A tripartite model of co-designing for an iMVT integrated science curriculum

Abstract

Curricula that substantiate innovative pedagogies are crucial for sustaining and scaling up education reform efforts. However, when researcher-designed curricula are enacted by teachers, the results might not be what researchers expected. Both researchers and teachers need to understand national curriculum policies in order to align their selection, design, and enactment of certain curricula. A co-design strategy, thus, is ideal in order to address the challenges. In this paper, first we describe a tripartite model of curriculum co-design process for a secondary chemistry unit through collaboration among a Singapore MOE chemistry curriculum specialist, researchers, and teachers when developing an iMVT integrated curriculum. This was also intended as a means for teacher professional development to build teacher competence in adopting, sustaining, and scaling up our innovation. Secondly, we intend to find out a mechanism behind this tripartite collaboration to theorize a co-design model by analyzing the interactions among the three parties over about six months of time following a design research tradition. The study contributes to the literature by proposing and evaluating a tripartite model for curriculum development and teacher professional development.