Connected Learning Summit 2019

Teacher and Artist Partnerships: Collaborative Design of Integrated Learning Experiences
Anna Jordan-Douglass, Christine Torres, Carly Bogaards

Interdisciplinary curricula has gained momentum as an approach to teaching and learning, and for fostering meaning and understanding in learners, in response to new societal challenges and problems to be solved. Integrating curriculum across disciplines not only makes the subjects more meaningful to students, but promotes democratic schooling by providing learners with choice and active inquiry. In elementary schools, the arts can be used as a way to promote dynamic pathways of interdisciplinary teaching and learning, and give students and teachers new ways to make meaning in their worlds. Through a residency program organized by a local arts organization, formal and informal educators partnered to integrate the arts into a science curriculum with a focus on weathering and erosion. The result of the partnership was 50 2nd grade students structured into six production crews, who each created a mini-documentary featuring puppet hosts and hand-built sets. The students engaged in the science and engineering practices to gather research, identify a real world problem, and design a solution to that problem. The project required all four educators working collaboratively on a set of shared goals, leveraging one another’s expertise, and knowing when and how to lean on additional resources, and is a powerful example of collaborative informal and formal education partnerships to design learning experiences.

Design of Computational Thinking Curriculum for Multilingual Learners
Sharin Rawhiya Jacob, Ha Nguyen, Leiny Garcia, Mark Warschauer, Debra Richardson

University researchers and in-service teachers co-designed a curriculum for computational thinking instruction to upper elementary students.The process was held under a Research Practitioner Partnership, where researchers and practitioners investigated the state of computer science education in a district with a high student population of Hispanic, multilingual learners and of low socio-economic status. Such findings were used to inform the adaption of a curriculum for computational thinking that meets the needs of the districts’ culturally and linguistically diverse students. As a result, an online and open source computational thinking curriculum was designed to align with computer science and literacy standards, provide linguistic scaffolding, include culturally responsive materials, and integrate inquiry based approaches. A showcase of our curriculum will include an explanation of the design process and and overview its unique adaptations.

Meteor Writes
Shoshi Shapiro, Chris Breskey

What happens when a podcaster, a poet, and a playwright, walk into a museum? How does a storyteller find and share the stories of science? Come learn how two Chicago Institution’s Teen Programs teamed up with students and storytellers to answer these questions during the showcase.

From Concept to Classroom: Co-Designing and Implementing an Historical Inquiry Game as a Method to Foster Teacher Professional Growth
Jim Mathews,  David Gagnon

As part of a cross-institutional game design project, our team created a Teacher Fellowship Program that engaged three cohorts of elementary school teachers in co-designing a history game for 3rd-5th grade students. The game, called Jo Wilder and the Capitol Case, is an adventure-style game where players use historical inquiry practices to locate and analyze a series of historical artifacts. The Teacher Fellowship Program had several intersecting goals, including: (1) to produce a freely available video game that would get used in classrooms to develop students’ capacity for doing history (Levsitk & Barton, 2015); and (2) to provide a professional learning experience that would lead to growth in teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and practices tied to the use of games and historical inquiry activities in their teaching. To help us understand how teachers engaged with the Fellowship, we used the Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth (Clarke and Hollingsworth, 2002). This model provided an analytic tool that helped us map the different pathways teachers’ professional learning took. In this presentation we’ll describe the Teacher Fellowship Program, including the principles that guided how and why we developed it. We will also highlight components of the Fellowship that teachers found most salient in relation to their own professional growth and explore how these shaped their beliefs, attitudes and classroom practices. Finally, we’ll identify gaps that need to be addressed in future programming.