Investigating the Processes of Teacher and Researcher Empowerment and Learning in Co-design Settings

Abstract Discussions about power have only recently begun to appear in the learning sciences literature. Most of this important work takes a critical perspective; the present work complements these efforts by examining power sharing as a catalyst for empowerment in teacher-researcher co-design. Even though teacher-researcher collaborations are discussed in the literature as contexts for empowerment, less is known about the processes that enable empowerment and their connection to learning. This case study examined co-design interactions to identify processes and conditions of empowerment in the context of designing a module to integrate Responsible Research and Innovation in elementary school science education. The co-design team consisted of seven in-service science teachers and one researcher. The main data corpus included ten face to face and online co-design meetings of over 13 hours of video, supplemented by co-design documentation, teacher interviews, and survey data. The analysis of the co-design interactions identified facilitating conditions for supporting power sharing during the co-design, which attended to socio-structural conditions to support the co-design activities and included the anticipation of real-world impact through classroom implementations. Findings suggest that teacher and researcher empowerment develop through power sharing which helps increase access to information and resources and the development of knowledge and skills, thus enabling teachers to make decisions on what and how to teach and researchers to provide just-in-time support.