Humanizing Co-Design with Educators

Design Process · All design processes
Evidence · 4 claims (3 for, 1 mixed) · 4 studies (2 review, 1 qualitative, 1 design), q1–q2 · 1 of 4 report an effect size · 4 claims rest on one study

Description

Co-design (researchers and educators collaboratively designing curriculum) is not automatically humanizing — it requires deliberate facilitation to treat participants' emotional and relational experience as legitimate design material, not a distraction from the "real" design work. This pattern adds concrete, replicable structures on top of a standard co-design process: shared contemplative training so no one enters as "the expert," ritualized opening/closing affective check-ins at every meeting, a reflective field-note protocol that surfaces educators' lived classroom struggles as design input, and explicit responsiveness that lets facilitators set the design agenda aside when participants' personal or collective wellbeing needs it.

Implications

Context

Requirements

• A shared foundational experience before design work begins that positions all participants (researchers included) as co-learners rather than experts and novices (the source study used an 8-week Compassion Cultivation Training)
• Recurring, ritualized opening and closing practices at every meeting (a brief guided practice, then a personal check-in; a closing practice, then a one-word feeling check)
• A structured reflection protocol educators use to write low-inference field notes about their own classroom interactions, paired with co-constructed prompts (e.g., "What feelings, thoughts, emotions arose for you?" / "How did you — or could you — care for yourself while caring for others in this interaction?")
• Facilitators who visibly affirm vulnerability when it surfaces (treating a shared struggle as a legitimate contribution, not a distraction to redirect past)

Constraints

• This is not humanizing by default — the source study is explicit that co-design must be intentionally facilitated this way; without deliberate structure, affective experience tends to stay invisible or gets treated as off-task
• Requires facilitators comfortable relinquishing some agenda control (e.g., canceling a planned session for an unstructured check-in during an acute disruption)
• Documented in a single district with an existing long-term research partnership, which may have made trust easier to establish than in a cold-start relationship

Grain Size

• Unit (a multi-month co-design series; the source study ran 14 meetings, 58 total hours, over roughly eight months)

Target Goals

• Building a co-design community that supports educators applying what they learn across multiple scales — personal practice, classroom teaching, and broader systems-level vision
• Attending to affect in co-design supports community and cross-scale transfer [+W]

Target Learners

• Educators (teachers, counselors, principals, librarians) participating as co-designers alongside researchers, especially in emotionally demanding domains (e.g., compassion/wellbeing curricula, trauma-informed practice)

Theory

Supporting

• Expansive learning (Engeström & Sannino) — extended here to emphasize that transforming subject-subject relations (not just the object being designed) is itself part of the collective learning
• Affect theory (Ahmed; Tomkins) — treats naming and sharing emotion as inseparable from, not prior to, cognitive and design work

Contradicting / Qualifying

• None identified in the source study; the authors note their own facilitator positionality (researchers as co-participants) likely shaped what became visible or expressible

Claims

• Participants reported that the trust-building collaborative environment enabled open and vulnerable sharing [+W]
• Emotions are seldom explicitly analyzed in conversational CSCL contexts and must be balanced with cognition in conversation conceptualization [+W]
• Negative emotions sometimes promoted implementation of novel practices in PD [~W]

Design

Sequence

1. Shared foundation: All participants (educators and researchers) complete an extended shared contemplative/relational training together before co-design work begins, so no one enters the room positioned as expert over novice.
2. Opening ritual (every meeting): brief guided practice → small-group debrief of the practice experience → open personal check-in ("anything else you wish to share about your week").
3. Design work: small-group brainstorming and drafting, mixing educators' classroom expertise with researchers' pedagogical frameworks.
4. Field-note cycle: educators write low-inference observations of their own school interactions using co-constructed reflection prompts; groups share notes and jointly reinterpret them with compassion, identifying intrapersonal, interpersonal, and systems-level sources of difficulty — these become source material for course design.
5. Closing ritual (every meeting): brief practice → one-word or short check-out on how people are feeling.
6. Responsive adaptation: when an acute disruption hits (the source study's cohort was mid-program when COVID-19 began), cancel the planned agenda and hold a loosely structured community check-in instead.

Affordances

• Reflection
• Community-Based Learning

Personalization

• The specific shared foundational training can be swapped for a different relational/contemplative practice suited to the design topic; what matters structurally is a genuinely shared, non-hierarchical starting experience
• Field-note prompts should be co-constructed with participants rather than imposed, to keep the reflection genuinely responsive to their concerns

Related Processes

• Interdisciplinary Course-Based Research Experience — both use a recurring reflective/iterative cycle as the core engine of the design, though this pattern centers affect rather than a disciplinary artifact

Examples

• A Rocky Mountain–region school district partnership: 10 educators from 6 schools, 8-week shared compassion training followed by 14 co-design meetings (58 hours) producing a 4-course digital sequence on compassion and dignity for educators; educators reported 43 distinct named affective experiences (21 negative, 22 positive) across the process, and documented applying course concepts in their own teaching, parenting, and colleague relationships.

Key Sources

• Potvin, A. S., Teeters, L. P., Penuel, W. R., & Dimidjian, S. (2024). Humanizing Co-design through attention to educators' affective and relational experiences. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 33(1), 41-79. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2024.2318557

Page metadata

Field	Value
type	process
id	humanizing-co-design-with-educators
title	Humanizing Co-Design with Educators
description	A co-design facilitation structure that deliberately makes space for educators' affective and relational experience — through shared contemplative practice, ritualized check-ins, and reflective field-note protocols — treating emotion as a design resource rather than a distraction.
status	review
grain_size	unit
author	Potvin, Teeters, Penuel & Dimidjian
generated	by claude/unspecified on 2026-08-29
trust	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources	1 — potvin-et-al-2024

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