Reconceptualising partnership in ECEC family–professional collaboration as a dynamic concept

In the field of education, it is common to talk about family–professional collaboration as a partnership. In this article, to address more seriously the challenges in practice related to the power balance between early childhood education and care (ECEC) professionals and parents and unclear expectations, roles and responsibilities, we argue for a reconceptualisation of the partnership concept. We draw on the deliberative approach to family–professional collaboration but argue for the need for a clearer distinction between the concepts of roles, positions and relationships. Our position is that even though the desired relationship between ECEC professionals and parents is that of an equal partnership, it nevertheless needs to be understood as a dynamic partnership where parents and ECEC professionals drift in and out of an expert position, which does not pose a threat to the overarching equality in the collaboration. In addition, we argue that certain requirements must be met to establish a dynamic partnership collaboration in practice, including metacommunication about the collaboration, modulating the desired behaviour and acknowledging formal roles and responsibilities, which places a hierarchical collaborative dimension on top of the dynamic partnership. To flesh out this theoretical reconceptualisation of partnership, we use the case of Norwegian ECEC family–professional collaboration as an illustrative example.