Design-based research*equity*social media & technology for learning
Overview
Educurious (www.educurious.org) leverages social media and authentic Project Based Learning (PBL) in the design of year-long courses in Life Sciences and English Language Arts for diverse high school students. The goal of Educurious is to re-imagine what is possible in a classroom setting by incorporating cutting edge technologies, social networking, contemporary content, disciplinary practices and access to world-class experts. Design principles included giving students opportunities to engage in authentic scientific problems and scientific practices such as performing fieldwork, analyzing and using computer models, and writing scientific texts. The curriculum used a social media platform that connected students to each other, and also to disciplinary experts.
Role: Designer and Researcher for the Ecological Impacts of Climate Change, Evolution, and Environmental Health units
Challenge
How can we support equity in education by building learners' social capital, disciplinary practice expertise and sparking interest in personally-consequential real-world problems in ways that capitalize on sociocultural learning processes?
Design
The Educurious curricula engages students in authentic learning through contemporary projects aligned to standards, uses a competency-based, learner-centered social media platform, leverages principles of how and why people learn, and connects students with volunteer network of experts and professionals.
Image Credit: P. Bell
Analytic Approach
We used an ethnographically focused design-based research approach. Each unit was piloted twice separately in Years 1 and 2, and the entire year-long course was piloted in Year 3. Analytics included:
Selected Findings
Learner-Expert Online Interactions Promote Scientific Expertise
We explored interactions between scientists and students on the social media platform during two pilot enactments of the ecological impacts of climate change unit. During this unit, scientists provided feedback to students on infographics, visual representations of scientific information meant to communicate to an audience about climate change. Analysis of the structure and content of the scientists' feedback revealed that when giving feedback on a particular practice, scientists provided avenues, critiques, and questions that incorporated many other practices; thus, scientists encouraged students to participate systemically in practices instead of isolating one particular practice. Analysis of student work before and after revising based on feedback demonstrates that in many cases students increased the complexity and improved the visual presentation of their arguments using feedback. We conceptualize the infographic and related data analysis of shared data sets as boundary objects that engaged students in authentic argumentation practices across classroom and professional contexts. While, traditionally, incorporating scientific inquiry in a classroom has emphasized student experimentation and data generation, we found that engaging with scientists around established scientific texts and data sets provided students with a platform for developing expertise in other important scientific practices during argument construction (Walsh & McGowan, submitted).
Importance of Addressing Socio-Political Dimensions of Climate Science
Three case studies of high school students whose classroom participation in a unit on the politically-polarizing topic of climate change was informed by their political identities and how they situated themselves in climate change’s sociocultural, historical and geologic context. We describe how these students, including two who initially rejected human-influenced climate change but revised their understandings, negotiated dissonant identities in the classroom through repeated engagement with conflicting political and scientific values, knowledge, beliefs and identities. These case studies problematize building bridges between formal and informal learning experiences and suggest that it may be necessary to leverage disconnections in addition to building connections across settings to promote productive identity work. The results further suggest that supporting climate change learning includes attending to identity construction across eco-social time scales, including geologic time (Walsh & Tsurusaki, 2014; Walsh & Tsurusaki, submitted).