In this paper we present an ongoing design-based-research (DBR) (Euler, 2014) project taking place in Switzerland. The school improvement project has the aim to improve students’ learning within schools through student participation. School improvement processes should be shaped through the cooperation between teachers, students and researchers – so the expectation of the project.

The idea that researchers, especially in social sciences, are not neutral observer of social phenomena, but they always have to be aware of the fact that they are part of it, is not new (e.g. Vogd, 2011). Researchers following the DBR approach go even further: They assume that gaining knowledge requires active engagement within the studied social space (Sloane, 2017). This assumption has outreaching consequences for research projects: the research process is not designed in advance but in an ongoing process in cooperation with school members and students. In the same time researchers are not only observing school processes but they engage actively in those processes. Both students and researchers are not usually considered as active actors in school improvement processes. The presentation aims to describe first this process of the first project year, showing which steps were undertaken to allow for this teacher-student-researcher collaboration and second report on the experiences and irritations that occurred.

The study is embedded in school improvement research dealing with the question, how do schools change. Change processes are seen as not entirely steerable or predictable (Spillane et al., 2002), where organizational routines play an important role. On the one hand, organizational routines can make changes difficult (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991), but on the other hand, routines can also be transformed and thereby be responsible for changes in organizations (Feldman & Pentland, 2003). The practice theory deals intensively with this special and apparently contradicting nature of routines and tries to propose a differentiated understanding of change: “social life consists of practices, more precisely, of practice arrangement bundles, it follows that social change is the emergence of significant differences in practice arrangement bundles” (Schatzki, 2019, p. 16). Although practices are understood as a bundle of actions reproducing itself again and again, those bundles of actions are never identically performed (Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 2016).

The practice theoretical perspective and DBR share the assumption that practices are primarily grounded upon incorporated, implicit, and shared knowledge which the individuals themselves are not aware of (Polanyi, 1985). The goal of DBR and also of the practice theory is to better understand and reconstruct this implicit knowledge underlying practice.

On the background of school improvement research, we ask how school practice changes or persists, if participating schools work together with students and researchers. The questions we examine in this contribution are: How do teachers, students and researchers cooperate in a school improvement project in four different schools? How were the processes shaped? What experiences and irritations occurred during the first project year?

We will present results from the first year of a design-based-research project, conducted with four secondary schools in Switzerland. First, we will illustrate which forms of cooperation were established within the project. We analyze and compare the planned steps of the process according to the research proposal with the accurate process documentation of the implemented steps. Second, we go into deeper analyses of team meetings and aim to investigate meetings where researchers, teachers, and students take part. Meetings are not only a central part of this collaboration but show how partners refer to different types of knowledge.

Using the project documentation we will illustrate process characteristics of the collaboration between teachers, students, and researchers. We will report how in-advance planned structural and process features had to be changed during the implementation phase. We will also show difficulties in negotiating roles and topics within the school improvement process. Furthermore, we will refer to experiences demonstrating that partici-pation of students and researchers requires a high level of openness und flexibility, which cannot be foreseen. We will also discuss how irritation caused by unexpected and unpleasant results can be overcome within the process and turned into productive collaboration. Coming back to the theoretical framework, we will discuss these preliminary results considering changes within schools, which are possibly “significant differences in practice arrangement bundles” (Schatzki, 2019, p. 16) and also show where school practice remains persistent.

Euler, D. (2014). Design-Research – a paradigm under development. In D. Euler & P. F. E. Sloane (Eds.), Design-Based Research (pp. 15–44). Franz Steiner. Feldman, M. S., & Pentland, B. T. (2003). Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48(1), 94–118. https://doi.org/10.2307/3556620 Polanyi, M. (1985). Implizites Wissen. Suhrkamp. Powell, W. W., & DiMaggio, P. (Eds.). (1991). The New institutionalism in organizational analysis. University of Chicago Press. Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243–263. Schatzki, T. (2016). Praxistheorie als flache Ontologie. In H. Schäfer (Ed.), Praxistheorie. Ein soziologisches Forschungsprogramm (pp. 29–44). transcript. Schatzki, T. (2019). Social change in a material world. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Sloane, P. F. E. (2017). ‘Where no man has gone before!’ – Exploring new knowledge in design-based re-search projects: A treatise on phenomenology in design studies. EDeR. Educational Design Research, 1(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.15460/eder.1.1.1026 Spillane, J. P., Reiser, B. J., & Reimer, T. (2002). Policy Implementation and Cognition: Reframing and Re-focusing Implementation Research. Review of Educational Research, 72, 387–431. Vogd, W. (2011). Systemtheorie und rekonstruktive Sozialforschung: Eine Brücke (2., erw. und vollst. über-arb. Aufl). Budrich.