Co-Created Learning: Interest Surveys and Content Dissemination

• In Event: Fostering Deeper Learning in Research-Practice Partnerships: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives

Abstract

Whether in science or civics, student learning deepens when they participate in co-creating the learning experience. iHub and Generation Citizen (GC) offer two case studies in student curricular co-design through curricular interest surveys and in situ content creation.

iHub centers students’ interests through codesign with teachers, leading to deeper learning is by using boundary practices to bridge the work of researchers and practitioners (eg., Penuel, Allen, & Coburn, 2015). One way that these boundary practices between groups of adults can be strengthened is by finding ways to include youth in this partnership. One method is by using student surveys to gauge the interest and importance of different curricular topics to youth before beginning design work. In the codesign of a high school chemistry curriculum, our research-practice partnership conducted a survey of almost 1000 youths’ interests in lesson topics before beginning the process of codesign with teachers. This study asked, “How did teachers and researchers engage in the boundary practice of using a survey -- disaggregated by race, gender, and home language -- to determine the central topic of a chemistry unit? How can a survey of student interest be used as a boundary object between student interest and teacher-researcher codesign?”

GC approaches curricular codesing as a real-time content-creation opportunity for students over the course of an Action Civics project and most prominently during the Research Unit, which leverages youth participatory action research (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). The Action Civics approach is rooted in the need for pedagogies that create space for students to both create classroom content through research, analysis, and sharing and to elevate their experiences and the experiences of their communities as a relevant form of expertise in the classroom. The barriers to such affirming civic learning experiences for BIPOC students and students in low-resource schools and neighborhoods has been clearly articulated (Calarco, 2014; Kawashima-Ginsberg & Sullivan, 2017; Stephens, Markus & Townsend, 2007). The questions GC’s student surveys seek to answer is the extent to which this approach to curricular codesign in the classroom deepens students’ ability to retain civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions.
These case studies validate the importance of co-created learning experiences across disciplines. A finding made increasingly relevant as COVID-19’s effects have brought student-teacher connections to the forefront of most educators’ minds and the summer surge of direct action in the Movement for Black Lives has made clear the agency, competence, and power of young people, which the educational system has been gravely underutilizing.

Authors

• William R. Penuel, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Kerri Wingert, University of Colorado at Boulder

• Amy Curran, Generation Citizen

• Destiny Warrior

• Elizabeth Sidler