Co-Designing Justice-Centered, Action-Oriented K–12 Science Education: Emergent Principles and Practices for Work With K–12 Teachers

• In Event: Grounded in Justice and Joy: Critical Empirical and Conceptual Explorations of Affect

Abstract

Recent research on the development of justice-centered K-12 science education (Morales-Doyle, 2017) has challenged both the everyday practices (Mutegi, 2011) and the larger “purposes” (Morales-Doyle et al., 2019; Roth & Désautels, 2002) of science teaching and learning in U.S public schools (see NGSS, 2013). Emergent within this work is a parallel challenge for researchers and practitioners: re-designing the core principles and practices guiding the work of curricular co-design with K-12 teachers for justice-centered, action-oriented science learning that prioritizes students’ ideas, communities, and emotions (Gerard et al., 2022). Recent innovations in co-design work include Bang et al.’s (2010) development of community-based design, Gutiérrez & Jurow’s (2016) exploration of social design experiments, and Severance et al.’s (2016) use of CHAT principles to center teacher agency in the design process. We propose two additional “re-designs” for justice-centered science curriculum co-design with teachers, surfacing from our multi-year experiences teaching and learning in a large public U.S. school district: 1.) practices to sustain collaborations across all research activities and 2.) developing community partnerships for publicly embedded action. These “re-designs” focus on the affordances and constraints of paired and small-group partnerships for co-designing learning opportunities and methods of inquiry. Following others, we highlight the importance of affect (e.g., Davis & Schaeffer, 2019)—namely joy—and agency at personal and community levels (e.g., Varelas et al., 2018) in shaping both the process and design “products” of our work.

Case 1 focuses on a teacher-researcher collaboration that centers the participating teacher as a co-researcher and co-conspirator (Love, 2019) toward justice-centered ends. The author and Ms. E (a pseudonym) co-design curriculum and co-research justice-oriented science teaching and learning (Morales-Doyle, 2017), including how care (Valenzuela, 1999) and attention to affect (Davis & Schaeffer, 2019) are central to justice-oriented teaching. The author uses an auto-ethnographic methodology to uncover principles that support co-research partnerships from meeting transcripts, reflective memos, interviews, and observations from Ms. E’s classroom. The author uses inductive coding analysis and triangulation of data to create generative themes in co-research partnerships toward justice. Findings highlight three aspects of this partnership: co-facilitating goal setting and visioning, leveraging the expertise of each participant towards meeting desired goals, and honoring and uplifting emotions that come up during the work.

Case 2 focuses on a curriculum design and implementation project with 3 high school (environmental science) and 2 middle school (history and special resource) teachers in partnership with a local science museum. Analytically, the research leverages a multi-sided, multi-sited perspective that highlights how students’ and teachers’ practices and perspectives are “developed, extended, and leveraged across settings,” (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014, p. 604) throughout the project. To facilitate this multi-dimensional analysis, the research explores a range of video, interview, and artifactual data from across the design and implementation sequence including teachers’ curricular materials and students’ work. Preliminary findings focus on the impact of the publicly-engaged nature of the work on teachers’ design and pedagogical practices, particularly their collective leveraging of one another’s expertise.

Authors

• Kelly R. Billings, University of California - Berkeley

• Jacob Barton, University of California - Berkeley