Louisiana Teachers’ Project-Based Learning Science Curriculum Adaptations: Leveraging Elementary Students’ Local Experiences of Climate Change

• In Event: Constructing Educational Possibilities With Teachers at the Center of Project-Based Learning Design and Enactment

Abstract

Objectives
Students, even young students, experience climate change. Yet there is a notable absence of studies pertaining to students’ experiences and understandings about climate change. We respond to this literature gap by co-constructing climate change instruction with elementary teachers, and explore how teachers adapt materials to leverage students' lived experiences, cultural and community-based intellectual resources for learning core ideas.

Perspective
Students learn science by connecting their lived experiences and understandings of the world around them to investigations in the classroom. Teachers know their students well, and modify questions, prompts and activities so they elicit and interpret ideas, and move student thinking forward (Ruiz Primo & Furtak, 2007). Our goal is to develop students’ and teachers’ critical consciousness, which requires locating learning within topics worthwhile to study (Tilsen, 2023). Students and their teachers can develop critical consciousness and learn science by examining socioscientific issues from justice and equity perspectives and engaging in politically informed praxis (Tolbert, 2022). Project-based learning of the future leverages opportunities from the authenticity of projects that center science learning in consequential problems (Polman et al., 2018).


Methods
This design-based research project (Penuel et al., 2011) builds on purposeful flexible design of existing PBL curriculum where teachers solicit students’ experiences to adapt their lessons. Adaptations (within 4 created lessons about climate change in the local community) are co-designed by teachers and include activities, questions, and projects. Teachers discuss their adaptations with one another, and focus on what and how students learn, and what they did to create the opportunity. Interviews, reflective pre-and-post enactment interviews, PL data, and audiotaped discussions in class were transcribed and coded using Dedoose and a modified coding scheme (institutional challenges; naming inequities, repositioning students) from Tolbert and colleagues (2022).

Data
For design, we interviewed 2 local scientists (N=2), 4 teachers from two schools in Louisiana over a 2-week period using semi-structured interviews, (N=16), short pre-and-post enactment interviews (N=32), PL discussion about creating and reflecting on adaptations (N=2), and transcribed audio of class discussions (N=16).

Results
Preliminary findings suggest that teachers are aware of young students’ everyday experiences related to climate change, and can adapt lessons to support students in “naming their world” and connecting science to local political entanglements. Teachers saw various, and disparate, ways to connect their students’ lives so that they supported students to use science ideas to act and transform the oppressive systems around them. One teacher built on the experience of being homeless because a tree fell on part of a student’s house, “and so it was sucking in”. She connected the event to science and rising water to the area in Louisiana, “the fact that we're still floating. We're not on bedrock…We're not solid”. The use of science and context supported developing understanding of climate change.

Significance
We add to the emerging discussion that brings PBL curriculum to social scientific issues, centering the need for authentic social and critical consciousness for teachers and students for rich, flexible, experiences to invest in learning.

Authors

• Emily Adah Miller, University of Georgia

• Joseph DeLuca, Fairfield University

• Liz French, University of Georgia

• Shweta Lahiri, University of Georgia

• Julie A. Luft, University of Georgia

• Ajay Sharma, University of Georgia

• Hong H. Tran, Purdue University