Practice-based design research to advance teaching and learning practices through situated partnerships

Abstract

This chapter takes on the question of methodological challenges involved in investigating the learning and co-creation of situated knowledge. Teaching and learning practices are constantly being challenged to innovate to keep pace with trends and developments in higher education. Externally developed innovations driven by academic research can put pressure on teachers as the implementation of such innovations can be difficult to apply in their own context. Practice-based research (PBR) is an approach to address these transfer problems by bringing challenges experienced in practice to the foreground and use them to initiate teacher and researcher partnerships and to set the innovation and research agenda together. In other words, PBR emphasises co-creation of knowledge between teachers and researchers aimed to situate innovation within the complexity of practice and educational design. In this contribution we will discuss PBR followed by an example.