Enacting a technology-based science curriculum across a grade level: The journey of teachers' appropriation

• Different teachers appropriated a mobilized science curriculum.
• Their enactments were observed, analyzed and compared.
• Pedagogical orientations and student ability levels affected their instructions.
• Teachers need to move and be supported from designed curriculum to enacted curriculum.

Studying teacher enactment of an innovation helps us understand the process of effective spread of a curricular innovation to teachers who have differing levels of content readiness, pedagogical orientations, teaching competency, different student profiles, and professional development experiences. Towards this, we explore how different teachers in the same grade level appropriated a common science curriculum enabled by mobile technologies in their classrooms. The innovative science curriculum: Mobilized 5E (Engage–Explore–Explain–Elaborate–Evaluate) Science Curriculum was developed through an iterative cycle of design-based research. As curriculum designs were not self-sufficient by themselves, the enactments of the teachers differed in how they leveraged on students' artifacts, how they integrated the technology into the class, the ways in which they interacted with the students, and how they scaffolded students' activities in a mobile learning setting. In this study, the teachers' enactments of mobilized 5E lessons were observed, analyzed and compared, with the aim of exploring the differences of lesson enactment amongst them. The results showed that teachers' different pedagogical orientations affected their instructions, especially their ways of technology integration in the class, and their patterns of interactions with the students. Based on the exploration of the teacher enactment of the mobilized 5E curriculum, implications are drawn concerning the implementation of innovative curricula implementation and the supports for teacher professional development of such innovation with the ultimate purpose of sustaining and scaling.