UC Berkeley

Teachers are increasingly motivated to incorporate local social justice issues, such as public health or environmental concerns, into science classes. Incorporating social justice into science, which connects science content to students’ everyday lives and real-life problems that matter to them, has been shown to support student learning and motivation in science. However, traditional science curriculum and science-teacher education have often avoided issues of social justice, and though motivated, teachers need support to transform their existing science curriculum while still maintaining alignment with NGSS science standards. Communities where teachers and other experts in education can come together to co-design justice-centered science curriculum can provide teachers with pedagogical support, resources, and community to support them in integrating social justice into science. My dissertation project explores how participants within a Research Practice Partnership (RPP) engaged in co-design to design two justice-centered science units focused on public health issues. The RPP brought together several groups of participants (researchers, teachers, and computer scientists) who contributed differing expertise towards co-designing the curriculum. I discuss how participants were supported to leverage varying expertise to address major challenges in refining curricular designs and supporting student learning, and how activity structures in the RPP supported teacher learning and leadership during co-design.The studies presented in this dissertation are guided by the following two overarching research questions: What design tensions arose during the process of co-designing justice-centered science curricula, and how did the RPP integrate the expertise of participants to address these tensions? How did the RPP support the development of teachers’ co-design capacities? The work of the RPP leverages design-based research and co-design methodologies to support collaboration and refinement of curriculum. Two pedagogical frameworks, Knowledge Integration (KI, Linn & Eylon, 2011) and Justice-Centered Science Pedagogy (JCSP, Morales-Doyle, 2017), inform the design of the curriculum and serve as common languages through which participants discuss curricular designs, pedagogy, and student work.The first two studies use the Design Tensions (Tatar, 2007) framework to analyze how challenges in designing justice-centered science curriculum emerged and were addressed by the RPP team. In the first study, I discuss the emergence of the first tension - persistent challenges in supporting students to integrate complex justice ideas - and discuss how RPP worked together to identify gaps in the units’ ability to support students to integrate justice ideas and utilized the KI framework to inform refinements to the unit. In the second study, I discuss the emergence of a second tension aligned with a major design principle of the KI framework, making science accessible through real-world examples. This tension - Balancing making SJSI accessible and integrating complex, publicly available data and data science topics unfamiliar to students - documents the trade-offs made by the team in identifying the right real-life data or examples to support students to integrate science and justice ideas with findings from data to understand social justice science issues. The final study turns to the teacher participants in the RPP. I explore how specific structures and activities within the RPP supported teachers’ engagement in co-design and leadership within the RPP. Findings indicate that both novice and experienced co-design partners were supported to engage in RPP activities that supported their leadership and professional growth.Taken together, these studies have implications for how the field designs justice-centered science curriculum and how teams with varying expertise can leverage their knowledge to address persistent challenges in supporting students to integrate science and justice ideas. Findings from these studies also have implications for expanding our understanding of KI to justice-centered contexts and demonstrate how merging KI and JCSP can inform the design of justice-centered science curriculum. Though focused on one RPP, this dissertation contributes to the field’s broader understanding of how co-design occurs between researchers and practitioners within an RPP and the structures and resources within an RPP that help to facilitate collaboration. Implications reveal the important impact of teachers in co-design and how RPPs can be structured to uplift and leverage their contributions when designing justice-centered STEM curriculum.