Project-Based Science Learning: Adaptations That Promote Productive Disciplinary Engagement and Disrupt Exclusionary Practices

This paper examines how exclusionary epistemic practices embedded in science as a discipline are reproduced in classroom settings and how these practices can be disrupted when teachers adapt existing materials toward goals of epistemic inclusion. The inequities in access, participation, and representation in science that are reproduced at a societal level are developed in the classroom. Students learn how to do science—they develop the epistemic and social practices of the scientific discipline—in science education classes. When exclusion of some students from classroom knowledge building is normalized, marginalization becomes part of how students learn to engage in science and engineering practices. Drawing on a curricular redesign project conducted during the COVID-19 transition to virtual learning, the study highlights how the repositioning of teachers as active agents and experts in curriculum adaptation was central to the work. Using qualitative data-driven coding with productive disciplinary engagement and epistemic inclusion to guide the analysis, critical cases of curricular adaptations were developed with 10 elementary science teachers during a year-long project-based learning online science curriculum enactment project. Five themes associated with disruption of entrenched exclusionary practices emerged that can be codified as adaptation principles: 1. adapt features of project-based learning to: (1) bring in and leverage students’ identities and intellectual resources from home; (2) provide student-centered choice; (3) elicit diverse knowledge, expertise and ideas; (4) support students to make use of many different modalities; (5) dismantle the usual (traditional) structures between the teacher and students.