Teachers’ and researchers’ motivations to engage in RPPs: two (similar) communities?

The gap between teachers and researchers is often described using the 'two-communities' framework, which posits teachers and researchers in distinct communities with divergent work cultures and expectations. Collaborative research involving teachers has been suggested as a way to bridge this gap. However, little is known about the motivations of both teachers and researchers to engage in such collaborative projects and how these motivations can be enhanced. In the context of a design-based research project, we conducted an exploratory study on the motivations of teachers and researchers to engage in collaborative research. Our survey included a section dedicated to understanding respondents' motivations for engaging in collaborative research in general, as well as sections focused on three specific stages of the design-based research: reviewing and revising a research-informed resource in order to make it research-brokered, participating in online workshops within a teacher-research framework, and attending one-day in-person meetings to prioritize the suggested changes to the resource. We surveyed 30 researchers and teachers having shown interest (but not all participating) in our design-based research. Our results indicate that extrinsic motivations, such as rewards or professional obligations, were not highly motivating for most respondents. Surprisingly, the time required to participate in collaborative research was also a low source of motivation. We found few differences between teachers' and researchers' perceptions of motivational statements. Additionally, in-person meetings participation was higher when respondents did not judge their autonomy in collaborative research as highly motivating but did judge the usefulness of the result or process as highly motivating. Although our small sample size warrants cautious interpretation, our findings challenge the 'two-communities' framework by showing that both groups have similar motivations. We recommend future collaborative research to describe each step of their projects, as the specific nature of the activities may influence what motivates teachers and researchers to engage.