Participation and co-design in digital education research: navigating between instrumental and critical approaches

Over the past decade, there has been a boom of participatory as well as co-design-oriented approaches (also) in the field of digital education. While much of that boom has been following a mainly instrumental understanding of participation and co-design, there has also evolved a growing body of critical research, devoted to the normativities and political dynamics of the approaches, including the performative impact of technologies. This paper investigates how such different understandings of participation and co-design manifest in a key area of digital education policy implementation: publicly funded research (projects). Using the case of Germany, we analyse the evolvement and characteristics of participation and co-design-oriented digital education research projects over the past decade. We investigate online material on ministry research schemes and associated projects as well as conducted in-depth interviews with experts leading or working in co-design projects. While the findings point to a persisting tension between instrumental and more critical understandings and operationalisations of participation and co-design, they also indicate a slow, but visible trend towards more reflexive, creative and speculative methods and projects.