Resources That Work Here: The Role of Infrastructure in Shaping Science Teachers' Documentational Genesis

As science teachers gain increasing access to resources through an ever-expanding resource system, the study of how science teachers decide which resources to use and how to use them becomes increasingly important and complex. When science teachers exercise agency to select and adapt resources in alignment with their context, teaching and learning can improve. However, little is known about the ways in which school and district infrastructure mediate these processes. This study uses the documentational approach to didactics (DAD) and the structure-agency dialectic to explore how instructional guidance infrastructure (IGIs) influenced science teachers in one district to select, adapt, and use a set of instructional resources developed by other teachers in the district with the goal of creating collections of resources aligned with the district's infrastructure. This two-phase, explanatory sequential mixed methods study featured the collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data with the purpose of exploring how teachers used the collections' resources, if at all, and how IGIs shaped these decisions. In the first phase, metadata from teachers' access to the resource collections was used to create a set of initial conjectures about the nature of teachers' work with the resources and to create a sampling frame for further analysis. In the second phase of the study, teacher interviews and teaching artifacts were used to construct case narratives illustrating how teachers used these resources, if at all, and how IGIs influenced these decisions. Results of this study indicated that teachers' past experience with resources in their content area played an influential role in how teachers searched for, interpreted, evaluated, adapted, and implemented resources. Several IGIs influenced each stage of this work by enabling and/or constraining teachers' agency for using these resources, often in inconspicuous ways. These findings provided insight into the ways in which science teachers selected and adapted resources to create coherence with their infrastructure, informing the future design of resources and the IGIs that support teachers' work with resources. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]