Honouring the Ethos of Co-design methodology in Contemporary Socio-scientific Teaching Research

Research co-designed with participants is considered challenging by all stakeholders involved and can be made more so when the focus of the research is on complex educational problems. This chapter describes an ongoing professional learning program, which is supporting senior secondary chemistry teachers to integrate socio-scientific issues such as climate change and sustainable development into their chemistry teaching. The design of the professional learning program is itself undergoing an iterative design cycle, informed by peer reflection between the researchers, artefacts collected from involved students and teachers, and semi-structured interviews with teachers. This chapter provides selected researcher peer reflection and feedback from one group of teachers, implementing an intervention specific to an example of chemistry education research, the Mahaffy Tetrahedron, which models a teaching approach to humanising chemistry education. Through this example and the context of how the researchers presented it initially to the teachers, the methodological considerations of co-designed research-practice partnerships are investigated. We consider issues that arise as researchers guide teachers to incorporate innovative approaches into their teaching.