Teachers as Co-Designers: Forming Equitable Participation through the Lens of Relational Trust

Abstract

Collaborative design is a research-practice partnership with partners having equal decision-making power. However, creating and sustaining equitable participation in codesign partnerships is a significant challenge for further research efforts. Thus, this exploratory research investigates a trajectory from imbalanced participation to an increasingly equitable and collaborative one in a three-year research-practice partnership that aimed to design and implement a STEM-integrated bioinformatics high-school curriculum through the lens of relational trust. We adapted a multidimensional relational trust framework and followed an inductive approach to analyze a corpus of interviews with two teachers who participated in the codesign sessions and three researchers who facilitated the curriculum implementation and codesign processes. Our results suggested the partners shared authority as they collaboratively redesigned the curriculum and, by further reframing the relational trust dimensions intersected with the shifts in partners’ participation, offered a preliminary conceptualization of multidimensional and multifaceted relational trust for equitable participation in codesign partnerships.