Exploring How Curriculum Ergonomics Could Be Used to Inform the Design of Curriculum Resources

Building design studies in ergonomics, we take up the construct of curriculum ergonomics to conceptualize how mathematics teachers engage with curriculum resources and how prior experiences inform their use. Research on the relationship between teaching and curriculum resources emphasizes how teachers understand and take up curriculum resources and how doing so leads them to iteratively transform those resources, with less focus on how the design of curriculum resources influences what teachers do. We explore (1) how features in teachers’ primary curriculum influenced how they designed lessons with both their primary versus unfamiliar curriculum resources and (2) how features in unfamiliar curriculum resources influenced how teachers designed lessons. To do so, we selected teachers with varied curriculum backgrounds and documented how they designed lessons using three sets of curriculum resources. Our analysis provides insight into how teachers’ prior curriculum experiences shape their engagement with unfamiliar curriculum resources and informs the development of design principles for curriculum resources to better support teachers in designing and enacting ambitious mathematics teaching.