When We Partner with Teachers: Educators as (Co-)Designers

Abstract

In this special issue, we asked a broad question: what do our designs look like when we partner with teachers? More specifically, we began by acknowledging the fact that our design decisions - the “what has gone into this effort?” - are not always visible in our research publications. The result is a diverse collection of contributing teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers. 

This is the first of two special issues focusing on partnership implementations of instructional designs intended for K-12 classrooms. From an open call for proposals, we invited manuscripts that represented different design approaches, contexts, and products, and gave special attention to those authored or co-authored by teachers. After several rounds of peer review, seven manuscripts were selected for the first issue. In this issue, we have brought together a collection of design cases that reflect a range of science instruction resulting from designing new or re-designing existing curricula to creating web-based virtual rainforest journeys to digital physics games. The authors document details of their design thinking, priorities, and influencers. They discuss implementation considerations and confront tensions that existed between their design ideas and the needs of the learners who would use their instructional products in contexts where resources and constraints cannot always easily be known in advance.