A central question in the ECER2025 conference theme description is: How should educational research shape the future of educational practice? We engage with this question with a focus on co-creating sustainability education through collaborations between educational researchers and teachers.  

An important consideration behind this panel discussion, is that scientific research cannot deliver ready-made, universally applicable recipes that practitioners can follow to guarantee successful practice. In real-world practice, problems present themselves to practitioners much more complex, ill-defined, puzzling, troubling, unique, and uncertain than how it is assumed in the model of ‘technical rationality’ focused on the mere ‘application’ of research-based knowledge in practice (Schön 1991). Challenges faced in educational practice will always require professional reflection and judgement of the teacher who has a very specific class in front of them in a very specific in-school and out-of-school context. Therefore, scientific knowledge must be complemented with teachers’ professional experience, with ‘the wisdom of the practice itself’ (Shulman 1987, p. 8) to arrive at sound judgement on how to best plan lessons and act in the classroom. This requires what Garrison (2010: p. xvii-xviii) calls ‘practical reasoning’ which concerns itself with seeking means for securing the always value-laden ends we desire to obtain. It highlights the importance of fostering and giving space for what Eisner (1977) calls educational ‘connoisseurship’, involving traits such as careful attention, the intention to discern subtle qualities, memory of previous experiences, knowing what to look for, and understanding of, for example, ideas, history, and social context. Taking these considerations seriously, the omnipresent references to ‘evidence-based’ teaching in contemporary debates about education throughout Europe and beyond should be handled with caution. While a ‘bouquet of evidence’ – scientific as well as practical – on ‘what works’ in the sense of bringing about the desired result or preventing undesirable outcomes should ideally guide our practice, Kvernbekk (2016) argues, we should avoid a top-down, technocratic approach to evidence-based practice that reduces the focus of researchers to the effectiveness of means, delimits the role of practitioners to mere executers of ready-made guidelines and recipes, and closes down the space for deliberation about the aims of education and the desirability of targeted outcomes.

Against this background, we present and discuss varied initiatives where educational researchers collaborate with teachers on co-creating sustainability education practices in diverse European contexts. A first contribution addresses ‘Lesson Designs Workshops’ (LDW), a methodology for bridging research and practice through cocreating lessons. The LDW methodology builds on practical experiences in Asia, Africa, South America, and Europe and is theoretically underpinned by Schön’s (1991) work on professional knowledge and research on didactic modelling (Hamza & Lundqvist 2023). Next, we discuss the use of LDW in Swedish and Belgian upper secondary schools where researchers and teachers jointly engage with the challenge to enable students to grasp the complex and dynamic relationships between economic, social and ecological dimensions of sustainability by using Kate Raworth’s embedded economic model. Another case brings us to Scotland and focuses on co-creation of rights-based education practices to address biodiversity loss through taking a place-responsive (Mannion et al. 2013) and assemblage approach (Mannion 2019). Finally, we address implications for (pre-service and in-service) teacher training by discussing a multi-actor partnership on co-creating educational ‘commons’ (Bauwens et al. 2019) in Belgium.

Questions which will be explored include: What are crucial conditions for fruitful co-creation? What are possible pitfalls? Does this differ across diverse European contexts? How does the design of the cocreation setting matter? What is vital for facilitators to take into account? When and how do the agencies of young people and the more-than-human come into play in co-creating curricula?

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