"How Should We Proceed?" Examining Dynamics of Decision Making When Designing Curriculum in Partnership With Students

• In Event: "Designing for" to "Designing With" Partners: Emergent Challenges in the Co-Design Process

Abstract

Curriculum design in Physics Education Research (PER) has traditionally employed a hierarchical model of student engagement, with researchers inviting students to play the role of “testers” individually or in a group (Docktor & Mestre, 2014; Meltzer & Thornton, 2012; Shaffer & McDermott 1992; Meredith & Redish, 2013). This paper describes our initial attempt to shift our “traditional” curriculum design model to involve students in the design process as partners. This initial foray into curriculum co-design is informed by work in Students as Partners (SaP) (eg. Matthews, 2017) work and participatory design (eg. Hanna, Risden, Czerwinski, Alexander, & Druin, 1998).

The co-design group consisted of two researchers (one graduate student and one faculty member) and four undergraduate physics majors. The researchers acted as planners, participants, and facilitators. The decision to do all this regulatory work for the co-design process emerged from the institutionalized asymmetries amongst the participants—researchers had more time and resources to work on the project. Reflections by facilitators on wanting the meeting space to more adhere to SaP principles such as reciprocity, mutuality, and complementarity (eg. Hermsen, Kuiper, Roelofs, & van Wijchen, 2017) led to researchers attempting to engage students in the decision-making into how the group should proceed in the co-design process.

Using tools from fine-grained interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995), we examine emergent tensions during an episode mid-way through the co-design process in which the participants negotiate and renegotiate participation in the decision-making processes. These tensions include misalignment towards contesting and structuring participation frameworks (Goodwin, 2007) and the interactional work required to reach more coherence. Our analysis suggests the epistemic resources drawn on, forms of interaction, ways of talking, and affect contribute to positioning of participants (and contesting the positioning of participants) in ways that are historically and institutionally stratified within a hierarchical model (Gee, 2004). Interactions towards opening up space for some decision-making often framed other decisions—potentially more consequential decisions—as closed-off to students. Through the extended negotiation process, the decisions available to students, including how to interact and what roles they might be able to take up, become narrower and narrower.

While the aim of this work is critically evaluative self-reflection, this paper also speaks to characterizations of shared epistemic agency (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991; Scardamalia, 2002; Damsa, et al., 2010), revealing an entanglement of regulative and epistemic dimensions of shared epistemic agency. This entanglement complicates our initial notions of how to leverage asymmetries of participants while avoiding significantly closing off agentive participation.

Authors

• Erin Ronayne Sohr, University of Maryland - College Park

• Ayush Gupta, University of Maryland - College Park

• Brandon James Johnson, University of Maryland - College Park

• Gina Quan, San José State University