European Commission promotes equity, social cohesion, and active citizenship for improving the overall quality and efficiency of education systems (European Union). While appreciating this vision, education systems like Finland have used co-creation for developing its national education policy (Lähdemäki, 2019).

Curriculum co-creation is an innovative and inclusive process of curriculum design in which different stakeholders, such as students, staff members, school leaders, or parents become partners in the process of curriculum development. Bovil et al. (2020) defines it as a collaborative, reciprocal process of curriculum development in which all participants can contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same ways, to curricular or pedagogical conceptualization, decision making, implementation, investigation, or analysis. Key benefits of this process include enhanced engagement and motivation; bolstered meta-cognitive awareness, a strong sense of identity; influx of fresh perspectives, and development of higher order thinking skills which eventually leads to improvement of student learning (Cook-Sather et al. 2014). Based on social-constructivist view of knowledge construction, this process provides voice and agency to stakeholders thereby leveraging their expertise and experiences in the process of curriculum design (Lubicz‑Nawrocka & Owen, 2022).

Curriculum co-creation has often been used in the sector of higher education for development of few courses predominantly in developed countries like the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Scandinavia (Cook-Sather et al. 2014; Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2017).  Research indicates that co-creation is often undertaken within the partnership projects that select small groups of privileged students. In contrast, co-creation involving a whole set of school teachers, academic leaders, curriculum researchers, university professors has been largely overlooked.

To democratise the process of curriculum design, following the guidelines advocated by India’s National Education Policy (GOI, 2020), one of the Indian states for the very first time undertook a comprehensive program of curriculum co-creation at systems level.  This seemed essential in the country since innovations introduced in a top-down manner were rejected by the teachers as they considered it to be an imposition on to them by educational researchers and policy makers who are unaware of the classroom realities where reform is to be executed (Berry,et al., 2020). In such cases, high-quality innovations were implemented in ad-hoc manner (Cuban, 1998).

This research presents the case of curriculum co-creation in school education sector while Delhi (National Capital Territory of India) is working towards establishing a new board of school education called as Delhi Board of School Education (DBSE) using the technical expertise of Australian Council for Educational Research. DBSE curriculum designers co-created K-8 curriculum with school teachers which entailed three phases: designed curriculum, process curriculum, and reflected curriculum.  Phase 1 (designed curriculum) involved identification of curricular goals at each stage, identification of curriculum designers, and developing requisite learning materials. Phase 2 (process curriculum) was the democratic process of knowledge construction in which epistemic collaborations were developed among curriculum researchers, pedagogic experts, assessment expert, school teachers, and domain leads. This phase involved collective review of curriculum designed in phase 1. The co-created curriculum emerging from this phase was implemented by school teachers in their respective classrooms. In phase 3 (reflected curriculum) feedback was collected from school teachers, students, and academic leaders to ascertain the effectiveness of the curriculum in the field. 

This study attempts to understand the perspectives of participants associated with the process of curriculum co-creation. Situated in qualitative research traditions, using semi-structured interviews and focussed group discussions, this paper highlights the perspectives faced by different segments of individuals, ways in which they overcame various challenges to embed partnership and achieve shared ownership of the emergent curriculum. Also, it illustrates the increased satisfaction and professional development resulting from working in partnership.

This research is situated in qualitative research traditions (Yin, 1984). In order to develop a nuanced understanding of the stakeholder views, different representative groups were identified which included: school leaders, school teachers, domain-leaders, and education researchers. Using criterion sampling techniques, five school leaders, five education researchers, ten domain-leaders, and 30 school teachers who participated in curriculum co-creation activities for a period of one year were chosen as the primary participants for study. Data collection tools included five focussed group discussions (FGD). One FGD took place with each group of participants, namely, school leaders, school teachers, domain leaders, and education researchers; and, the one FGD was organised with all the groups collectively. Semi-structured interview sessions were organised with representative participants from each group. In addition, one co-creation session in each of the subject domain was observed by the authors to develop an in-depth understanding of co-creation process. Reflection notes prepared by the teachers after co-creation sessions were used to corroborate views emerging from the above-mentioned data sources. This study utilised ‘grounded theory’ methods (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) to reduce and centralise the qualitative data to obtain categories. To begin with, all the data was transcribed and read iteratively to locate concepts being represented by the data sources. Open coding procedures were utilised which involved continually asking data the following questions: Which category does this incident/ word/ phrase allude to? What are the similarities or differences between the two emerging concepts? and so on. Code notes and theoretical memos were prepared throughout the analytic procedure to keep a track of the evolving concepts emerging from the data sources. This process was followed by axial coding where similar concepts were clubbed under one overarching concept, now called as a category which was elaborated in terms of possible conditions that give rise to it, the context in which it usually occurred, the interactional strategies among its’ various sub-concepts, and the consequences of these interactions. Processes of bundling, grouping similar units, deletion of synonymous units were utilised to arrive at final categories as delineated in the research findings. To ensure the reliability of the coding procedure, independently generated codes were shared with a senior education researcher in the country. It revealed a high degree of agreement with the codes generated by the authors. The data piece was revisited collaboratively to discuss the disagreements and to develop consensus on the codes being used for the study.

Data findings reveal that stakeholders showed deep conviction towards the advantages of co-creation despite finding it to be a challenging and time-intensive process. Stakeholders perspectives are discussed under following sub-themes: Professional development network of teachers, Sense of ownership with the co-created curriculum, Blending educational innovation with classroom realities, Overcoming resistance, and Navigating institutional challenges. All the stakeholders believed that this democratic practice provides an enriched professional development opportunity to teachers, they felt valued and developed a sense of identity and ownership with the newly developed curricular materials. School leaders reported that they found it easy to execute reform as teachers participating in co-creation advocated its benefits for school improvement. Researchers observed that co-creation workshops helped them in gaining field insights which enabled them to co-create curriculum in a teacher and student-friendly manner. Developing awareness about classroom realities supported them in making curriculum which is easy to implement in schools. Domain leaders reported that co-creation enabled domain leaders to design an innovative yet feasible curriculum for the system. Despite all these advantages, it was apparent that it was difficult to overcome resistance and inertia of teachers and school leaders. They found it an addition to their already heavy workload and condemned it in the beginning. However, in due course of time when they became a part of co-creation professional learning network, they started owing the new curriculum. It was difficult for domain leaders as well as they tended to reject the classroom realities and were enthusiastic to put all the research-oriented innovations in the curriculum. In addition, navigating institutional challenges, norms, and practices was a challenge that needed continuous negotiation.

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