Promoting Justice through the Co-Design of an Integrated Science, Engineering, and Computational Modeling Unit (Poster 7)

• In Event: Building STEM Teachers’ Social Justice Teaching Capacities: Future Directions for Teacher Education

Abstract

Objectives
The Next Generation Science Standards integrate engineering and computational thinking (CT) practices so that students can apply science to solving problems that are relevant to them. Engaging in engineering and CT, which emphasize systematic approaches to generating solutions to human problems, constitutes an important mechanism for science teachers to center social justice issues in students’ own communities. This work builds upon approaches to justice in science classrooms that call for students to integrate science knowledge with their communities’ ways of knowing to empower students to design solutions to personally relevant problems (e.g., Calabrese Barton et al., 2021). Engineering enables teachers to center social justice because projects can focus students on relevant socio-scientific issues, foreground and value students’ own personal and community resources within school contexts, and counter norms of whose knowledge is privileged within classrooms.

As students’ experiences are necessarily positioned within the contexts of their classrooms and schools, justice-oriented approaches require teachers to adapt instructional materials to their own contexts and customize curricular materials to their specific classroom settings (e.g., Kim, 2021; Lo et al., 2021). More research is needed to explore how elementary teachers can customize computationally-rich curricular materials for justice-oriented science. This poster examines how a fifth-grade teacher co-designed an NGSS-aligned unit about water runoff over the course of four years and enacted the unit in ways that promoted justice.

Methods
The Water Resource Challenge (WRC) is a 15-day unit integrating Earth Science, engineering, and computational modeling concepts and practices where students investigate the phenomenon of water runoff, develop a computational model of water runoff, and then use the model to test and refine solutions. The WRC was conceived as an off-the-shelf curriculum about water runoff but was eventually co-designed with teachers to center justice for students in their communities. By articulating the co-design process of this unit, this poster investigates emerging design conjectures (Sandoval, 2014) that contributed to centering justice.

We use a single case study methodology (Yin, 2018) of one 5th-grade teacher who participated in the co-design of the WRC with researchers and implemented the unit three times over four different years at the same elementary school. The school is part of a district in a mid-Atlantic state with 40.0% White, 28.1% Black, 13.1% Hispanic/Latinx, 13.6% multiple races, with 53.6% of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch, and 14% emerging multilinguals. Data sources included curricular materials, co-design artifacts, professional learning observations and artifacts, lesson plans, classroom observations, and interviews.

Results
Over the three design iterations, the WRC became more focused on addressing problems of importance to the students – that heavy rains flooded their playground and forced indoor recess. Revisions included students presenting their design ideas with evidence from computational models to their principal to improve their school and leveraging other school efforts to empower students to design changes to their school community.

Significance
Findings contribute to an understanding of how to help teachers customize curricular materials to their own local contexts to promote justice in science classrooms.

Authors

• Jennifer L. Chiu, University of Virginia

• Kevin McElhaney, Digital Promise

• Sarah Lilly Deans, University of Virginia