Power, Pollution, and Particles: Designing a Youth-Led Chemistry Curriculum

• In Event: A Focus on Equity: Participant-Centered Research Alliances

Abstract

Purpose
This study describes the co-design of a high school chemistry unit among a small team of youth who attend a 6-12 school in a large urban district, adults from a community activist organization whose mission is to develop youth into community leaders, and university-based researchers. The goal of the work described in this study is to collaboratively build a chemistry unit and teacher professional development modules to center the students’ interests, identities, and community priorities.

Theoretical Framework
Curricula and the education of children is a deeply political endeavor usually designed by White, English-speaking individuals and reflective of their cultural perspectives (Au, Brown, & Calderon, 2016). We seek to build on recent work in “justice-centered science pedagogy” (Morales-Doyle, 2017) that seeks to center chemistry as a dynamic, human-engaged discipline that is deeply relevant to our changing planet. Our design conjectures (Sandoval, 2014) propose that structures that 1) intentionally involve youth at the outset of chemistry curriculum design and 2) directly engage youth in teaching teachers about their designs can 3) transform the processes of curriculum production and 4) produce chemistry units that are interesting and engaging to diverse youth.

Methods
This paper employs a collaborative autoethnographic approach (CITE) to analyze and reflect on our diverse experiences in the context of the unfolding events of the partnership and the effectiveness of our design structures. We bring a wide range of experience (1-30 years) and racial and gender identities intersectional with our methodology.

Data
We analyzed 20 weeks of lesson planning and fieldnotes over 7 months to select “turning point” episodes that warranted a closer understanding of the effectiveness of those designs in producing We selected two key moments from these fieldnotes for deeper analysis. The following are two central episodes.

Results
Centering race. Our initial chemistry design centered on the topic of smells in one neighborhood historically impacted by “smelly” industries: roofing, pet food, oil refining, etc. The smells were somewhat engaging to youth, but we noticed a major difference in the tone of the youths’ engagement when we changed the focus during week 8 to an article titled, “White people create pollution; People of Color experience it.” At the end of the semester, it was one of the more meaningful activities that youth identified. The significance of this finding is that educators and codesigners have a potentially powerful move to make in adding the context of sociohistorical injustices to curriculum design.

Position youth as codesigners, not test subjects. The arc of the 15-week course and subsequent teacher workshop focused on first “teaching” the chemistry units and then engaging them in designing a teacher workshop. A marked difference in engagement occurred when we began asking youth to design a teacher workshop, and we articulate this difference as one of positioning; youth have valuable experiences and expertise that they can bring in order to design curricula that transform the historically-corporate “transmission” model of science learning into one where students and their communities’ needs are centered from the beginning.

Authors

• Kerri Wingert, University of Colorado at Boulder

• William R. Penuel, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Alma Urbano-Torres, Project VOYCE