Implementation of British Columbia's applied design, skills, and technologies (ADST) curriculum in elementary public-schools: Tensions and transformations

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2025

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Simms, Wendy

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Abstract

In 2016, British Columbia (BC) began implementing a redesigned curriculum aimed at educating students for the 21st century and in so doing introduced the new Applied Design, Skills, and Technologies (ADST) curriculum. ADST is an experiential, hands-on program of learning that emphasizes the design thinking process and cross-curricular approaches. The purpose of this study is to describe how the ADST curriculum is being implemented in BC public elementary schools and teacher education programs. Engeström’s (2001) cultural historical activity theory (E-CHAT) was used as the theoretical framework, as it supports researchers in identifying the tensions and transformations in collective professional activities during times of change (e.g., during curricular reform). An activity system model was created to guide the development of a survey with both Likert-type and open-ended questions. Respondents were 670 elementary public-school teachers from at least 53 of the 60 school districts across BC. The results showed that the ADST curriculum-in-action is fostering core competencies and problem-solving skills in students. However, a tension that emerged from this study was the uneven implementation of the ADST curriculum due to the lack of training, support, resources, and time for professional learning and collaboration. Of note was pre-service teacher’s low engagement with the ADST curriculum during their teacher education program. Nevertheless, teacher librarians emerged as ADST leaders in many BC public elementary schools in ways that directly addressed the “lack of.” While the term leadership was not used to describe their support, teacher librarian practices aligned with those of transformational leaders.

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The book chapter was published as: Simms, W. (2025). Implementation of British Columbia's applied design, skills, and technologies (ADST) curriculum in elementary public-schools: Tensions and transformations. In C. Smith & L. Schnellert (Eds.), Research in teacher leadership in Canada: Transformative and contextualized agency (pp. 329-362). Canadian Association of Teacher Education. https://hdl.handle.net/1880/120508

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