Abstract
An important issue for the Educational Design Research (EDeR) community to continue to deal with is the scalable and sustainable implementation of its methods, findings and designs beyond the bounds of specific projects. Those engaged in EDeR specifically seek out concurrent problems of theory and problems of practice, but this should not be seen as sufficient for ensuring their work has impact beyond their current project. Just as with other forms of research, EDeR practitioners must still reach out to and connect with educational institutions and teachers who are dealing with many competing demands.
 This position paper offers a largely theoretical contribution to the discussion of the problem of implementation. It will introduce the concept of conceptual tinkering as an approach to engaging teachers in the skillsets and, more importantly, the mindsets of EDeR as an approach to educational improvement. Sketches and prototypes of tools to enable conceptual tinkering will be discussed.
Highlights
Educational Design Research (EDeR) or Design Based Research (DBR) positions itself as highly aligned with the immediate needs of teacher practice
This does not seem to be the case with scholars such as Fishman, Penuel, Hegedus, and Roschelle (2011) demonstrating that even when innovations are shown to be useful and useable through design research, teachers often do not continue to use them after the research project is completed, and few take them on
While the appearance of poor post-project implementation of EDeR designs may in part be due to the lack of mature projects in this still nascent genre (McKenney & Reeves, 2013), it may be because many applied educational projects with or without a design orientation are carried out in exceptionally favourable conditions. This means that many projects are able to indicate potential for impact on practice but may lack evidence of genuine impact, and has resulted in some arguing the importance of Design Based Implementation Research (DBIR, Penuel & Fishman, 2012; Penuel, Fishman, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2011), which extends EDeR to critically examine the scaling up process
Summary
Educational Design Research (EDeR) or Design Based Research (DBR) positions itself as highly aligned with the immediate needs of teacher practice. The desire at a policy level to ‘teacher proof’ curriculum seems to have grown in recent years, but here we will assume that good educational design will consider the teachers who translate curriculum into practice as an essential element of the educational design This proposition will be reified, somewhat, through a brief discussion of the conflict Australian teachers find between an increasing emphasis on and interest in inquiry approaches to professional learning, stemming from the research field, and the demands of the ‘standards’ approach that has been applied to teacher governance in Australia as in many other settings. It does suggest that for the benefits of inquiry approaches to be realised, there is a need to continue to develop both better frameworks and better explanations for the value of the approach This is so in the current era where neoliberal modes of governance have framed teacher professionalism in a very different way (Connell, 2009). We would argue that EDeR supports the activist approach to professionalism that Sachs’ suggests, but before we move on, we will first discuss the more direct limitations of Australia’s standards with respect to innovation
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