and a supportive environment for teachers to reflect on and construct their relational agency to act on the demands of teaching EAL in this collaborative relationship. The research involved the recorded planning conversations and group interviews based on relevant documents as stimuli. This way, we believe the research benefited the participants and was part of their collaborative practice and outcomes.

To build on this study and the relevant literature, we recommend future research tap into the personal dimensions (e.g. pedagogical beliefs and emotions) and contextual dimensions of collaboration (e.g. formal collaboration policy and management support), and how these shape teachers’ relational agency in collaboration. It would also be useful to examine how the professional knowledge needed for collaboratively teaching EAL students in mainstream classrooms is distributed between collaborators and how they negotiate such knowledge distribution.

Acknowledgments We thank the participating school and teachers for their support and cooperation in this research. This research was funded by Faculty of Education, Monash University under the ECR research grant scheme.

Funding This work was funded by an ECR Research Grant awarded to the first author.

Data Availability The data can be made available to the editorial team in de-identified form upon request.

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Conflict of Interest There is no financial interest or benefit that has arisen from the direct applications of this research

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Minh Hue Nguyen is a Lecturer in TESOL Education, Monash University. Her research, supervision, teaching, and engagement are in the areas of teacher education, especially in TESOL curriculum and pedagogy. Her current research projects are in the areas of content–language teacher collaboration, men- toring, teacher/learner agency, and professional identity.

Thi Kim Anh Dang is Senior Lecturer in TESOL and Languages Education at the Faculty of Educa- tion, Monash University (Australia) and Senior Fellow (Higher Education Academy, UK). Her research focuses on teacher learning in collaborative settings, especially regarding professional identity and agency, English-medium-instruction, educational policy, and sociocultural activity theory.