NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
Reflections on 40 Years of Partnership
By Joe Farrell, OISE, Toronto
Email: jfarrell@oise.utoronto.caKeywords
Partnership, Chile, education
Summary
Joe Farrell reflects on 40 years of partnership with Ernesto Schiefelbein and provides pointers to why such ?horizontal intellectual collaboration? has been so successful.
Ernesto Schiefelbein and I first met in the summer of 1969 at the University of Chicago. Bob Myers and Arnold Anderson had approached me earlier asking if I might be interested in serving for 18 months in Chile as an ?advisor? in educational planning, under one part of a large USAID grant for education development in Chile. I told them that I was not at all interested in being an ?advisor.? I was ideologically/morally opposed to such North/South advisor-advisee relationships, and in practical terms, what could I as a newly minted PhD possibly ?advise? Ernesto about? They said they didn?t think Ernesto wanted that either. A day-long meeting was arranged for that summer at the U of Chicago. It was clear from the start that Ernesto also had no wish for an ?advisor?. What he was looking for was someone who could work with his planning team in developing an evaluation of the massive educational reform over the previous six years in Chile, and had funding to support the effort. He was looking for someone to help them learn the needed knowledge and skills to do that by working with them collaboratively in designing and carrying out the evaluation study. We would all learn from each other. I would not be called an ?advisor? but an ?associated researcher.? That was a role definition which attracted me, so we agreed, and on Jan. 1, 1970 I arrived in Santiago with my then-young family, and it all began.
The original intellectual/professional partnership grew quickly into personal/familial friendship, all of which has lasted to this day, obviously made easier by the advent of the internet. That original evaluation study went longitudinal, for close to ten years, by a collective combination of technical expertise, political expertise, and good luck, and became finally the largest, longest and most complex such study ever conducted anywhere, to my knowledge. The final publication from it was in 1986. It had a wide range of local and international policy and theory implications, and generated a large number of more detailed research studies in Chile, which have influenced educational policy there, and elsewhere, to this day. And from it there grew a much broader partnership?at one period for eight or so years in the 1980s we had, with IDRC and CIDA support, a team of some 30 OISE faculty and graduate students, and some 50 Chilean researchers, working collaboratively on a wide array of educational research and development efforts, in both nations, producing a long list of co-authored reports and publications in Spanish, English, and French.
And it still carries on. We most recently worked directly together in 2005 in Harvard and 2006 in Colombia, now focusing on a range of partnerships that grew out of that earlier work, with Vicky Colbert and her ?Escuela Nueva team? in Colombia, Malak Zaalouk and the Community Schools program in Egypt, and many others around the world, where we are focusing on understanding how and why radically alternative forms of schooling on a large scale are having dramatic success in improving learning among the most marginalized young people in the world. Each connects to the previous partnership in complex ways. And here we are again.
How and why did this original and long-standing partnership with Ernesto work so well, and grow so many further partnerships? Clearly, Ernesto and I started out ?on the same page? in terms of understanding what such partnerships should be, what I have come to refer to as ?horizontal intellectual collaboration?, and we both worked hard to make that vision continue to happen; we have shared a common commitment to improving learning among the most marginalized peoples; and we were from the start ?simpatico?. And I think we had both sought and found partners who sought and shared the same visions and values, even if we did not necessarily know it fully at the time. And we had immense good fortune, some manipulated and some entirely accidental. (My mother often said to me as I was growing up: ?Good luck consists of being prepared to open the door when opportunity knocks?.) Such I suppose is life. We have been deeply blessed. But it is still a mystery. Un abrazo, querido amigo.
Full contents of NORRAG NEWS 41.
Download the full issue of NORRAG NEWS 41 in pdf.