Topic and research questions

Collaboration is an important component of teacher professional development (Lipscombe et al. 2020), and literature highlights that teachers benefit from collaboration in professional learning communities. Teacher professional learning needs to be close to practice (Wermke 2010), and in the work presented in this proposal we explore the ways in which teachers and researchers collaborated to create a professional learning module (PLM) that is both collaborative and also aligned with teachers’ needs. This proposal represents one study from a project which had the goal of developing PLMs that are responsive to teachers’ needs and that builds from their experiences.

This proposal examines the coplanning process undertaken by a team of primary teachers and university researchers as they worked to codesign a PLM within early childhood science education in [European country]. This PLM targets early childhood teachers and uses the narrative of the Three Little Pigs story as a central theme for its scientific activities and investigations. Coplanning with teachers provides a valuable space for sharing ideas, reflecting on past experiences, and developing mutual understandings of practice (Scantlebury et al. 2008). Within our work we sought to create a dialogic space for coplanning through the codesign of a PLM in a team consisting of in-service teachers and researchers.

In this process, we noted that teachers often spoke from their perspectives of their students’ engagement with the investigations. From this initial observation, an analytic focus emerged from the coplanning process on the ways in which a diversity of children’s experiences and interests was represented in the teachers’ dialogue, how these mediated the context of the teacher-researcher coplanning sessions, and how these unfolded through the dialogue. The questions that guided our analysis are: 1. How do teachers draw on their perspectives of their students’ engagement within the coplanning sessions?  2. What structures support this sharing process? To address these questions, we consider the diverse ways in which children’s experiences are represented in teachers’ interactions during coplanning sessions for the PLM.

Guiding theoretical framework

Our work strives towards creating structures that nurture collaboration through a codesign process built on a foundation of coplanning, coteaching, and cogenerative dialogue (Author et al. 2025).

Coteaching is guided by the notion of learning “at the elbow” of another, as coteachers learn from and with each other through teaching together (Roth and Tobin 2002). Coteaching brings individuals together and offers a space to coplan an educational activity, and then conduct it together, learning from each other, broadening pedagogical content knowledge, and challenging an idea of a lone teacher being responsible for quality education (Tobin and Roth 2006). Successful coteaching is a result of successful coplanning, as it is a process during which a shared responsibility for teaching and learning emerges.

Coplanning and coteaching are grounded in cogenerative dialogue to incorporate multiple voices, experiences and different perspectives for establishing a plan of working towards shared objectives (Tobin 2006, Author 2011) and to support coteachers in reflexively considering their shared practice (Author and colleague 2011).

In the context of our work, we coplan and then coteach PLMs, with the objective of bringing together different perspectives and experiences of teachers and researchers. Teachers come together with researchers in designing and implementing new educational activities that are built upon people’s expertise through cogenerative dialogue. Thus, the coplanning sessions are intended as spaces of 1. Open sharing of each others’ perspectives and experiences, 2. Designing a new educational structure, 3. Establishing shared responsibility for the outcomes.

Four teachers and six researchers participated in the codesign of the PLM. The teachers have expertise and experience within early childhood education in various settings, including special needs contexts and outdoor informal education. Six researchers include a professor, two senior researchers, a post-doc and two PhD students, who all work as a science education team at the University of [country]. The data resources analysed include 4.5 hours of video recordings from the two in-person coplanning sessions in Winter 2023 that were key in establishing the PLM’s outline, aims, and coteachers’ responsibilities. All members of the codesign team attended both sessions. During the coplanning sessions, we noticed that the teachers’ dialogue often included their perspectives on their students’ engagement with the investigations being discussed (i.e., statements often including “my kids… my students…”), and thus we engaged in a recursive and iterative analytic process that led to a refined focus on considering how their perception of their students’ experiences were woven into the teachers’ interactions during the coplanning process. We noted analytically that these included both i) their reflections as they look back at their implementation of the investigations with their students, as well as ii) their perspectives on their students’ possible future engagement, and this became central to the emergent interpretive analysis. The video recordings were manually transcribed, and the transcripts used the main data resource. We approach the research data through qualitative content analysis to provide a way to systematically describe the meaning of qualitative data through the generation of categories (Schreier 2012). Qualitative content analysis is defined by a focus on latent meaning and attention to context; it is also data-driven with more inferences to context, author, and recipients (Schreier 2012, p.17). Our role as participants enhanced the contextualized interpretive perspectives on the data. The research focus led to building categories around the ways in which teachers drew upon their perceptions of children’s engagement, and these are through three different categories: 1. Observations, 2. Reenactment, 3. Presentations. If accepted, during the presentation, we will contextualize these categories through narrative elaboration of data excerpts from the coplanning sessions.

We found that children’s experiences with the investigations being coplanned by the codesign team enter the space of cogenerative dialogue in different ways - through teachers’ observations, reenactments, and presentation of photos, videos and drawings. Children’s perspectives are interpreted and shared by the teachers, who mediate and construct them during the dialogue, thus, children’s experiences and perspectives become recontextualized through a dialogic and intertextual process. Recontextualization implies the “dynamic transfer-and-transformation of something from one discourse/text-in-context” to another (Linell 1998, p. 144-145), and as teachers share their perspectives of children’s engagement, they layer children’s experiences into their dialogue in an intertextual process. As such, the cogenerative space serves as a structure for teachers to reflectively draw on their experiences as they recontextualize these in dialogue with the codesign team as resources for the collective. Science education at the early childhood level is mediated through children’s interactions - with each other, with materials, and with teachers (Matsui 2021), and it is essential to identify meaningful ways of engaging with children’s experiences (Shaw 2019). The structure of dialogic coplanning between teachers and researchers provides a space for teacher agency as they reflexively draw on their experiences with children to work together to create something new - the PLM. Our analysis has revealed how the teachers’ reflections on children’s experiences are central to the collective PLM planning processes. An important implication emerges in considering the complexity of ways in which the teachers drew on student-created resources in interaction. The analysis has highlighted the ways in which the teacher-researcher collaboration provided opportunities to both look back as well as look forward together, through dialogic and intertextual process that drew from different perspectives, opinions, and experiences, with the cogenerative nature affording welcoming, acknowledging, and responding to such differences.

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