Synergistic co-teaching: Surfacing the invisible flows of dramaturgy in practice in initial teacher education

Global disruptions in higher education provide further impetus to recent calls for fundamental changes in initial teacher education (ITE) curricula and pedagogies. This video-based Interactional Ethnography of on-campus co-teaching practices aims to surface the ‘invisible flows’ of co-teaching as social interaction. The micro-etnhographic discourse analysis of four interaction units across a 2-hour teaching session and a video stimulated recall interview revealed that the co-teachers used intertextual references to signal shared understandings while engaging their ITE students in preparation for a Capstone assessment. Drawing on Goffman's (1959) seminal work in dramaturgical sociology, the joint close micro-analyses of classroom talk, actions, disciplinary expertise and professional histories made transparent how, as a team, the co-teachers relied on their bond of reciprocal dependence and familiarity to gain intersubjectivity. When a disruption arose, they synergistically demonstrated the defensive attributes and practices of a dramaturgical team constitutive of circumspection, discipline, and loyalty as they (re) formulated their planned lesson and co-operatively maintained their common learning goals. This process enabled them to demonstrate a different type of co-teaching pedagogical practice, which we propose as synergistic co-teaching.