Many environmental and sustainability education (ESE) researchers have a strong commitment to improving ESE practice. Building capacities of educators to shape and implement high quality ESE is also an important policy objective. It has been put forward as a ‘priority action area’ in UNESCO’s Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in 2014 as well as its follow-up framework, the ESDfor2030 Roadmap (UNESCO 2020) that is currently informing international efforts to promote and improve teaching and learning about sustainability issues. This paper explores varied ways in which transdisciplinary collaboration between ESE researchers and teachers can contribute to this ambition. We discuss the potential and possible pitfalls of diverse existing approaches to bridging research and practice and propose a novel methodology, Lesson Design Workshops (LDW). This is an approach for cooperation between researchers and teachers that is focused on co-creating educational products (lesson plans and teaching materials) and holds potential to improve ESE practice by, simultaneously, designing high-quality lessons and building educators’ sustainability teaching capacities as well as improving the didactical models used in the co-creation. Through a case study of a LDW on fostering capabilities for argumentation about sustainability issues, we empirically explore these potentials.

Collaborative settings that aim to bridge educational theory and practice have taken shape in varied ways. In this paper, we discuss ‘Lesson studies’ (Duez 2018, Gordon 2019), ‘Learning studies’ (Marton and Booth 1997, Kullberg et al. 2019), ‘Design-based research’ (Anderson & Shattuck 2012), and ‘Didactical dialogue’ (Olin et al 2023). What these practices share, is that, in contrast to traditional in-service training, they are designed for collaboration and participation, considering teachers and their knowledge and experiences as valuable resources. Thus, they acknowledge crucial differences between research-based knowledge and professional knowledge (McIntyre 2005). According to Bates (Schön 2019) practitioners want solutions to their teaching problems, while researchers seek new knowledge. Thus, scientific knowledge is seen as not directly useful for teachers unless it is transformed and/or contextualised to the specific teaching practice.

The methodology of LDW shares these assumptions. Like the other abovementioned methodologies, LDW takes departure in a specific teaching challenge that needs further attention in order to improve students’ learning. It shares with Lesson studies its focus on lessons. Similar to Lesson studies and Didactic dialogue, the methodology does not see a collaboration on doing research as a means for theory-practice bridging. While LDW shares a focus on the transdisciplinary process with Didactic dialogue, the difference is that in LDW this dialogue is mainly used for co-creating educational products. Like Design-based research LDW are not connected to one theory but are theory neutral. What is unique about LDW, is its focus on transdisciplinary co-creation of educational products, i.e. lesson plans, as a mean for theory-practice bridging. These can be said to be one of teachers knowledge products (Runesson & Gustafsson, 2012). Sharing and refining them over time makes accumulation possible. Since lesson plans developed in LDW are a product of a hybridisation between scientific and professional knowledge, the theory-practice bridging becomes materialised in a product that is central in the profession of teaching and therefore is directly useful.

In this paper we explore how the specific characteristics of LDWs can contribute to bridging research and practice. We do not only address how it can improve lesson design and foster capacity building, but also pay attention to how also research models can benefit from such transdisciplinary collaboration. The focus of our investigation is on how didactic modelling (Hamza, Palm & Wickman, 2018) contributes to the hybridisation of scientific and practical knowledge.

We present a case study on a LDW in engineering education focused on improving the quality of students’ argumentation about sustainability issues. Data are gathered through interviews, participatory observation, and document analysis. We conducted and analysed a series of 5 LDW meetings with a group of lecturers in electromechanical engineering in a Belgian University. These were organised on demand, as the teachers expressed challenges regarding how to (re)design their teaching practices in view of fostering students’ capabilities to develop high-quality argumentation on sustainability topics and how to evaluate their performance. In the LDW, we work with a didactic model inspired by Stephen Toulmin’s (1958) work on quality arguments and how it has been applied in didactic research (Rudsberg et al. 2013). Starting from a customisable evaluation rubric for assessing oral and written student work, a back-casting exercise results in the (re)design of lesson plans and teaching materials tailored to the participants’ teaching context. Using transactional didactic theory (Östman et al. 2019a,b) as analytical models, we analyse whether and how the participants in the LDW were able to redesign their educational practices in a way that helped them to overcome the teaching challenges they were facing. That is, we investigate if and how the design of the LDWs (the tools and models used, the tasks performed, the facilitator’s interventions, etc.) helped them to overcome problematic situations. The analytical work is guided by the question how the ‘dramaturgy’ of the LDW setting (its ‘scripting’, ‘staging’, and ‘performance’ – Van Poeck and Östman 2022) affects the participants’ experimentation and reflection, as well as the educational products that result from that.

Our results show how the LDW methodology as a way of bridging research and practice can contribute to, both, improving lesson design and building capacity for sustainability teaching. We also shed light on vital conditions for that and possible pitfalls. Our analysis shows in a detailed way how the research-inspired didactical models (on argumentation) and didactical tools (e.g. assessment rubric) used in the LDW are vital for aiding participants ‘reflection-in-action’ (Schön 1991) and experimentation. The latter, resulting in a re-design of educational practice, can be understood as a form of ‘professional modelling’ (Schön 1991). We observed the re-design of student assignments and the content of lectures in a specific course, but also curriculum reform in the bachelor programme of which the course was part. We did also analyse the change of the didactical models used in the co-creation as part of professional modelling. Building on the results of the exploratory case study, we discuss the potential of the LDW methodology for bridging theory and practice in comparison to ‘Lesson studies’ (Duez 2018, Gordon 2019), ‘Learning studies’ (Marton and Booth 1997, Kullberg et al. 2019), ‘Design-based research’ (Anderson & Shattuck 2012), and ‘Didactical dialogue’ (Olin et al 2019).

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