BioBuilder's Model for Transformative Education: A Case Study in the Rural Southeast

• In Event: The Biomaker Ecosystem: Technologies, Spaces, and Curriculum for K–12 Making With Biology

Abstract

Synthetic biology—where genetic engineering principles are leveraged to redesign cells to generate a specific usable output—has become an increasingly relevant science tool for K-12 education. Despite this growing attention, much of those efforts report on implementations on local scales. Furthermore, while those efforts provide important insights about learning in this paradigm shifting field where computation and design is a salient part of engagement, they tend to focus on the learner, leaving out an important stakeholder: teachers—whose adoption and implementation practices are essential. This is due in part to the fact that synthetic biology represents a paradigmatically distinct approach in life science, where cells are often treated as genetic circuits and computational metaphors are often used to characterize genetic sequences. This not only complicates how synthetic biology is understood, but also how teachers might connect this perspective to their own expertise, which traditionally exists in disciplinary silo. As a result, we know very little about how to introduce teachers to synthetic biology.

We address these issues by developing and implementing comprehensive active learning professional development activities with high school life science teachers. This professional development design uses a problem-based learning approach (Savery, 2004) that also leverages perspectives from computation (Minsky & Papert, 1988) to frame synthetic biology (Shetty et al., 2008; Way et al., 2014). In the last eight years alone, this program has been deployed to train more than 500 high school teachers from around the world. In this presentation, we report on a model for integrating a synthetic biology-based professional development program at scale using the BioBuilder curriculum (Dixon & Kuldell, 2011; Bernstein et al., 2015). This week-long implementation took place with 10 high school science teachers in a rural school district in the southeastern region of the United States. Using anecdotal qualitative evidence we report on implementation factors that warrant consideration when introducing a synthetic biology-based curriculum across a school district. Those considerations include resource assessments—whether teachers have insights about their resource needs in order to be successful in implementing such a program—and value-added assessments—consideration of whether teachers believe the approach is of any value to students. Our observations suggest that a scaled implementation can be successful if it—in addition to supporting teacher practice and expertise building—provides teachers with the wherewithal to assess their own learning trajectories (i.e., how and what is needed to reach mastery) and when teachers themselves place value on the field and its potential benefits to students.

This work brings attention to teachers, important stakeholders in the successful adoption and implementation of key synthetic biology learning paradigms. While this effort represents an early step in understanding high school teacher perspectives about synthetic biology as a learning tool, it also identifies key design features in professional development implementations at scale. Future efforts should identify critical professional development learning objectives in order to better understand how to support teachers in advancing their own expertise in these burgeoning areas.

Authors

• Natalie Kuldell, BioBuilder Foundation

• Jessie Klapper Elliot