Invitation: December Lectures on Design-Based Research 2026

Schools are responsible for preparing students to become informed citizens capable of independent judgment. This includes enabling them to reason about risks and make decisions under uncertainty. Yet empirically grounded instructional designs for fostering risk literacy in secondary-level mathematics education remain scarce, and little is known about learners’ reasoning in such situations. This talk provides an overview of a design-based research project addressing both gaps, tracing the process from theoretical conceptualization through design and implementation to empirical analysis and outcomes.

Conducted during a teacher traineeship, the project was shaped by the dual role of trainee teacher and researcher, offering an insider perspective on classroom practice. The theoretical framework combined a conceptualization of risk literacy in mathematics education with an inferentialist perspective in which concepts gain meaning through the social practice of giving and asking for reasons. These approaches informed the design of an eight-lesson stochastics unit for grades 9 and 10 and its empirical investigation. The unit was implemented in four classes at two schools under everyday classroom conditions.

The project yielded a model of informal-stochastic reasoning that distinguishes four modes of reasoning in decisions under uncertainty, a set of design principles for fostering risk literacy, and webs of inferences that make learners’ reasoning processes visible. These contributions are relevant for both classroom practice and research on risk literacy. The talk concludes by reflecting on how theory, design and empirical insights from everyday classroom practice informed one another throughout the project, and what this reveals about conducting design-based research in schools.

Design-Based Research brings researchers and practitioners together to address complex problems through iterative, context-sensitive design. Yet co-creation does not take place on equal or unrestricted ground: partners may differ in disciplinary expertise, familiarity with local contexts, access to resources, institutional authority, and the time they can devote to collaboration. At the same time, academic expectations for linear writing and early text-production can compete with the relationship-building, negotiation, and iterative design work on which DBR depends. Drawing on experiences from my dissertation project PROSHED, this interactive lecture explores how these tensions can be recognised and navigated in transdisciplinary and transcultural educational design research.

The first part explores how power dynamics and different forms of authority shape collaboration and co-creation in DBR. It then considers boundary objects as shared working interfaces that can help partners negotiate perspectives and adapt design ideas in context.

The second part explores the relationship between co-creation, academic writing, and project management in DBR, focusing on how researchers can balance collaboration, documentation, and the development of research outputs throughout the iterative research process.

Brief reflection activities invite participants to reflect on their own project experiences, identify key challenges, and consider possible approaches. The subsequent discussion aims to enable a joint reflection on how co-creation can be made more deliberate, context-sensitive, and feasible alongside the practical and academic demands of DBR.

In this paper, I present findings from a design-based research study on teaching processes in band classes. Band classes are a form of music education that offers diverse opportunities to combine practical instrumental training with musical and aesthetic learning. As this instruction often takes the form of instrumental and ensemble lessons, the focus tends to be on teaching practical instrumental skills. Reflection on musical perceptions, subjective attributions of meaning and musical-aesthetic experiences tends to take a back seat.

Video analyses of classroom communication, including the students‘ informal conversations, revealed that musical-aesthetic negotiations of assigning meaning primarily take place in the ‚backstage‘ area of the classroom. While the teacher-led ‚foreground‘ was characterised predominantly by communication about playing technique, students articulated and negotiated musical perceptions and subjective meaning-making in their side conversations.

Therefore, in the backstage area, musical and aesthetic learning opportunities arose that were neither specifically initiated nor directly guided by the teacher. As these informal communication spaces are largely inaccessible to teachers, the question arose as to how such learning processes could nevertheless be supported pedagogically. In this context, the role of the teacher became central to instructional development.

However, examination of the teacher’s role was not limited to lesson design, but also gained significance for the research and development process. In the second step, I will describe how the development of both the lesson design and the methodological approach of the study changed. Through the iterative interplay between instructional development, empirical analysis and theoretical reflection, collaboration between academia and practice evolved. Teachers‘ practical expertise in teaching became relevant not only for instructional design development, but also increasingly for the analysis and interpretation of empirical data.

In this presentation, I will demonstrate how an openness to the unexpected can be a defining feature of design-based research. At the same time, I will discuss the implications of designing music lessons that recognise learning processes which cannot be fully planned or controlled, and how this can contribute to the potential of musical and aesthetic education.