AusTEr – Pedagogical responsibilities in multiprofessional cooperation in Swiss all-day schools

Several studies have confirmed that multi-professional cooperation (Fischer et al., 2013; Olk, Speck & Stimpel, 2011) influences the optimization of organizational processes at all-day schools. Furthermore, it relieves teachers and strengthens the self-perception of their profession. Finally, it facilitates a successful development of all-day schools.
However, multi-professional cooperation is also described as a field of tension (Merten / Kaegi 2015) and high expectations are placed on a fruitful cooperative culture of teachers, social work staff and third-party providers at all-day school.
The present symposium focuses on two aspects of multi-professional cooperation: First, we examine the meaning and understanding of professional cooperation from the perspective of the involved professionals on an abstract level. Second, on a concrete level, we consider the arrangement, the design and experience in all-day schools gained so far.
Based on four research papers from Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and USA with qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches, the two aspects mentioned above are addressed and discussed. The city of Zurich is the first Swiss municipality, which has started to introduce comprehensive all-day schools. The SNSF research project AusTEr examines processes of negotiating pedagogic responsibilities in multi-professional teams in the transformation of regular schools to all-day schools in the city of Zurich. This second contribution is based on the assumption that multi-professional cooperation does not gain relevance simply because of proximity in space, but because it is a declared goal to build strong partnerships between educators and teachers.