EMPOWER: Enacting Materials to Promote OWnership, Engagement and Relevance

EMPOWER (Enacting Materials to Promote OWnership, Engagement and Relevance) is an ambitious program that empowers students to enact change in their local community. The introduction of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) across the United States has spurred numerous efforts to design and disseminate NGSS-aligned curriculum materials. NGSS-aligned curriculum materials aim to shift science instruction away from rote memorization and toward the active co-construction of ideas by teachers and students. However, leveraging these curricula in ways that support students to take action on environmental and health issues in their local community requires active, reflective, and sustained professional learning. The EMPOWER program aims to prepare teachers to adapt and enact curriculum materials to address and respond to local health and environmental issues, so that students will be engaged, interested, and empowered to enact change in their local community. In the EMPOWER program, we will work with secondary science teachers in core partner school districts who have committed to using NGSS-aligned units as part of their school science curriculum. Our theory of action is that supporting teachers’ understanding of their students, their local teaching contexts, research-backed theories around student agency and ownership, and the curriculum materials will result in shifts in 1) teachers’ views of effective science teaching, 2) teachers’ capacity to adapt curriculum materials to address local issues, and 3) students’ sense of ownership and engagement in science learning. These shifts are mediated by 2 years of professional learning (PL) activities across two contexts: participation in 1) week-long summer workshops, and 2) ongoing cycles of enactment and reflection during the academic year. In the summer workshops, teachers investigate issues in students’ local communities and use this knowledge to adapt the curriculum to directly connect science learning to these issues. During the academic year, teachers will engage in multiple cycles of enactment and reflection on the adapted lesson with researchers and their district colleagues. Across these two contexts, artifacts, surveys and video recordings will be used to study shifts in teacher’s beliefs and adaptive expertise with curriculum materials, as well as students’ participation in science learning. In Years 3-4, we will work with a subset of teachers to co-develop open-source pedagogical resources for building teachers’ capacities to utilize NGSS-aligned curricula in ways that promote students’ ownership, engagement, and participation. In Years 4-5, we will work with teachers to test and refine these materials and disseminate these materials to teachers in new schools and districts across the nation. The research activities of the EMPOWER program will result in the development of an online, open-source that support teachers in adapting curriculum in ways that empower students to address the science issues and phenomena in their community.