SIGNIFICANCE
This curriculum package was developed using universal design for learning (U.D.L.) as the philosophical framework. A concept adapted from architecture for education, U.D.L. asserts that interventions intended to help those with special needs actually make the environment more hospitable for all while mitigating ‘ableist assumptions’ (Hehir, 2002) typified by cognitive, emotional, or physical disability labels that exclude people from rich social and intellectual experiences. In architecture, a ramp not only benefits an individual using a wheelchair, it also makes it easier for a parent with a baby stroller and more navigable for a worker with a heavy cart. In education, interventional strategies directed toward helping a subset of learners’ needs actually benefit all learners. For instance, using closed captions intended for the hearing impaired on an audio presentation will also aid students who are English language learners and students who are predisposed towards visual learning. The extent of U.D.L. benefits are immeasurable. Implementing U.D.L. in the classroom exposes all students to varied multi-modal experiences, producing a more robust learning environment and equipping all learners with cognitive flexibility and the ability to respond dynamically to challenges.
This curriculum package was developed to make use of the data found in my students’ inventory surveys from last semester which indicated that they were predisposed towards music and global humanitarian issues. Consequently, per my research sub-question, I anticipate that carousel and engineering design units infused with collecting and interpreting real data centered on music, carbon footprints, renewable energy, and socially conscious innovations will increase student engagement. I am optimistic that this curriculum project can be adapted for any community of high school students by making the arc more sensitive to ‘culturally relevant pedagogy’ (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and students’ interests. For instance, classrooms with students excited about automotive design might supplant parabolic solar ovens with designing and building hyperbolic headlights for cars. Should a teacher code a student needs assessment and discover that many are interested in biology they might couple an inquiry into logarithms and their use in developing robust food chains with an ecological study-and-build project rooted in the parabolic design of Mucana holtonii and how this shape helps bats echolocate and pollinate this night-flowering vine. The well of potential modifications runs deep when spearheaded by a caring educator who trusts in the transformational power of the teacher-student relationship and curriculum rooted in the tenets of U.D.L. (i.e., representation, action & expression, and engagement). A list of potential emphases useful for such modifications can be found in Appendix C.
This curriculum also represents an attempt to build equity into my classroom so students are “understood, appreciated, and respected” (Valenzuela, 1999, p. 108). There are numerous opportunities for students to cultivate ‘agency’ (MacLeod, 1987) as they work independently, are provided instructions and feedback about engaging effectively within teams, learn to wield mathematical and power tools, present creative works, provide and respond to constructive criticism during formal critique, and interact with community experts.
I used a multi-pronged approach to help students build capacity within the “strands of mathematical proficiency” (Kilpatrick et al., 2001, p. 5): ‘Conceptual understanding’ is strengthened as students develop mathematical models applying to the placement of food (solar oven) and frets (string instrument) and as they make decisions within interactive simulations. The iterative dimension to this curriculum project emphasizes ‘procedural fluency’ while ‘strategic competence’ “is propagated by multimodal formative assessments and monitored through student questions, diagrams of mathematical relationships, digital renderings, and build projects. ‘Adaptive reasoning’ is consistently measured as students present audio recordings, written works, conceptual maps, and their engineered prototypes for formal critique. Finally, carefully scaffolded design-build projects and ‘carousel’ activities using problems that are open-ended, interdisciplinary, and that encourage creative, art-infused solutions have the potential to foster a ‘productive disposition’ whereby students are habitually inclined to “see mathematics as sensible, useful, and worthwhile” (p. 5) and proof-positive that it is sensible to hold “a belief in diligence and one’s own efficacy” (p. 116).
While Kilpatrick et al. (2001) maintain these strands as integral features of mathematical proficiency, I maintain that said proficiency is intertwined with curriculum rooted in U.D.L. The U.D.L. framework encourages both self- and peer-construction of meaning (rather than didactic instruction) that pairs well with projects centered on real-world problems. This project represents an attempt to serve all types of learners interested in music, ecology, engineering, advertising, graphic art, economics, mathematics, physiology, and international affairs while also “avoiding readily accessible instances and accessing more abstract levels of representation” (Ward, Patterson, & Sifonis, 2004, p. 99). Acquisition of factual knowledge is an important metric of student growth. However, this curriculum package also prioritizes students’ ability to analyze, evaluate, imagine and create.
This curriculum package, once implemented, will serve as a robust platform for delving into the research questions I laid out at the onset of this capstone course. As I guide my students through the curriculum arc and assess their reactions to the activities therein, I will deepen my understanding of the effects of U.D.L. on my students’ engagement with the content and their ability to create meaning.
LIMITATIONS
There are certain limitations to this curriculum design project given my school context. We have access to an innovation lab (a hands-on power tool workshop and design lab) so doing a design/build project is relatively easy. The lessons involving construction might be more difficult at other schools that do not have access to woodworking tools or that do not allow students to bring their own tools due to liability and student safety. Along this line of thinking, it might be challenging for teachers of larger classes to monitor student safety while using tools, especially if community experts are unavailable as additional chaperones.
A limitation I come up against often, is time. My school only guarantees to meet approximately seventy to eighty percent of Common Core State Standards and I have a difficult time finding enough room in the academic calendar for content lessons that span multiple class periods. Meanwhile, teachers at schools that guarantee a higher percent of state standards are unlikely to be able to negotiate enough time to guarantee the depth and focus this curriculum arc demands.
Another interesting limitation I discovered while developing this curriculum package is that it was very difficult to avoid tailoring the design/build projects to the majority’s interests. Since I work at a very small school with class sizes of 12-16 students, I have found that their demonstrated interests are often shared or overlapping so it is easy to mold the lessons to fit their interests. At a larger school, there may be disparate sections of the class with quite different interests and large numbers of supporters representing those interests. Consequently, this curriculum package might have to be more divergent at schools with large class sizes and distinct spheres of student interests.
Money is an omnipresent issue at any school. This curriculum project allows for a subsidy of twenty-five dollars per team of four to build each solar oven and an additional twenty-five dollars for their string instrument. These funds might have to be less subsidized at schools with smaller budgets for build projects. However, I believe that these design/build projects could be constrained to a more limited budget and the resulting projects would still approximate the work of real engineers and product designers. To this end, I emphasize a discussion on the economic feasibility of distributing solar ovens prototyped in class.
Finally, many lessons call for the use of the internet and student computers. This technology is essential to this curriculum arc and consistent with the type of technology many students will utilize in the 21st century workforce. Thankfully, affordable alternatives to expensive PCs are available such as the Lenovo 100S Chromebook (approximately $179), the CTL Chromebook J2 (approximately $149), and the Hisense Chromebook (approximately $129). These price points, coupled with the fact that ‘Rhinoceros’—the digital drawing software students use in class—is free to new users for three-months and also optional to this curriculum arc, makes this technological push less demanding on schools’ and families’ wallets.
This project’s development would ideally parallel the iterative helix of the engineering design process. In this case, the clear limitation to this research is the fact that it was developed and synthesized over the summer. As a result, I found that few colleagues outside of my graduate cohort were available to vet my ideas and responsive improvements to student needs were hypothesized rather than deployed in real time. In short, I had to anticipate students’ reactions from lesson to lesson. I look forward to weaving this curriculum arc into my classroom during the academic year and taking advantage of rich student feedback in the form of surveys, interviews, exit slips, formative & summative assessments. The student input and reactions will allow me to customize the arc to fit their myriad talents and burgeoning interests. This curriculum project will further benefit from peer critique by co-members of a professional learning community within my school context with particular attention paid to thematic codes I will extract from student data. I hope that this type of peer critique might also lead to opportunities to expand this curriculum arc across different courses, further leveraging cross-cutting, interdisciplinary learning.
However, these limitations are surmountable and I intend to explore the ‘experiment’ and ‘improve’ phases (N.A.S.A., 2015) of my work as an educator while benefitting from student and peer input before cycling back to the drawing board. This curriculum research is a live, dynamic project that is intended to be a foundation for future growth rather than a linear, terminal product. Happily, the parallels are not lost on me as I look forward to this upcoming work and recognize the symmetry of how my work as an educator is approximating the sort of work this curriculum project asks of my students.
REFLECTION
There is one distinction I would like to make about the development of this curriculum package. I decided to deploy the principles of U.D.L. over the arc of the lessons rather than within each lesson. This approach developed in the wake of earnestly trying to imbue U.D.L. principles into many lessons I taught over the last year and finding that 1) it was nearly impossible to address every learning need and style in each lesson 2) trying to do so often fragmented the lessons, distancing learners who like to focus deeply on single tasks and 3) it was easy to misidentify a student’s learning profile. This curriculum package represents my attempt to serve different learners’ needs over the course of a subject arc rather than lesson by lesson. The result is, I believe, a much more successful U.D.L. curriculum that avoids some of the pitfalls of implementing U.D.L. (e.g., teacher burnout, failure to correctly identify and assess a learner’s profile, crafting a prescriptive lesson for a subset of learners but isolating or losing the attention of other learners). I have also come to believe that tailoring a lesson to an individual to the point where that student is no longer exposed to learning styles with which they are less comfortable does not align with the spirit of U.D.L. My intention is to deploy techniques and options so each student can explore and develop their learning style while treating their learning profile as a dynamic and developing identity rather than a set of discrete and immutable preferences. It follows that any given lesson within this curriculum package caters more to some learners than others. I expect that some students will intuitively engage in a lesson while others will use the lesson as an invitation to explore a learning style with which they were heretofore less comfortable. Acknowledging this, subsequent lessons were developed with equity in mind so as to ‘balance the field’ and stimulate all of my students. I think the result of this endeavor will manifest as students cast away the myths that mathematics is only intended for (and accessible to) a few types of learners; that math is purely abstract and inapplicable to the arts and humanities; that math does not lend itself to creativity; and that math classes rely on memorization and regurgitation.
I witnessed a student’s behavioral transformation firsthand when I first started to experiment with U.D.L. concepts over a year ago in EDUC 509: Engineering Design Process in Math and Science Education. This student, who I will call Robert, struggled with completing formative work and engaging in discussions centered on mathematical abstractions. Through an early course assignment and discussions about extracurricular interests, I came to understand that Robert enjoyed drawing and build projects. He also admitted completing only those school assignments that he perceived as purposeful. I tailored an early prototype of the solar oven design/build lessons to Robert’s interest in experimenting with digital rendering software and his affinity for construction. My experience was that he flourished, becoming more engaged in class (e.g., as he asked more questions), helpful towards his peers (e.g., as he shared his expertise with drawing and building), and attentive to homework (e.g., as his submission rate and average score increased by over twenty percent in each category). Robert, who previously never attended office hours, started to attend office hours regularly. His transformative behavior convinced me of the effectiveness of U.D.L.
I believe the process of developing this capstone project has led me to change the way I think about developing curriculum: from focused concentration on individual lessons to the wider lens of learning by subject arc. Additionally, this culminating graduate project has reinvigorated my desire to promote playfulness, self-advocacy, creativity, social construction of knowledge, engineering design and collaboration in the classroom. While this curriculum package’s external & inter-rater validity has yet to be assessed, I am confident the curriculum could be utilized at any school that supports social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978), student ‘agency’ (MacLeod, 1987), and community involvement. I suspect this work has engendered ‘process validity’ (Inoue, 2015) since it has inspired me to develop my craft with greater mindfulness as I “reflect on [my] own mind as well as what is happening in the minds of others” (p. 4). I am hopeful that my students will also experience process validity as they engage in this curriculum: working individually and in teams, creating interdisciplinary products using multi-sensory and multimedia tools, and working through metacognitive assessments intended to help them diagnose areas of achievement and growth. I plan to continue developing curricula that address what is relevant to my students, encourage divergent thinking, recognize that every student has their own learning style, elicit engagement through project-based learning, and challenge each individual to exercise their logic, creativity, and communication skills.
Meditating on the value of process through play helped me identify my ‘omoi’—an “integrated form of feeling, thinking, and passion developed by going through challenges and collective experiences that create…a gut feeling” (Inoue, 2012, p. 20). I developed this curricular project under the auspices of helping all types of learners: ‘visual-spatial’, ‘bodily-kinesthetic’, ‘interpersonal’, ‘intrapersonal’, ‘linguistic’, ‘musical’, and ‘logical-mathematical’ (Gardner, 1983). My ‘omoi’ informs me that I want to champion process as much as product, growth through feedback and creativity through engineering design and artistic renderings. Feedback from my students last year suggests that I ought to help them build creative and collaborate capacity as well as opportunities to disseminate their ideas. The curriculum package I have presented will support my students as they improve their initial ideas, deepen their understanding of mathematical and scientific concepts, and value the economical, technological, and humanitarian significance of their robust, artistic and mathematically-sound works.
This capstone project is a scaffold for my own ongoing development as a teacher. Due to the helical nature of successful research, I plan to assess this project’s efficacy among different learners and will adapt the project accordingly during future implementations. When coupled with compassionate teaching I believe this curriculum research can help my students engage metacognitively, recognize the rich utility of errors and give them custodianship of their own education. Part of that compassionate practice means modeling a growth mindset for my own development as a teacher.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express gratitude towards colleagues within this cohort for helping me drive this work forward with equity and student learning at the forefront. I would also like to thank Dr. Quezada, Dr. Inoue, and Dr. Assisi for their unwavering leadership and for pushing me to reflect on my practice at every turn. Finally, I would like to thank my wife and family for their saintly patience and unquantifiable help as I envisioned and developed this culminating graduate work.
References
Engineering design process video series. (2014). Retrieved June 9, 2015, from
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/best/edp.html#.V6VVRZOAOko
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York:
Basic Books.
Hehir, T. (2002). Eliminating ableism in education. Harvard Educational Review, 72(1),
1-33. Retrieved March 7, 2016, from https://ole.sandiego.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-761309-dt-content-rid-1442815_1/courses/EDUC-X538-MASTER/M1/M1_EliminatingAbleism.pdf
This curriculum package was developed using universal design for learning (U.D.L.) as the philosophical framework. A concept adapted from architecture for education, U.D.L. asserts that interventions intended to help those with special needs actually make the environment more hospitable for all while mitigating ‘ableist assumptions’ (Hehir, 2002) typified by cognitive, emotional, or physical disability labels that exclude people from rich social and intellectual experiences. In architecture, a ramp not only benefits an individual using a wheelchair, it also makes it easier for a parent with a baby stroller and more navigable for a worker with a heavy cart. In education, interventional strategies directed toward helping a subset of learners’ needs actually benefit all learners. For instance, using closed captions intended for the hearing impaired on an audio presentation will also aid students who are English language learners and students who are predisposed towards visual learning. The extent of U.D.L. benefits are immeasurable. Implementing U.D.L. in the classroom exposes all students to varied multi-modal experiences, producing a more robust learning environment and equipping all learners with cognitive flexibility and the ability to respond dynamically to challenges.
This curriculum package was developed to make use of the data found in my students’ inventory surveys from last semester which indicated that they were predisposed towards music and global humanitarian issues. Consequently, per my research sub-question, I anticipate that carousel and engineering design units infused with collecting and interpreting real data centered on music, carbon footprints, renewable energy, and socially conscious innovations will increase student engagement. I am optimistic that this curriculum project can be adapted for any community of high school students by making the arc more sensitive to ‘culturally relevant pedagogy’ (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and students’ interests. For instance, classrooms with students excited about automotive design might supplant parabolic solar ovens with designing and building hyperbolic headlights for cars. Should a teacher code a student needs assessment and discover that many are interested in biology they might couple an inquiry into logarithms and their use in developing robust food chains with an ecological study-and-build project rooted in the parabolic design of Mucana holtonii and how this shape helps bats echolocate and pollinate this night-flowering vine. The well of potential modifications runs deep when spearheaded by a caring educator who trusts in the transformational power of the teacher-student relationship and curriculum rooted in the tenets of U.D.L. (i.e., representation, action & expression, and engagement). A list of potential emphases useful for such modifications can be found in Appendix C.
This curriculum also represents an attempt to build equity into my classroom so students are “understood, appreciated, and respected” (Valenzuela, 1999, p. 108). There are numerous opportunities for students to cultivate ‘agency’ (MacLeod, 1987) as they work independently, are provided instructions and feedback about engaging effectively within teams, learn to wield mathematical and power tools, present creative works, provide and respond to constructive criticism during formal critique, and interact with community experts.
I used a multi-pronged approach to help students build capacity within the “strands of mathematical proficiency” (Kilpatrick et al., 2001, p. 5): ‘Conceptual understanding’ is strengthened as students develop mathematical models applying to the placement of food (solar oven) and frets (string instrument) and as they make decisions within interactive simulations. The iterative dimension to this curriculum project emphasizes ‘procedural fluency’ while ‘strategic competence’ “is propagated by multimodal formative assessments and monitored through student questions, diagrams of mathematical relationships, digital renderings, and build projects. ‘Adaptive reasoning’ is consistently measured as students present audio recordings, written works, conceptual maps, and their engineered prototypes for formal critique. Finally, carefully scaffolded design-build projects and ‘carousel’ activities using problems that are open-ended, interdisciplinary, and that encourage creative, art-infused solutions have the potential to foster a ‘productive disposition’ whereby students are habitually inclined to “see mathematics as sensible, useful, and worthwhile” (p. 5) and proof-positive that it is sensible to hold “a belief in diligence and one’s own efficacy” (p. 116).
While Kilpatrick et al. (2001) maintain these strands as integral features of mathematical proficiency, I maintain that said proficiency is intertwined with curriculum rooted in U.D.L. The U.D.L. framework encourages both self- and peer-construction of meaning (rather than didactic instruction) that pairs well with projects centered on real-world problems. This project represents an attempt to serve all types of learners interested in music, ecology, engineering, advertising, graphic art, economics, mathematics, physiology, and international affairs while also “avoiding readily accessible instances and accessing more abstract levels of representation” (Ward, Patterson, & Sifonis, 2004, p. 99). Acquisition of factual knowledge is an important metric of student growth. However, this curriculum package also prioritizes students’ ability to analyze, evaluate, imagine and create.
This curriculum package, once implemented, will serve as a robust platform for delving into the research questions I laid out at the onset of this capstone course. As I guide my students through the curriculum arc and assess their reactions to the activities therein, I will deepen my understanding of the effects of U.D.L. on my students’ engagement with the content and their ability to create meaning.
LIMITATIONS
There are certain limitations to this curriculum design project given my school context. We have access to an innovation lab (a hands-on power tool workshop and design lab) so doing a design/build project is relatively easy. The lessons involving construction might be more difficult at other schools that do not have access to woodworking tools or that do not allow students to bring their own tools due to liability and student safety. Along this line of thinking, it might be challenging for teachers of larger classes to monitor student safety while using tools, especially if community experts are unavailable as additional chaperones.
A limitation I come up against often, is time. My school only guarantees to meet approximately seventy to eighty percent of Common Core State Standards and I have a difficult time finding enough room in the academic calendar for content lessons that span multiple class periods. Meanwhile, teachers at schools that guarantee a higher percent of state standards are unlikely to be able to negotiate enough time to guarantee the depth and focus this curriculum arc demands.
Another interesting limitation I discovered while developing this curriculum package is that it was very difficult to avoid tailoring the design/build projects to the majority’s interests. Since I work at a very small school with class sizes of 12-16 students, I have found that their demonstrated interests are often shared or overlapping so it is easy to mold the lessons to fit their interests. At a larger school, there may be disparate sections of the class with quite different interests and large numbers of supporters representing those interests. Consequently, this curriculum package might have to be more divergent at schools with large class sizes and distinct spheres of student interests.
Money is an omnipresent issue at any school. This curriculum project allows for a subsidy of twenty-five dollars per team of four to build each solar oven and an additional twenty-five dollars for their string instrument. These funds might have to be less subsidized at schools with smaller budgets for build projects. However, I believe that these design/build projects could be constrained to a more limited budget and the resulting projects would still approximate the work of real engineers and product designers. To this end, I emphasize a discussion on the economic feasibility of distributing solar ovens prototyped in class.
Finally, many lessons call for the use of the internet and student computers. This technology is essential to this curriculum arc and consistent with the type of technology many students will utilize in the 21st century workforce. Thankfully, affordable alternatives to expensive PCs are available such as the Lenovo 100S Chromebook (approximately $179), the CTL Chromebook J2 (approximately $149), and the Hisense Chromebook (approximately $129). These price points, coupled with the fact that ‘Rhinoceros’—the digital drawing software students use in class—is free to new users for three-months and also optional to this curriculum arc, makes this technological push less demanding on schools’ and families’ wallets.
This project’s development would ideally parallel the iterative helix of the engineering design process. In this case, the clear limitation to this research is the fact that it was developed and synthesized over the summer. As a result, I found that few colleagues outside of my graduate cohort were available to vet my ideas and responsive improvements to student needs were hypothesized rather than deployed in real time. In short, I had to anticipate students’ reactions from lesson to lesson. I look forward to weaving this curriculum arc into my classroom during the academic year and taking advantage of rich student feedback in the form of surveys, interviews, exit slips, formative & summative assessments. The student input and reactions will allow me to customize the arc to fit their myriad talents and burgeoning interests. This curriculum project will further benefit from peer critique by co-members of a professional learning community within my school context with particular attention paid to thematic codes I will extract from student data. I hope that this type of peer critique might also lead to opportunities to expand this curriculum arc across different courses, further leveraging cross-cutting, interdisciplinary learning.
However, these limitations are surmountable and I intend to explore the ‘experiment’ and ‘improve’ phases (N.A.S.A., 2015) of my work as an educator while benefitting from student and peer input before cycling back to the drawing board. This curriculum research is a live, dynamic project that is intended to be a foundation for future growth rather than a linear, terminal product. Happily, the parallels are not lost on me as I look forward to this upcoming work and recognize the symmetry of how my work as an educator is approximating the sort of work this curriculum project asks of my students.
REFLECTION
There is one distinction I would like to make about the development of this curriculum package. I decided to deploy the principles of U.D.L. over the arc of the lessons rather than within each lesson. This approach developed in the wake of earnestly trying to imbue U.D.L. principles into many lessons I taught over the last year and finding that 1) it was nearly impossible to address every learning need and style in each lesson 2) trying to do so often fragmented the lessons, distancing learners who like to focus deeply on single tasks and 3) it was easy to misidentify a student’s learning profile. This curriculum package represents my attempt to serve different learners’ needs over the course of a subject arc rather than lesson by lesson. The result is, I believe, a much more successful U.D.L. curriculum that avoids some of the pitfalls of implementing U.D.L. (e.g., teacher burnout, failure to correctly identify and assess a learner’s profile, crafting a prescriptive lesson for a subset of learners but isolating or losing the attention of other learners). I have also come to believe that tailoring a lesson to an individual to the point where that student is no longer exposed to learning styles with which they are less comfortable does not align with the spirit of U.D.L. My intention is to deploy techniques and options so each student can explore and develop their learning style while treating their learning profile as a dynamic and developing identity rather than a set of discrete and immutable preferences. It follows that any given lesson within this curriculum package caters more to some learners than others. I expect that some students will intuitively engage in a lesson while others will use the lesson as an invitation to explore a learning style with which they were heretofore less comfortable. Acknowledging this, subsequent lessons were developed with equity in mind so as to ‘balance the field’ and stimulate all of my students. I think the result of this endeavor will manifest as students cast away the myths that mathematics is only intended for (and accessible to) a few types of learners; that math is purely abstract and inapplicable to the arts and humanities; that math does not lend itself to creativity; and that math classes rely on memorization and regurgitation.
I witnessed a student’s behavioral transformation firsthand when I first started to experiment with U.D.L. concepts over a year ago in EDUC 509: Engineering Design Process in Math and Science Education. This student, who I will call Robert, struggled with completing formative work and engaging in discussions centered on mathematical abstractions. Through an early course assignment and discussions about extracurricular interests, I came to understand that Robert enjoyed drawing and build projects. He also admitted completing only those school assignments that he perceived as purposeful. I tailored an early prototype of the solar oven design/build lessons to Robert’s interest in experimenting with digital rendering software and his affinity for construction. My experience was that he flourished, becoming more engaged in class (e.g., as he asked more questions), helpful towards his peers (e.g., as he shared his expertise with drawing and building), and attentive to homework (e.g., as his submission rate and average score increased by over twenty percent in each category). Robert, who previously never attended office hours, started to attend office hours regularly. His transformative behavior convinced me of the effectiveness of U.D.L.
I believe the process of developing this capstone project has led me to change the way I think about developing curriculum: from focused concentration on individual lessons to the wider lens of learning by subject arc. Additionally, this culminating graduate project has reinvigorated my desire to promote playfulness, self-advocacy, creativity, social construction of knowledge, engineering design and collaboration in the classroom. While this curriculum package’s external & inter-rater validity has yet to be assessed, I am confident the curriculum could be utilized at any school that supports social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978), student ‘agency’ (MacLeod, 1987), and community involvement. I suspect this work has engendered ‘process validity’ (Inoue, 2015) since it has inspired me to develop my craft with greater mindfulness as I “reflect on [my] own mind as well as what is happening in the minds of others” (p. 4). I am hopeful that my students will also experience process validity as they engage in this curriculum: working individually and in teams, creating interdisciplinary products using multi-sensory and multimedia tools, and working through metacognitive assessments intended to help them diagnose areas of achievement and growth. I plan to continue developing curricula that address what is relevant to my students, encourage divergent thinking, recognize that every student has their own learning style, elicit engagement through project-based learning, and challenge each individual to exercise their logic, creativity, and communication skills.
Meditating on the value of process through play helped me identify my ‘omoi’—an “integrated form of feeling, thinking, and passion developed by going through challenges and collective experiences that create…a gut feeling” (Inoue, 2012, p. 20). I developed this curricular project under the auspices of helping all types of learners: ‘visual-spatial’, ‘bodily-kinesthetic’, ‘interpersonal’, ‘intrapersonal’, ‘linguistic’, ‘musical’, and ‘logical-mathematical’ (Gardner, 1983). My ‘omoi’ informs me that I want to champion process as much as product, growth through feedback and creativity through engineering design and artistic renderings. Feedback from my students last year suggests that I ought to help them build creative and collaborate capacity as well as opportunities to disseminate their ideas. The curriculum package I have presented will support my students as they improve their initial ideas, deepen their understanding of mathematical and scientific concepts, and value the economical, technological, and humanitarian significance of their robust, artistic and mathematically-sound works.
This capstone project is a scaffold for my own ongoing development as a teacher. Due to the helical nature of successful research, I plan to assess this project’s efficacy among different learners and will adapt the project accordingly during future implementations. When coupled with compassionate teaching I believe this curriculum research can help my students engage metacognitively, recognize the rich utility of errors and give them custodianship of their own education. Part of that compassionate practice means modeling a growth mindset for my own development as a teacher.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express gratitude towards colleagues within this cohort for helping me drive this work forward with equity and student learning at the forefront. I would also like to thank Dr. Quezada, Dr. Inoue, and Dr. Assisi for their unwavering leadership and for pushing me to reflect on my practice at every turn. Finally, I would like to thank my wife and family for their saintly patience and unquantifiable help as I envisioned and developed this culminating graduate work.
References
Engineering design process video series. (2014). Retrieved June 9, 2015, from
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/best/edp.html#.V6VVRZOAOko
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York:
Basic Books.
Hehir, T. (2002). Eliminating ableism in education. Harvard Educational Review, 72(1),
1-33. Retrieved March 7, 2016, from https://ole.sandiego.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-761309-dt-content-rid-1442815_1/courses/EDUC-X538-MASTER/M1/M1_EliminatingAbleism.pdf