Internationally, research into teacher professional learning has increasingly explored how teachers and academics can work successfully together to bring about educational change. Recent literature underscores the importance of working with, rather than on teachers, and highlights the inherent complexities of changing teacher practice (Admiraal et al, 2021; Opfer & Pedder, 2011). In this paper, we critically examine our assumptions and practices as education academics engaged in a longitudinal project with in-service teachers, co-designing and implementing problem-based learning (PBL) in school-based STEM education. While the teachers led the implementation in their schools, co-design and evaluation was pursued as an authentic partnership with us, the academic researchers.  As the project evolved, we began to question both our strategies for positioning teachers as co-researchers, and our assumptions about co-design and research. While research on co-design from the perspective of teachers is a growing field, this study is unique in its focus on the professional learning and reflexive shifts experienced by us, the academic researchers. Accordingly, our guiding research question is: How does the intention to position teachers as authentic co-researchers in a school-based PBL project challenge and reshape the practices, assumptions and roles of academic researchers?

The study is theoretically framed by concepts of co-learning and co-design, which together provide a lens for examining collaborative knowledge production and role negotiation within teacher-academic partnerships. Jaworski (2001) conceptualises teacher-academic collaboration in terms of co-learning partnerships, drawing on Wagner’s (1997) notion of co-learning whereby researchers and practitioners actively participate in the learning process engaging in shared action and reflection. Through this shared relationship each not only learns “something about the world of the other” but also “each may learn something more about his or her own world and its connections to institutions of schooling” (Wagner, 1997, p. 16).

Complementing this perspective is the concept of co-design, which adds a practical dimension to collaborative partnerships. Roschelle et al. (2006) define co-design as a “highly-facilitated, team-based process in which teachers, researchers, and developers work together in defined roles to design an educational innovation, realize the design in one or more prototypes, and evaluate each prototype’s significance for addressing a concrete educational need” (p. 606). In this study, we utilise a theoretical framework informed by co-design and co-learning to examine the dynamics of our interactions with teachers as we sought to position them not only as implementers but as co-designers and co-researchers of a STEM PBL educational innovation in their schools.

In previous research aiming to position teachers as co-researchers, tensions emerged for researchers related to different professional contexts, roles and expectations related to timelines, aims and workload (Bevins & Price, 2014; Roschelle et al, 2006). Tensions also exist around role asymmetry, such as perpetuating the ‘researcher as ‘thinker’, teacher as ‘doer’’, even when researchers strive for egalitarian approaches (Bungum & Sanne, 2021). Valuing different knowledge types (Bungum & Sanne, 2021) and differing goals, such as teachers’ orientations towards clearly defined and measurable outcomes aligned with curricular realities, as compared to researchers’ desire for innovation and open-ended tasks that involve ambiguity (Bevins & Price, 2014; Schafer, 2025) create further tensions.

The study adopted a qualitative, collaborative research approach situated within a multi-year PBL in STEM project. Participants included five university-based academics from two Australian Universities and 35 in-service, elementary and middle school teachers from 15 schools across two Australian states. Central to the research was a co-design methodology, based on the assumption that teachers would engage as equal partners alongside academics in the design, implementation and evaluation of PBL practice within their respective schools. Teachers were positioned this way because they were valued as the professionals best placed to understand the complexities of the primary and secondary schooling environments (Smith, 2017). Teachers’ active involvement in gathering data from their classrooms was therefore integral to the project. Teachers participated in 5 professional learning (PL) workshop days across three years, which were designed to introduce participants to the project, establish their views and understanding about PBL and STEM Education and facilitate the development of an Action Plan which teachers implemented, refined and evaluated within their schools. Academics introduced research about PBL, facilitated collaborative discussion and shared feedback throughout the process. Data for the study reported in this paper were drawn from three main sources: (1) academics’ reflective journals and meeting transcripts for planning and debriefing the PL workshops across the three years (2) a final interview with three of the academic team, and (3) artefacts from PL days, such as teacher interviews and working documents. Data were analysed using a grounded approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) utilising open and axial coding to organise data into conceptual categories. Researchers worked collaboratively applying a constant comparative method across each stage of data analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Data analysis was triangulated as all researchers worked collaboratively across all data. A single category was created from similar categories representing a higher degree of abstraction (Robson, 2002). These core categories began to capture the main ideas or concepts that were central to understanding the facilitation process. Through reiterative data analysis the properties and features of each category became further dimensionalised because of “the conditions which gave rise to it; the action/interaction by which it was expressed, and the consequences that it produces” (Corbin & Strauss, 1990, pp. 7–8). Finally, findings were synthesised into a coherent theoretical framework that explains the relationship between the intention to actively position teacher researchers as co-researchers and University academic thinking and actions, including behaviors, strategies, challenges, and outcomes.

Data analysis is proceeding. We report preliminary Findings here. Initially, teachers appeared to resist the co-researcher role, preferring to remain as implementers, rather than designers, or researchers. This apparent reluctance promoted a re-examination amongst the academic team regarding their facilitation approaches as well as the assumptions, both implicit and explicit about teachers’ capacity and willingness to act as equal partners in the way the academics envisaged. As the program progressed, we came to understand that we needed to: 1. Challenge and reshape our assumptions about our ability to position teachers as co-researchers, to something that must be initiated by teachers themselves. Our role was to support them in adopting a critical research stance towards their practice. 2. Challenge and reshape our practices to more effectively support teachers to move from being passive and leader-dependent to actively engaging in the co-design and learning process, recognising that this shift ultimately depended on their own initiative. 3. Challenge and reshape our roles to partner with, rather than lead, teachers to see research as an integral part of their teaching identity. Realising that true change must be initiated by teachers themselves highlighted the complexities of collaborative efforts to shift teacher thinking and practice. Our change in thinking revealed how our assumptions about research and the researcher role, both conscious and unconscious, had become obstacles making it difficult for teachers to adopt new ways of thinking and working. As academic researchers, while our intentions were to achieve codesign, shared ownership, and co-research, by accepting responsibility for these changes we continued to work on teachers rather than with them. Our findings shed light on the dynamics of co-design highlighted by Roschelle et al. (2006), in particular the tensions associated with assumptions concerning goals, roles and contributions of team members, as well as different workplace norms.

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