Beyond Frameworks of Fidelity: Tracking Collaborative Design to Promote Multiple Perspectives of Science in the Classroom

Abstract

Culturally Relevant Education (CRE) focuses on the design of curricular materials that strengthen students’ cultural identities while teaching classroom content and science practices. While examples of CRE in science continue to grow, the identities and cultures of the designers are often different from those of the students and communities in which they work, leading to a divide concerning whose values are promoted in the classroom. Collaborative design invites diverse stakeholders to construct curricula that affirm multiple worldviews through distributing power within the design team. In this process, practitioners naturally adapt curricular materials depending on factors such as their instructor beliefs, institutional context, and student makeup. However, these adaptations are held in tension with the goals of the designer as a curriculum transfers to practice. Collaborative design considers adaptation as a mechanism that supports the transfer of curricular materials through mitigating power imbalances between designer and practitioner and exposing latent values that inform a design. Structures to study design and implementation of curricular materials remain sparse, leading to a focus on outcomes without paying attention to a multitude of factors that complicate the transfer of designs to real classrooms. The work presented herein examines the collaborative design and implementation process. The first chapter expands on a fidelity of implementation framework, exploring the negotiation between critical components (e.g., a designer’s perceptions of what makes a curriculum effective) alongside participants’ contextualized knowledge needed for adaptation. To study this process, we partner with secondary science teachers and a research scientist in a workshop setting, qualitatively analyzing teacher reflections, interactions within the workshop, and adaptations made considering teachers’ context. This framework is then applied to an overarching collaboration between Iḷisaġvik College, a Tribal College in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, and University of Michigan (UM) to design and implement a culturally relevant snow chemistry unit. Chapters three and four define the critical components for the overarching collaboration, examining how scientific researchers portray the western scientific knowledge construction process in relation to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) alongside how tenets of CRE relate to the collaboration. These chapters analyze interview and classroom data using inductive-qualitative and case study methodologies to study frameworks of scientific epistemology and CRE. Findings dictate that more nuanced depictions of critical components are necessary to expose latent expectations and value sets that influence a design. Also, constructing spaces for negotiation between the designer and participant throughout implementation facilitates necessary adaptation while preserving the integrity of critical components. The fifth chapter examines the negotiation between designer and participant context through the overarching collaborative design and implementation process between Iḷisaġvik College and UM. This process is tracked over multiple semesters using conjecture mapping to structure analysis of support meetings of the design team, classroom interactions, and participant artifacts to inform adaptation based on context. Through collaborative design, the final implementation of the snow chemistry unit contains examples of students navigating Traditional Indigenous knowledge alongside western science practices, signaling the inclusion of multiple perspectives of science in the classroom. To reach this outcome, conjecture maps provide a structure for reflection on student interactions with the unit that inspired adaptations throughout multiple cycles of implementation. As a result, conjecture mapping facilitates the study of complex designs while considering multiple cultural perspectives, shedding light on how to design for cultural relevance in a way that affirms all stakeholders.