Curriculum as Seed: Designing and Supporting the Use of Open Education Resources to Promote Teacher Agency and Innovation

Abstract

As open education resources (OERs) continue to proliferate, teachers will likely utilize these freely available resources to design and enact disciplinary instruction. While OERs have transformative potential in shaping classroom instruction, their open-access and availability also introduces new questions about how teachers will learn to take up and utilize these curriculum materials. In this conceptual paper, we build on a metaphor introduced in the field of human-computer interaction to reconceptualize the relationships among OERs, teachers, students, and the local context. We expand on how this new metaphor foregrounds aspects of curriculum use that have been backgrounded in previous conceptual frameworks, including the timescale and evolution of curriculum use, teacher creativity and agency, and the role of educational systems in shaping curriculum use.