CREATEd is engaged in the development of a co-design toolkit that engages a diverse team of researchers, practitioners, designers and other stakeholders in the creation of research-informed equity-centered resources.
What is Co-Design?
Co-design is an innovative approach to creating more usable research products but also for democratizing research use through more equitable and inclusive processes. The CREATEd co-design process leverages the knowledge and experiences of researchers, educators, communication and design experts, and other stakeholders in envisioning and producing resources that both draw on high quality research and are useful and relevant for achieving greater equity in educational policy and practice.
Our team is developing (and continuously improving) a set of co-design tools to be used in both CREATEd fellowship activities and shared with other members of the education community.
What Does CREATEd’s Co-Design Process Look Like?
The CREATEd Co-Design process is an 9-stage, facilitated framework for leveraging diverse teams’ collective knowledge.
What Does CREATEd’s Co-Design Process Do?
- Contribute to stronger relationships between research and practice by creating opportunities that support greater understanding and appreciation across research and practice boundaries and improve capacity for future collaboration.
- Demonstrate our commitment to redress systemic inequities and promote a more socially just education system by adopting critical lens on all aspects of the work, including the selection of research, intended users and uses, and product design
- Promote a more diverse and inclusive educational community by building teams that are more representative of the communities we serve
What is the Outcome of Co-Design?
The co-design process leads to the development of new research-informed equity-centered resources that can be mobilized nationally to strengthen educational policy and practice. These resources are/will be freely available to all educators, creating widespread access to high quality materials that support greater equity in our educational system.
Additionally, participants in the process will enhance their capacity to support research-informed practice, to center equity in their work, and to communicate and work across traditional boundaries associated with their role. Ultimately, this increases capacity to work collaboratively across the system to achieve equity goals.
NEW! The Co-Design Toolkit
The CREATEd Co-Design Toolkit is a result of four years of work and two rounds of pilot testing as part of the CREATEd Fellowship program, now freely available online! The Toolkit offers a range of FREE resources that support the implementation of the co-design process across a wide range of settings. These tools include:
- Background on co-design
- Information to help determine if co-design is a good fit for project goals
- Facilitator guides for each stage
- Team tools for all stages in .pdf and Google Docs formats
Upcoming Co-Design Opportunity!
The CREATEd team is pleased to announce a funded opportunity for members of the Education Knowledge Broker Network to use our newly-available Co-Design Toolkit to create research-informed, evidence-centered resources.
Important details:
- The toolkit is a result of four years of work and two rounds of pilot testing as part of the CREATEd Fellowship program. We are offering this opportunity as part of a “soft launch” of the new, web-based version of the toolkit and will ask teams to participate in a light touch formative evaluation to provide feedback on the resources and experience to help us improve the tools and process.
- CREATEd is partnering with the Education Knowledge Broker Network for this opportunity because knowledge brokers are in a great position to lead the co-design of research-informed, evidence-centered resources and few funded opportunities specifically target knowledge brokers. Membership in the Network is free and a great way to connect with others that work to link research and practice across the education system.
- We anticipate funding 2-3 projects which must launch in January and be completed by June 2026. Funding includes up to $2,000 each for project facilitator and team members, including researcher and policymaker, practitioner or other interestholder, as well as up to $10,000 for a designer. The CREATEd team will work with project leads to finalize details.
- Proposals need not specify all project details or name team members in advance. See the proposal form for more information. The CREATEd team is excited to review promising ideas and to support projects that would benefit from the tools and resources we can offer!
Project lead Elizabeth Farley-Ripple offers some additional information in this brief video (slides here) and is available at enfr@udel.edu to respond to questions until December 1.