In an increasingly complex and changing world, education systems face great difficulties in meeting new challenges. These difficulties result in particular from a gap between theory and practice, between research and teaching. Educators rely little on research findings to inform their practices, and researchers conduct research that takes too little account of the realities on the ground. This symposium aims to discuss how this gap can be bridged and how relationships between researchers and practitioners can be rethought to enable the development of collaborative research such as Design Based Research (DBR) (Sanchez & Monod-Ansaldi, 2015) or Collaborative Engineering (CE) (Sensevy, Forest, Quilio, & Morales 2013).

This symposium will allow researchers engaged in work that falls within the scope of DBR and CE to compare their approaches. We will discuss how practitioners can be involved in the research. What conditions should be taken into account? What are their roles? The symposium will also be the opportunity to discuss the methods carried out. What instruments does the research use? What types of data are collected? Finally, the epistemological foundations of the collaborative design paradigms will be discussed. To what extent can a result from a DBR or CE be considered as scientific?
This symposium will bring together Swiss, French and Canadian researchers involved in the COST ENCoRE Action (European Network for Collaborative Research in Education).

Sanchez, E., & Monod-Ansaldi, R. (2015). Recherche collaborative orientée par la conception. Un paradigme méthodologique pour prendre en compte la complexité des situations d’enseignement-apprentissage. Education & Didactique, 9(2), 73-94. Sensevy, G., Forest, D., Quilio, S., & Morales , G. ( 2013). Cooperative engineering as a specific design-based research. ZDM, the International Journal of Mathematics Education, 45(7), 1031-1043.