Teacher engagement and learning in materials development: A qualitative study of four primary school English teachers’ experiences

The newly-issued English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education (2022 Edition) in China have prompted publishers to reedit and rewrite textbooks, involving researchers (i.e., university professors) and practitioners (i.e., school teachers). Given that school teachers have long been users of teaching materials, their experiences in materials development have remained underexplored. To address this gap, we conducted a qualitative study to understand how four primary school English teachers engaged in materials development, whether their engagement in materials development elicited their learning, and if so, what the teachers learned. Drawing from individual interviews, observations of in-house meetings, and materials development documents, findings reveal that these four teachers engaged in materials development across behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions to different degrees, which led to teacher learning in ways of knowledge acquisition, participation, and knowledge creation. Findings are discussed regarding: 1) the interaction between teachers' multidimensional engagement and their learning, based on which an engagement-based teacher learning model is proposed; 2) teachers as agentic learners in materials development to build a nexus of research and practice. This study concludes with implications for the long-term impact of materials development on teachers’ professional growth.