Does Planning to Shift Cultures of Power Lead to Enactment?

• In Event: Centering Justice in Planning and Enactment

Abstract

Objectives and Purposes
For too long, rote and decontextualized instruction has been promoted in policies and curricula that dictate the educational experiences of students of color and students impacted by poverty (Au & Gourd, 2013; Preus, 2012). This has meant that white and affluent students often have greater access to authentic, student-centered instruction (Salazar, 2013). To combat this trend, project-based learning (PBL) has become a focus of educational reform because its principles promote a paradigm shift from a teacher-centered to a student-centered pedagogy (Grossman et al., 2019). Although much attention has been given to the design of PBL units in contemporary scholarship, we lack literature on teachers’ enactment. Such research is needed because teachers are the most important in-school factor in student achievement (Aaronsen et al., 2007). Thus, we ask the following questions:

Q1. To what extent do teachers with PBL experience design units aligned to PBL principles?
Q2. To what extent do teachers who design units aligned to PBL principles enact practice reflective of those principles?
Methods
Teachers, (N= 25), videotaped PBL classroom lessons before PD. Teachers also provided a sample assignment and consented to an interview. Videos, artifacts, and interviews were coded according to the PBL Protocol, consisting of five domains (i.e., Project-Orientation, Disciplinary, Authenticity, Collaboration, Iteration). Artifacts and interviews were assessed to calculate the percent of teachers representing PBL principles in their design. We then calculated percent of teachers’ representations of PBL principles in practice along three dimensions (i.e., represented in any way, well, or consistently well). Interrater reliability was above .6 kappa across the five domains.

Results
Q1. Alignment of Units to PBL Principles. Most teachers, 78.6%, designed units with a project-orientation that included an outside audience, 79%, and incorporated subject area content, 100%, but also allowed for student choice in the process 79%. In contrast, much less support for student reflection, 28%, or student revision, 0%, was found in teachers’ design.

Q2. Design to Practice. Results indicate that, 88 % of teachers enacted project-orientation, 68% did it well, and almost half of the teachers, 48%, did it consistently well. All of the teachers in our sample also had evidence of subject area content in their teaching practice with 76% enacting this practice well, and 44% enacting this practice consistently well. However, teachers did not enact practices related to contributing to an outside audience, 0%, or allowing for student choice, 28 %, despite planning for it in design. Lastly, teachers’ lack of attention to student reflection, 14% and revision, 28% may be a manifestation of their lack in design.

Significance/Implications
The purpose of this research was to explore the extent to which PBL principles in teachers’ design translated into enactment of those principles in practice. Our findings suggest that if PBL is to harness its promise as a vehicle for bringing progressive pedagogical approaches to schools where rote and decontextualized instruction has been the norm, researchers and practitioners may need to pay more attention to the problem of enactment (Kennedy, 1999).

Authors

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Pennsylvania

• JeanMarie Farrow, University of Pennsylvania

• Preeti Samudra, SUNY - College at Plattsburgh