Reorienting co-design toward care during a pandemic Camillia Matuk 1 , Kayla DesPortes 2 , Veena Vasudevan 3 , Ralph Vacca 4 , Peter J. Woods 5 , Megan Silander 6 , Anna Amato 7 1 cmatuk@nyu.edu, 2 kayla.desportes@nyu.edu, 3 vv2052@nyu.edu, 4 rvacca2@fordham.edu, 5 peterwoo@usc.edu, 6 msilander@edc.org, 7 ada437@nyu.edu 1-3, 7 New York University 4 Fordham University 5 University of Southern California 6 Educational Development Center Abstract: Care is an essential, but under-conceptualized aspect of successful educational co- design. We reflect on our experiences as researchers co-designing with teachers during the COVID-19 disruption. As researchers, we reframed our goals around an ethics of care to support teachers as they strove, and at times struggled to enact care for their students. We illustrate how co-design might be more dynamically responsive to partners’ needs in times of crisis, and potentially lead to more effective outcomes. Expanding co-design through an ethics of care Care and kindness are foundations of any relationship, and should ground and propel all education research endeavors. Whereas most research has only focused on care in teacher-students' face-to-face relationships, care should also be embedded in the educational co-design process between teachers and researchers, which in turn can also support care between teachers and students. Crises offer unique opportunities to enact care. Building on related work (Kara & Khoo, 2020), we reflect on how our research team renegotiated our co-design process within an ethics of care amid our early experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-design is a partnership between teachers and researchers to develop educational materials that can ensure usability and effectiveness and can lead to increased teachers’ increased agency and reflection on their practice, and ownership over the resulting design (Penuel, Roschelle & Shechtman, 2007). Typically, co-designers contend with tensions that arise from differences in values and workplace norms. In times of crisis, these tensions are exacerbated and new ones can arise, such that there is a greater need to be caring and responsive toward teachers’, students’, and researchers’ needs. Care is expressing concern for others that is manifested in behaviors, emotions, and bonds between individuals). An ethics of care calls for relationships to be constantly negotiated in terms of the roles of “carer” and “cared for” in order to prioritize the needs of others (Bergmark, 2020). Research finds that care in teacher- student relationships positively impacts students’ academic engagement, well -being, and self-esteem; as well the meaning that teachers draw from their work (Lavy & Naama-Ghanayim, 2020). However, nurturing caring relationships assumes that teachers and learners are co-located, and can rely on routines to enact care. For example, when students attend in-person class, teachers can notice whether they are academically disengaged. Teachers can also use formal and informal opportunities for dialog to enact care (e.g., in the school hallways, during class discussion). Crises introduce uncertainty in the conditions of learning, but they also introduce new opportunities for enacting care. We extend the notion of knowing and responding in education from what has traditionally focused on domain understanding and professional routines, to also focus on personal experiences. We examine how we, as researchers partnering with teachers, re-oriented our co-design process during the pandemic, and with the goal of enabling teachers to better respond to, and care for their students. Participants and context: A co-design process disrupted This work emerges from the Data Literacy through Art project, an effort to design and explore the value of an arts-based curriculum for supporting data literacy. Our co-design team comprised 7 cross-institution researchers, a middle school art teacher, and a middle school math teacher from the same school. During the previous and first year of the project, we spent a day in in-person art-making and data exploration to identify disciplinary synergies, and to generate initial ideas for an interdisciplinary classroom unit. Throughout the following academic year, our team of teachers and researchers held regular meetings to co-develop those units in preparation for a Spring 2020 classroom implementation. By March 2020, New York City schools had closed due to the pandemic, and classroom activities shifted to be asynchronous and online; university IRBs suspended in- person research; and several team members struggled to balance their home and work routines. Despite these challenges, our teacher partners felt that continuing with the curriculum implementation would be worth the effort