Designing and Supporting Productive Adaptation: Cross-Context Teacher Perspectives on Using FUSE in Classrooms

• In Event: 53.030 - FUSE Studios: Exploring the Adoption and Sustainability of an Informal STEM Education Innovation in and out of School

Abstract

Purpose

Developed by researchers and educators as a relaxed and fun way of engaging in STEAM-related activities, FUSE studios encourages students to explore their interests through a leveling up approach to ‘challenges’ such as 3D printing and graphic design without prescribed modes of implementation. FUSE designers are purposeful in designing a learning experience that “can travel” (Kirshner & Polman, 2013) to meet the needs of various classrooms, so long as adaptations maintain fidelity to the ‘free choice’ and ‘youth interest-driven’ design principles. Ongoing external evaluation reveals that within and across the dozens of FUSE school-based studio sites throughout the nation, students experience learning replete with both ‘peer support’ and support for ‘interest discovery’ (Ito et al., 2013). Such findings remain consistent despite a high degree of variability in local program adaptation.

Theoretical Framework

Our work is motivated by our evaluation and design-based implementation research driven interests in understanding the ways in which FUSE site variability influenced patterns of student participation and outcomes. As such, we take up the notion of productive adaptation: “adaptations that are responsive to the demands of a particular classroom context and still consistent with the core design principles and intentions of a curricular intervention” (DeBarger, Choppin, Beauvineau & Moorthy, 2013, p. 298) as a framework for making sense of the affordances and constraints of local adaptation on student patterns of participation.

Methods and Data

During the 2015-2016 school year, we interviewed nine teachers in various FUSE contexts. We elicited teachers’ goals of FUSE at their site; how those goals shaped the ways FUSE was adapted; and the aspects of FUSE that supported/constrained school goals. We aimed to identify practice-oriented perspectives on the way teachers’ made sense of the FUSE curricula in relation to the practices of teaching and learning in which they are engaged (Drier, 2008; 2009). In addition, we analyzed activity log and youth survey data to relate organization-level variations in goals and supports to patterns of youth participation.

Results

The preliminary results of our inductive coding (Miles & Huberman, 1994) of the teacher interviews show that teachers exercise high levels of agency and flexible responsiveness in adapting FUSE to meet the needs of their classrooms- such as including creating physical posters to highlight student collaboration, instilling whole class reflection time, or releasing challenges over time. We see a high degree of variability in adaptation with consistent measures of student attitudes, experiences and outcome-related measures. Kirshner and Polman (2013, p. 215) argue achieving such ingenuity in local adaptation is a “delicate combination” as the design must be “flexible enough...without being so protean that practitioners’ implementations lack substantive commonalities.” We suggest that the FUSE design supports productive adaptation.

Scholarly Significance

With over 11,889 students involved in the FUSE studios worldwide, we find merit in evaluating the ways in which the FUSE environment is supporting youth learning. Using the productive adaptation framework as analytical support for analyzing local adaptations, this paper makes visible the potential of one innovative design to support teachers’ agency for productive adaptation.

Authors

• Daniela Kruel DiGiacomo, University of Colorado - Riverside

• Katie Van Horne, University of Colorado - Boulder

• William R. Penuel, University of Colorado - Boulder