This chapter will interrogate ways of understanding collaborative lesson research that expose educators’ experience of challenging assumptions about teaching school mathematics. These perspectives will interrogate the lived experience of mathematics in a secondary school as well as ways of navigating contradictions within normalised curriculum practices. Finally, ways of imagining more equitable outcomes for low prior-attaining young people, many representing marginalised communities, are positioned within collaborative design research projects that seek to embrace the powers that they bring to the classroom. The experience of some young people in school can rapidly descend into a narrative represented by a discourse of deficit because of structural, political and cultural factors that marginalise ways of being and seeing in education that do not align with the dominant culture. This chapter will challenge this narrative by interrogating what might be possible at the boundary of teacher education collaborations that centre the experience of the young person as the starting point for novel and risky design research.