Teacher agency during a K-12 place-based collaborative design process centered around a socio-scientific issue in Northern Alaska

In the face of pressing socio-scientific issues and the underrepresentation of Indigenous and marginalized students in STEM, there is an increasing need to integrate socio-scientific issues into the classroom through transformative pedagogical approaches. While the successful adoption of transformative teaching requires affordances for teachers’ professional agency, educational reforms have historically been implemented through approaches that treat teachers as implementers of policy, constraining teachers’ professional agency. Building upon a previous collaboration with a community in the Iñupiaq region of Northern Alaska, we co-constructed a series of place-based lessons on energy independence in the Arctic with a team of sixth grade teachers, researchers, and designers. Utilizing a case study approach, we characterized how three teachers enacted professional agency as they participated in the collaborative design process. Our findings provide insight on how to support teachers in adopting transformative teaching practices to teach about socio-scientific issues when using a collaborative design approach. Results indicate that flexible collaborative design supports teachers’ professional agency, but more efforts are needed to move STEM instructors towards making cultural and community connections in socio-scientific instruction.