This symposium comes within the framework of NW 27’s special call on the collaboration between researchers and teachers in didactical research. During the two past decades, collaborative research programmes saw a steady increase and have become diversified. Researchers and practitioners (e.g., teachers, cooperating teachers, teacher trainers) engage more and more in participatory action research (Anderson et al., 2015), design-based research (Zheng, 2015), cooperative engineering (Morales, Sensevy & Forest, 2017), lesson and learning study (Dudley, Xu, Vermunt & Lang, 2019; Marton & Runesson, 2015), etc. Relying on different research traditions, these participative types of research are important sources of learning. They are assumed to contribute to practitioners’ professional development as well as to students’ learning through improved teaching sequences and instructional strategies. Researchers’ practices may also be enriched in the context of such collaboration (Savoie-Zajc & Descamps-Bednarz, 2007).

The aim of this symposium is to investigate who gains what within collaboration between researchers and practitioners in didactical research. In the first part of the symposium, relying on four empirical examples from different types of research and different european perspectives, we analyse, discuss, contrast and illustrate the process through which outcomes result from researchers and practitioners’ participation in collaborative research programmes as well as the nature of these outcomes.

The first empirical example comes within the framework of a didactic engineering for development and training. Engaging researchers and teacher trainers in the co-analysis of data produced within a didactic engineering process was supposed to allow the latter to acquire didactical research skills. However, differences between both types of actors in terms of didactical and methodological knowledge has led to unshared ways of analysing data. Through this first empirical example, the authors show how researchers and teacher trainers acted as co-constructors of meaning and how, consequently, they were brought to simplify their co-constructed analysis tool in order to improve inter-analyst reliability.

The second empirical example is based on principles of cooperative engineering, in a case relating to the teaching and learning of geometry in primary school. The author shows how the analysis of teachers and students’ joint actions realised by the researchers was shared in details with the teachers so as to build a common conceptual background. She also shows how the teachers, within the cooperative engineering collective, can provide students with opportunities to develop new geometrical strategies.

The third empirical example draw on two projects (one in Sweden and one in Finland) where action research was used as a methodological ground for the collaboration. The authors show how the way teachers were understanding themselves transformed through the collaboration, as well as how, as researchers, they acquired a better understanding of action research as a method for teachers’ professional learning and practice development.

The fourth empirical example looks at the effects of a participatory intervention research in physical education involving one researcher (the author) and one primary teacher (the co-author). Positive effects resulted from teacher and researcher’s collaboration in terms of setting up an environment and didactic regulations favoring the students’ learning. The authors conclude on the emergence of a hybridation of practices due to the researcher-teacher collaboration.

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