EDUC.SP25

This course explores co-creation as a foundational practice in Education. Embracing a partnership ethos and reflecting the Education Department’s emphasis on relationships, facilitation, and change, the course invites students to analyze co-creation—“shared decision-making, shared responsibility and negotiation of learning and teaching” (Bovill, 2020, p. 2)—as it does and could inform how knowledge, culture, language, and power interrelate in research, policy, and practice. Focusing on the ways in which co-creation, as Jiayi Loh (BMC class of 2021) writes, “disrupts the reductive teacher-student power hierarchy by granting agency and power to both sides to shape the classroom experience while also being cognisant of the different functional roles that each person inhabits” (Cook-Sather & Loh, 2023), the course explores how co-creation challenges inequities, hierarchies, and biases and supports students in planning for reparative, restorative, and liberatory work. The course can be taken either after the entry-point courses and one or more electives and before the culminating courses we have designated for majors and minors in Education Studies or early on for those wishing to use it to chart their paths through the major or minor and beyond. This course supports both exploration of our own practices in the Education Department and in the Teaching and Learning Institute at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges and co-creation for equity and justice in various national and global/comparative contexts.

Through actively engaging with texts and other resources, academics who practice co-creation, and former Bi-Co students who have carried a co-creation ethos into their professional lives, enrolled students will:
analyze co-creation theories and the theories, traditions, and policies that inform them
explore practices of co-creation across contexts around the world, and
generate an action plan for a co-creation approach consistent with one of the areas of specialization required of majors in Education Studies (e.g., secondary education, out-of-school contexts, higher education).