Negotiating professional expertise: Hybrid educators’ boundary work in the context of higher education-based teacher education

Abstract

Researchers and policymakers advocate the need to establish stronger relations between schools and universities in teacher education, but we know little about micro-level practices that professionals engage in to forge connections between these domains. Analytically foregrounding hybrid educators in Norway, this article goes beyond metaphors of “building bridges” by providing nuanced accounts of how expertise is negotiated through boundary work in higher education. The analyses demonstrate how perceptions of a “hierarchy” dictate whose knowledge matters when and in what ways and show the importance of recognising expertise as differentiated and as mobilised or silenced through participation in specific professional practices.