Evolving Curricular Designs through Teacher Adaptation and Implementation with Students over Time

Abstract

This chapter describes five years of an ongoing curricular design and enactment effort involving multiple stakeholders with diverse roles. It focuses primarily on particular individuals with roles of high school classroom teachers, and their interactions with university-based faculty and doctoral students involved in research and development. The chapter describes how particular teachers in diverse learning environments adapted a curricular model for involving adolescents in the authoring of science news stories and infographics for authentic publication. In the first summer institute, the emphasis was on helping participants understand science journalism. Processes of participatory design resulted in the project moving toward more multimodal communication. The project&s;s most engaged teachers were motivated by personal goals to find new instructional approaches that could increase the personal relevance of science topics and scientific inquiry for their students. The chapter concludes by discussing future directions for organizing distributed socio-technical systems for participatory design involving teachers and their students.