The key question we address in this paper, is how transdisciplinary collaboration between educational researchers, teachers, school coaches, and sustainability content experts can serve as a driver for capacity-building and education innovation. More specifically, we investigate how transdisciplinary, co-productive workshops can help to overcome obstacles for designing and performing high-quality open schooling on sustainability issues. Such teaching and learning practices where schools, in cooperation with other stakeholders, contribute to community wellbeing and sustainability, confront teachers with professional challenges as they involve a disturbance of teachers’ habitual ways of thinking and acting (Van Poeck et al. 2021). In this paper, we focus on four specific kinds of difficulties teachers experience in open schooling practices that have been identified in earlier research (Jornet et al. 2021): 1) difficulties to design lessons starting from a sustainability challenge – related to the disturbed habit of using the curriculum as a driver for lesson planning; 2) difficulties to plan lessons that take students along in an authentic quest for solutions – related to the disturbed habit of teaching as lecturing; 3) difficulties to plan lessons while not yet fully knowing what students’ input will be – related to the disturbed habit of ‘being prepared’; and 4) experiencing a lack of content expertise – disturbing teachers’ habit of being knowledgeable about the subject content.

The theoretical background underpinning our study is a transactional learning theory (Östman et al. 2019a) based on the pragmatist work of John Dewey (1916, 1938). Learning is in this theory understood as being incited by a so-called ‘problematic situation’ in which our habitual ways of thinking and acting are disturbed. This is grounded in the pragmatist assumption that, in everyday life, we mainly act without reflecting. Reflection, and hence learning, first starts when our environment disturbs such habits. Sometimes we can easily solve problematic situations with the help of existing habits. Learning then results in consolidating and enriching the habit. But sometimes the problem is harder to resolve and requires what Dewey calls an ‘inquiry’: through experimentation one tries to solve the problem which results, if successful, in new knowledge, skills, values, identities, etc. Learning can in this case result in a substantial transformation of habits or even the start of a new habit.

We draw on this transactional learning theory to approach teachers’ and other workshop participants’ continued professional development (CPD) and the collaborative process of education innovation in the studied case. It offers a useful framework to investigate how the disturbance of teaching habits, incited by the introduction of a new open schooling methodology (LORET – Locally Relevant Teaching), can foster both reflexive CPD and creative didactic innovation. Thereby, we are particularly interested in how fruitful learning in view of these two purposes can be facilitated. Our object of study is therefore the design and performance of the workshops in which educational researchers, teachers, school coaches, and sustainability content experts collaborate to co-produce LORET-based open schooling practices. Our analyses focus on how the workshop facilitators’ (i.c. educational researchers) actions – both while preparing and while implementing the workshops – affect the participants’ CPD as well as the collaborative education innovation outcomes. The presented case study took place in a Belgian primary school where the teachers and principal decided to establish a LORET-project focused on the issue of biodiversity and collaborated with didactic researchers, Ecoschool coaches, and a biodiversity centre to design the open schooling practices.

Our analytical approach is designed in order to open-up the black-box of the ‘dramaturgy of facilitating learning’ (Van Poeck and Östman 2022). Inspired by so-called ‘dramaturgical analysis’ (Feldman 1995, Hajer 2005, Nahuis 2009), this transactional analytical framework uses metaphors derived from dramaturgy to understand and investigate how what people do, is determined by the setting in which they do it – and vice versa. We focus on concrete actions of the workshop facilitators, i.e. on what they do both in the preparation of workshops and in the actual implementation. Participants’ learning – i.e. their CPD and the education innovation outcomes – is thus seen as being influenced by the setting facilitators create for it. How participants act within and upon that, simultaneously and reciprocally (‘transactionally’) influences the setting. With a dramaturgical lens, we approach facilitating learning in terms of ‘scripting’, ‘staging’, and ‘performance’ (Van Poeck and Östman 2022). Scripting involves formulating purposes for the learning process and determining participants’ roles. It concerns choices regarding objectives, determining who will participate, how participants are expected to behave, etc. Staging involves creating activities through designing a learning environment, a ‘scene’, in which certain objects/phenomena are brought to the participants’ attention as well as designing tasks through which they actively engage with the objects of attention. It is about choosing content, arranging/equipping the room, giving instructions, organising subgroups, planning the time to be spent on tasks, etc. In the performance, the prepared activities are put into practice. Facilitators’ interventions – ‘moves' (Östman et al. 2019b) – help guide the participants’ learning. These moves can either add something to the participants’ attentiveness, steer the learning process in a certain direction, or deepen it. Acts of scripting, staging and performance have an important influence on what participants learn as they direct the participants’ attention to certain things (and thus not to – or even away from – other things) and give direction to how the participants get to work with the object brought to their attention. This affects the inquiry that drives learning and, thus, influences how participants overcome problematic situations related to disturbed habitual ways of thinking and acting. Our transactional, dramaturgical analysis of the workshops thus allows us to reveal what participants learn in terms of overcoming obstacles and didactic innovation, how they learn from each other, and how facilitators' interventions and the created setting influence the learning process and outcomes.

Our findings reveal how the transdisciplinary and co-productive design of the workshops unlock valuable potential for CPD and creative didactic innovation. Both bringing together educational researchers, teachers, school coaches, and sustainability content experts, and doing so with the explicit ambition to collaboratively create useful, practical products (i.c. lesson plans and teaching materials) proved to be fruitful in view of overcoming difficulties teachers experience while trying to implement open schooling practices. We illustrate with excerpts of the workshop transcripts how: • the tools used in the workshops for creating lesson plans and teaching materials, both in the preparatory assignments and through exercises during workshops, helped participants to plan lessons starting from a sustainability challenge instead of from the curriculum as well as to take the students along in a problem-solving process instead of providing them with all answers through lectures; • the interventions of the workshop facilitator encouraged the participants to move away from providing solutions themselves towards designing lessons that invite students to generate these; • the biodiversity experts of an environmental education centre not only helped teachers to overcome a lack of knowledge on the topic but also provided them with a tailor-made biodiversity analysis of the school’s environment which inspired them to select and specify a locally relevant problem for their students to work with and to design lessons that take the students along in an authentic quest for solutions; • the Ecoschool coaches offered the teachers numerous suggestions and recommendations ranging from existing projects and teaching materials, possible partners, material and financial resources, etc. but also stimulated collegial learning beyond the boundaries of one specific school by sharing exemplary practices from other schools and illuminated links between working with real-world sustainability issues and realising curriculum goals.

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