Empowering Teachers as Architects of Equity and Social Justice–Oriented Environments Through Adaptation Design

• In Event: Project-Based Learning of the Future: From Equity-Adjacent to Equity-Infused

Abstract

Purpose

We leverage Professional Learning (PL) to support adaptations as anticipated practice in teaching PBL science, and development of teacher conscientização (Freire, 1970) to mediate the outcome of teacher-driven adaptations leading to equity and social justice-oriented environments (Authors, 2013). Conscientização is the awareness of social and political contradictions and related action against marginalization and systems of oppression (ibid).
Teachers adapt curriculum with both planned and in-the-moment decisions, which can open or constrain access to participation and disciplinary engagement of underserved students (Authors, 2022). We use PL to support principled adaptations which means that the change in lesson enactment from what is written deepens the learning (Potvin, 2021). Accordingly, we design PL to present adaptations as welcome, uncertain, and exploratory, and an opportunity for collaborative learning. Our aim was to use adaptations as the context for the development of teacher conscientização, which would inform adaptations that create more equitable and social justice-oriented learning spaces.

Perspectives
Due to tension around discourses of equity and social justice, we designed PL to elevate teacher knowledge of equitable practices through the sharing, application, and critique of adaptation principles. Further frameworks build on theories of conscientização (Freire, 1970) and equity and social justice as constructed and multidimensional (Gewirtz, 2006; Nasir et al., 2021, Rodriguez and Morrison, 2019).

Methods & Data Sources
Multi-sourced dataset includes teacher semi-structured interviews, video-taped PL sessions (n=14), and observation and structured field notes of 7 elementary teachers enacting and adapting PBL science curriculum (10 sections, 180 students) in 2021-22. Teachers' interviews (n=30) related to the real tensions teachers feel when adapting lessons in institutional environments.

Interviews were coded with a priori (e.g., PBL features, tensions of lesson adaptation) and grounded codes (e.g., teachers sharing expertise, response to others’ adaptation, practicing equity). We used grounded, thematic analysis to look for teachers’ navigation of tensions around equity and social justice in their pedagogy and practice during PL and in classroom observation.

Results
Conscientização was leveraged when connections were developed across teacher and student and community contexts of social justice (i.e., how it feels to be denied a voice in decision-making as a teacher; lacking resources to achieve) and then extended to adaptations (i.e., enabling voice of student; awareness of discourses around achievement). Teachers iteratively considered their adaptations as facilitating or constraining equity with respect to their evolving and dynamic definitions of equity.

Preliminary analysis shows that with PL, teachers transitioned from reticent activists to architects of adaptation toward equitable engagement and social justice orientations. The majority of teachers initially viewed social justice and equity as relational (i.e., between and among students) and as differentiation, and then moved toward equity as related to processes of resisting or reifying oppressive systems.

Scholarly Significance
We add to understandings of the benefits of welcoming teacher-driven adaptations that adhere to principles of PBL learning environments. We address questions about the unique expertise teachers can offer researchers to create science learning environments that embrace equity and social justice.

Authors

• Emily Adah Miller, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author

• Tingting Li, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author

• Susan Codere Kelly
  Presenting Author