Co-designing Curriculum to Discuss Environmental Disparities Using Data Science
Data has never been more abundant and accessible as it is now. Those who understand how to collect, clean, analyze and visualize data, and to build arguments with data are at an enormous advantage. Data provides a means of comparing and communicating ideas. For example, the data from the TreeEquityScore website provides opportunity for students to draw conclusions and formulate hypotheses about communities with varying amounts of tree coverage. As impactful as data literacy skills are, students should be immersed in meaningful, data-enhanced projects as early as elementary school. Such projects have been collaboratively designed (co-designed) as a fifth-grade curriculum that teaches students to wonder about the community that they live in, to ask questions about it, to survey members of their community, and then to analyze their data and share their findings. The co-design process, as part of a Research Practitioner Partnership (RPP), engaged data science and curriculum design researchers as well as eight elementary school teachers in schools districts with 94% Latine student populations. This poster reports on insights and perspectives raised by the fifth grade classroom teachers that infused into the curriculum content and teaching pedagogy that is relevant and engaging to the Gen Alpha student population. Some of these insights include the integration of the Tree Equity Score website, video of the actual neighborhoods students live in, and discussing the disparities in the classroom.