Equity-Centered Curricular Customization Model: Supporting teachers in professional learning for expansive science teaching

• In Event: Achieving Culturally Sustaining Science Education: Looking Back and Moving Forward

Abstract

Objective and Theoretical Framework
Teachers play a pivotal role in developing culturally responsive science instruction, yet often need support in shifting their classrooms’ culture and epistemic power structures (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2015). Curriculum materials can provide teachers with an image of classroom practice as well as resources to support this new vision (Harris et al., 2015). However, curriculum enactment is not prescriptive and does not look identical in all classrooms (Remillard, 2016). Curriculum is a resource that teachers use as they notice and build upon students’ sensemaking (Sikorski & Hammer, 2017) resulting in unique enactments in each classroom (Authors, 2017). Consequently, teachers’ curricular sensemaking can support customizations resulting in more responsive and expansive science classrooms.

Methods
Specifically, in this proposal we share research we conducted with teachers as part of three different professional learning communities (PLCs). PLCs are groups of educators who regularly meet to collaboratively engage in cycles of reflection and learning (Hord, 2008). The PLC context was productive for this work because it enabled us to partner with teachers in cycles of design-based research (The Design-Based Research Collective, 2003) to refine a curricular customization model. The customization model consisted of four stages: (1) (Re)establish an equity goal with student data; (2) Analyze curricular materials to plan customization; (3) Enact and collect student data; and (4) Reflect on the equity goal and enactment (See Figure 3).

Data Sources and Analysis
Each of the three PLCs included between four and ten middle school science teachers and researchers. They met approximately every other week for seven meetings, with each meeting lasting two hours. We collected multiple data sources including video recordings of PLC meetings, design artifacts and teacher interviews. For this paper, we looked across the three PLCs comparing the different equity design goals and the tensions and ambiguities that arose as part of this process.

Results
As the three cases illustrate, the specific equity goal played a pivotal role in the work teachers engaged in as they customized the curriculum materials for responsive and expansive science teaching (See Table 1). Furthermore, this work both built off of existing curriculum design features in the curriculum as well as utilized additional instructional strategies as they centered the work on students’ resources in order to customize for their specific equity goal. Finally, this work is challenging and surfaced tensions and ambiguities that the teachers wrestled with in all three cases.

Scholarly Significance
These cases illustrate the pivotal role the curricular customization model played in the teachers’ collaborative work to adapt the curriculum for their students. Although there is variation in CSP work, researchers “share the goal of sustaining the cultures, languages and lives of communities” (Alim et al., 2020, p. 269). By centering their work on their students, the teachers were able to develop more responsive and expansive science classrooms that were shaped by an equity goal grounded in their context.

Authors

• Katherine L. McNeill, Boston College

• Samuel Lee, California State University - Long Beach

• Yang Zhang, Northwestern University

• Austin Moore, Boston College

• Jason Buell, Northwestern University

• Maria A. Moreno Vera, Boston College

• Brian J. Reiser, Northwestern University

• Brianna Balke, Boston College