Co-design as a Site for Teacher Sensemaking and Engagement with Justice-Centered Science Instruction (Poster 9)

• In Event: Research on STEM Professional Learning Communities: Attending to Teacher Learning, Agency, and Equity

Abstract

Purposes: This study examines how a group of high school biology teachers collectively made sense of justice-centered science instruction in the context of a research-practice partnership over two years. The following questions guide this inquiry:
How did a group of high school biology teachers collectively make sense of justice-centered science instruction while co-designing and enacting the curriculum and assessment of one unit?
How were individual teachers' implementation of the co-designed unit and justice-centered science instruction shaped by the team’s collective development of the unit and justice-centered science practices?

Perspectives/theoretical framework: Philip’s (2011), ‘ideology in pieces’ frames this study. Teachers draw upon their everyday knowledge, what they hold as common sense, and formal knowledge gained through professional learning experiences (Philip, 2011; DiSessa & Sherin, 1998) to make sense of concepts relating to equity, justice, and civic engagement. Guided by this framework, we attend to the layered sociopolitical contexts as well as the racial identities, and historical relationships among the members. In addition, we attend to the power-laden context, asking whose ideas, experiences, or values are privileged or silenced in the process of constructing minoritized students’ learning experiences.

Methods: The study setting was a 2-year partnership project with a progressive school district that served students predominantly from racially and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities (over 70% Latinx, about 74% economically disadvantaged). Each year, 20 science teachers participated in the PD, exploring justice-centered science teaching that promotes students’ civic engagement. For this study, we trace one co-design team–four high school biology teachers who enacted curriculum on a biodiversity unit over two years.

Data sources: We employ a longitudinal critical qualitative case study approach (Denzin, 2017; Huberman, 2014). The data sources used were teacher interviews (8 hours), video recordings of PDs (100+ hours), various artifacts from co-design activities, and video recordings of enacted lessons (25+ hours). A unit of analysis was an event or incident that contains ideological meaning-making, such as: 1) teachers explicitly talking about their understanding of equity, justice, and civic engagement, 2) teachers discussing ways to support historically marginalized students’ science learning, and 3) when disagreements, tensions, or confusion arose among the teachers. Guided by the framework, each event was analyzed through open and closed coding, focusing on their racial identities, historical relationships, power dynamics, and shaping of discourses in activities, identifying any changes in discourse over time.

Results: We will present the full analysis at the conference. Preliminary analysis reveals three things: 1) teachers’ identities, historical relationships, and professional learning experiences shape how teachers engage in discourse around developing the co-design unit, 2) these identities and power-ladened structures embedded within the PD, district and society shape whose ideas are centralized and peripheralized during each meeting, and 3) the pedagogical-decisions made by the co-design team are a result of these power-laden structures that are dynamic, changing over time as the team participates more and more in this shared professional learning experience.

Significance: This study seeks to illuminate the collective sensemaking processes in a long-term co-design partnership project.

Authors

• Stephen R. Skoropad, University of California - Irvine

• Hosun Kang, University of California - Irvine