Studios of Joy: Co-Designing for Expansive Teacher and Student Learning

• In Event: Reconfiguring teacher learning as joy and connection: Longitudinal pathways for collaboration in justice-centered science instruction

Abstract

Objectives
Teachers and researchers have sought to transform science classrooms with students as agents in building joyful learning environments, where students can engage their full selves (Espinoza et al., 2020; Keifert et al., 2021). While the concept of joy and pedagogies of joy (POY; Scipio et al., 2025) has been explored more recently, less is known about designing professional learning to support POY. This paper investigates how job-embedded professional development (studio days) supported teachers in co-designing for joy.

Theoretical Framework
The POY framework consists of four principles: attending to affective entanglement, switching roles, cultivating third space (Gutiérrez, 2008), and (co)dreaming to enact. The studios in this study focused on the last two principles to co-create hybridity between learners, teachers, and researchers and to imagine expansive possibilities of the collective learning. In Studios, teachers and researchers co-create pedagogical knowledge, as they experiment on instructional practices (Horn, 2005; Little, 2003). This study attends to teacher learning in studios through the POY framework.

Methods
In PASTEL, we provided professional development (PD) for teachers in various forms, but this paper focuses on Studios: an all-day job-embedded PD hosted in an elementary classroom. Similar to Lesson Study (Lewis et al., 2006), studios support collegial improvement of teaching through cycles, with the goal being improvement of a particular lesson. Host teachers and researchers met before the Studio Day to co-design lessons. On the day of the Studios, teachers and researchers co-taught two portions of a lesson to the same group of children, debriefed between the lessons, then adapted pedagogical approaches tailored to that particular group of children.

Data Sources
The paper analyzed video and audio recordings studio days (n=2), host teacher interviews (n=3), and participating teacher interviews (n=7). Authors engaged in open coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) and analytical memoing (Leyva, 2016) first with individual host teacher data, and then across the three host teachers to synthesize patterns of designing for joy in professional development.

Results & Significance
The first studio was hosted by Susy who described joy by building off Muhammad’s (2023) book: “it's not happiness as much as it is like a sense of pride.” She provides examples of pride and joy as an outcome of student groupwork in the classroom and teacher collaboration in studios. Sita, the second focal teacher, emphasized that joy is shared, describing how students experience learning "as a community." Similarly, Dhara, who hosted the third studio, saw joy when “working together and helping each other,” making students “eager to participate” because the curriculum related to their everyday lives.
These preliminary findings show that studios were opportunities for teachers and researchers to co-dream and enact a third space where students’ everyday experiences are honored in the disciplinary curriculum. The three focal examples provided practices to support teachers co-designing for joy: recognizing joy as communal and connecting to the disciplinary community. When designing for joy at both the teacher and student level, through collaborative sense-making and student-centered curriculum, educators and researchers can co-create opportunities for expansive sensemaking.

Authors

• Sarah Jaewon Lee, University of Washington

• Jessica J. Thompson, University of Washington

• Camille Ungco, University of Washington