Leveraging Diverse Expertise and Collaborative Decision Making in Curriculum Co-Design: Unveiling Structures, Tools, and Practices

• In Event: Making the Invisible Visible: Dynamics, Processes, and Outcomes of Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

This study explores how a co-design team of seven students, six educators and seven researchers co-developed a high-school environmental engineering curriculum grounded in community based science. We examine how (1) the research team leveraged its diverse expertise to intentionally plan the design activities to support equitable participation, and (2) how collaborative decisions emerged through each co-design session to guide the ongoing refinement of the co-design process and curriculum development. Research-practice partnerships and design-based methodologies aim to bring together teams with diverse forms of expertise and roles who engage collectively to negotiate shared goals and build mutual understanding (Farrell et al., 2022). However, collaboration alone does not inherently ensure equity. Equity must be intentionally cultivated through the design of sessions that actively attend to participants’ background and professional identities (Farrell et al., 2022). This involves creating spaces that center participants’ voices and expressions, enabling shared meaning making and reflection guiding the work and its improvement over time (Penuel et al., 2013). By foregrounding these equity driven theoretical approaches, this study highlights the deliberate practices that elevate participant voice and foster collective decision making throughout the curriculum co-design process. This study uses a qualitative approach to make visible the co-design process across multiple sessions (Fig. 1). Through memos and matrixes, we document structures and tools used to support intentional planning, facilitation, and debriefing, as well as practices that became routine during co-design sessions in support of power distribution and collaborative sense- and decision-making.Data sources include audio recordings of co-design sessions, researcher memos, field notes, and artifacts including planning documents, participant-generated in-session materials. Findings highlight how intentional planning and facilitation, drawing on the diverse expertise of the co-design team members and integrating multimodal forms of expression and varied activities supported participant voice and fostered shared meaning making. Several tools, such as planning templates and exit tickets, as well as co-design routines, such as silent thinking, group brainstorming, charting, and distributed facilitation elevated participant voices and supported collective decision making. For instance, in response to a question about planning a field trip and collecting data, one student wrote in the exit form, “I think maybe if we collect visual examples it could help us in the future.” This insight directly informed the design of the fieldtrip where students were encouraged to take photographs of spaces that resonated with them and bring them to the next co-design session. Debriefing meetings served as key spaces to interpret artifacts from prior sessions, directly informing the design of subsequent sessions. This iterative process illustrates the relational and cyclical nature of the co-design process, where effort is made to inform the work through participant feedback. This study contributes to RPP and co-design scholarship by making visible the structures, tools, and decision making processes that characterized co-design in our project. Templates and tools we created can be easily adapted by other partnerships to support intentional facilitation and reflection towards continuous improvement of the co-design process.

Authors

• Rossella Santagata, University of California - Irvine

• Aakriti Bisht, University of California - Irvine

• Yuxi Huang, University of California - Irvine

• Taryn M. Williams, University of California - Irvine

• Symone Gyles, University of California - Irvine

• Teresa Hackey, University of California - Irvine

• Hosun Kang, University of California - Irvine

• Jennifer J. Long, University of California - Irvine

• Sara Ludovise, Orange County Department of Education

• Erick Valdez, Orange County Department of Education