When we imagine school-university partnerships, however, we imagine different ways of working together. We have a different vision of shared responsibility in action. In the brief summary in the next section, we lay out our present stage of development in understanding what we mean by shared responsibility. What Shared Responsibility May Be From our papers and discussions, we see shared responsibility as having some specific attributes. When we say shared responsibility is relational, we mean in part that it develops through and depends on relationships between persons.
Individuals can be responsible but shared responsibility involves relationships.
We seem to mean that people develop partnerships, that the hard work of partnership development occurs in the nitty-gritty interactions among people. We also seem to mean, though, that our understanding of shared responsibility is rooted in some basic regard for each other's humanity and that we cannot share responsibility or move partnership work forward at the expense of each other as persons. Communal Learning to share responsibility means working across organizational and social boundaries because of common interests and purposes. We cast a wide net, hoping for a widely inclusive sense of community. We live and work in the midst of tensions between community and organizations, between communal and organizational responsibilities.