Co-Designing English Teaching Materials through Dialogue: Lessons from a Research–Practice Partnership

English language teaching (ELT) materials are not neutral pedagogical tools but cultural and ideological artifacts that shape which forms of knowledge, values, identities, and cultural practices are legitimized in language education. ELT materials research is broadly categorized into studies of content, consumption, and production and argues that more research is needed on researcher–practitioner collaboration in materials writing. Building on this gap, this study examined how English teaching materials were co-designed through sustained dialogue among collaborators in a multilingual Islamic elementary school setting in Maluku, Indonesia. Drawing on frameworks of culturally sustaining pedagogy, social justice perspectives, and community-engaged approaches, we examined an ongoing collaborative project in Maluku, Indonesia, involving an ELT teacher educator, a pre-service English teacher, and an elementary school English teacher. Our data were drawn from online meetings, WhatsApp-mediated interactions, as well as multiple drafts of teaching materials and lesson plans. Through collaborative planning and iterative design, we adapted materials from global ELT textbooks, Indonesian government-sponsored resources, teacher-generated materials, and AI-assisted resources in response to the school’s linguistic, cultural, religious, and pedagogical context. We analyzed the data using reflexive thematic analysis. To contextualize our interpretations, we invited the practitioner collaborators to review selected excerpts and preliminary interpretations and provide clarification. Our analysis identified the negotiation of design authority as a cross-cutting process operating across two domains. These domains concerned cultural recontextualization and the balancing of linguistic accessibility, pedagogical purpose, and classroom feasibility. Collaborators negotiated decisions about local, national, global, and Islamic content, while the phase-end materials relied primarily on English and Indonesian and did not explicitly incorporate Sou Puan. The study shows how collaborative materials development can connect research knowledge, classroom experience, and contextual knowledge while also revealing the tensions involved in producing culturally meaningful and practically usable resources.