| Reformers have often looked to curriculum materials to influence teacher practices and found instead that it is the materials that wind up changing while local practices remain unaffected. Many efforts have sought to shape student learning by limiting practitioner discretion over the curriculum; others have enlisted teachers in the development of locally relevant solutions. This dichotomy reveals a tension for curriculum designers between the desire to preserve the core ideas of the reform and the need to accommodate its inevitable adaptation by practitioners. It also presents a design challenge: Is it possible to design curriculum materials that are sufficiently flexible to be adapted for use in a diverse range of classroom settings yet sufficiently resilient to retain the core principles of the reform?.;This dissertation examines how three urban middle school teachers used a common set of curriculum materials to enact a 10-week classroom science project. I introduce a scale for characterizing teachers' degrees of reliance on the materials, describing how they offloaded, adapted, and improvised with curriculum materials. I also develop the Design Capacity for Enactment framework, an analytical tool for examining the factors that influence teacher-tool interactions.;Findings suggest that features of the curriculum design, teacher knowledge, skills, and commitments all play important roles in shaping outcomes; however they are insufficient to explain similarities and differences in teachers' use of materials. To address this, I introduce pedagogical design capacity, a notion that characterizes teachers' capacities to use specific personal and material resources to craft instruction. Through descriptive cases, I illustrate how pedagogical design capacity accounts for similarities and differences in teacher practices across variations in knowledge, skill, and commitments. Furthermore, the analysis describes how the nature of the designs themselves influence the ways teachers perceive and mobilize curriculum materials.;Pedagogical design capacity not only helps identify patterns in practice across diverse contexts and outcomes; it also points to strategies for crafting designs that support the constructive processes in which practitioners invariably engage when implementing curriculum reforms. |
