“This isn't school, you know”: Designing for science teachers’ sensemaking of STEM ecosystems

As part of the special issue on Teacher Learning and Organizational Contexts, this paper explores the collective organizational sensemaking processes of middle school science teachers engaged in a design-based research project focused on supporting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) identity and interest development of middle school youth with the design of a STEM ecosystem. Most of the literature on STEM ecosystems focuses on the pathways available or not for youth to develop robust STEM identities and interests. Research on STEM teachers in STEM ecosystems generally focuses on teachers’ roles in brokering youth's experiences across learning settings and not on teacher learning. We fill this gap in the literature through an examination of how teachers came to understand STEM ecosystems as a means for supporting youth interest and learning in STEM and their role as educators within STEM ecosystems that include but extend beyond classroom practice. We used interaction analysis of video and audio data collected over two cycles of professional development to describe how designed activities supported STEM teachers to surface and attend to sources of ambiguity between the two learning environments. Our findings suggest that teachers understood the out-of-school environment vis-à-vis their organizational contexts—such as, how valued outcomes of school, like teaching vocabulary, were being addressed. Over time, teachers came to value out-of-school learning as distinct from their classroom and as a space that is “not school” that provided necessary learning opportunities for students. The teachers recognized the unique ways the out-of-school STEM setting surfaced students’ strengths in ways not always afforded by school. Implications for professional learning design for in-service science teachers to work toward providing more cohesive STEM learning experiences for youth are discussed.