Teachers as co-designers: Scientific and colloquial evidence on teacher professional development and curriculum innovation

Teachers are increasingly acting as co-designers of curriculum materials, because this process can positively affect their professional development while also yielding resources that are relevant and useful for their teaching practice. This study explores evidence related to the claim that involving teachers in collaborative design is worth the effort. We used two data sources: Papers from scientific journals, reflecting the researcher’s perspective, and from professional journals, providing a colloquial corpus reflecting the teacher’s perspective. We conclude that the colloquial corpus justifies our claim that co-design is gaining momentum, but that the scientific corpus is still limited in number of articles. We were able to identify common patterns across the professional articles that complement the patterns identified in the scientific corpus. At the same time, two distinct pictures of design teams emerge from these two corpora, with different process characteristics as well as reported effects.