Collaboration in the third space in the “Orality in Language-Conscious Subject Teaching” project

Based on the design-based research project “Orality in Language-conscious Subject Teaching“, this paper illustrates the manner in which collaboration between academic researchers and educators is conceptualized and operationalized. Collaboration between the participants is defined as a fundamental prerequisite of the project, which has a “dual focus“ (Aigner & Malmberg, 2022) as the underlying maxim. The concrete concept of collaboration is presented along the sub-steps of the iterative approach (Euler, 2014), whereby the implications of collaboration for the DBR process and how the participants (jointly) define and fulfil their roles within the individual phases are discussed in each case. The central element of collaboration is the combination of conjecture maps (Sandoval, 2014) and hypothetical learning trajectories (e.g. Simon, 1995) whose integration into the DBR process enables collaboration to be organised systematically and transparently, thus laying the foundation for a ‘common language’, among other things. The findings presented offer insights for academic researchers and teachers who are planning or carrying out collaborative design-based research projects. They show how conjecture maps and hypothetical learning trajectories can be used in practice to structure collaboration between participants and make it tangible and visible.