#469: Dilemmas of Customization: Navigating Goals and Guidance

Curricular customization is one means for teachers to achieve their own equity and pedagogical goals by tailoring the curricula to address a range of needs. However, teachers must balance potential contradictions between the goals and guidance of the curriculum and their own goals and understandings of students’ needs. Using data from a professional learning community of science teachers customizing curriculum for equitable sensemaking, we investigate how the dilemmas they face, the reasoning they employ, and their resulting customizations are shaped by these contradictions. We use these findings to highlight the complexities that underlie curricular customization, particularly when the goals and experiences that teachers bring to the classroom are at apparent odds with the guidance they receive in curricula. We intend to show that teachers do not enact their equity goals in a vacuum. Rather, they are shaped by the context within which they teach and the curricula.