Co-teaching and co-research in contexts of inequality

Abstract

There has been a recent surge of interest in the concept of co-teaching across institutions of HE, globally and locally, as a response to limited international mobility due to COVID-19. Traditionally, co-teaching emerged in fields such as teacher education, where pre-service teachers had to practice team teaching as part of their postgraduate training (Guise et al., 2017). More recently, coteaching has been introduced as a response to the massification of access to HE (Morelock et al., 2017), but also in the context of internationalisation and globalisation. For this book, however, we use a broader definition of coteaching (and co-research) following Murphy and Martin (2015), who see coteaching as “two or more teachers teaching together, sharing responsibility for meeting the learning needs of students, and, at the same time, learning from each other” (emphasis added). We see co-teaching and co-research as teaching and research that connects educators and learners across different institutions and different contexts, be it across South Africa, Africa or the world. We very deliberately linked co-teaching and co-research to the term ‘networked learning’, following the Networked Learning Editorial Collective’s (2021) emphasis on relationships and collaboration rather than technology and foregrounding our strong commitment to social justice.