Xu, G., & Wendell, K. B., & Pangan, T. J., & Bernstein, D., & Church, W., & Danahy, E. E. (2025, June), BOARD # 327: Biomimicry as an authentic anchor: Giving teacher the tools to adapt an interdisciplinary middle school curriculum (DRK12)  Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . https://peer.asee.org/55694

\bibitem{asee_peer_55694}
  Xu, G., \& Wendell, K. B., \& Pangan, T. J., \& Bernstein, D., \& Church, W., \& Danahy, E. E. (2025, June), \emph{BOARD \# 327: Biomimicry as an authentic anchor: Giving teacher the tools to adapt an interdisciplinary middle school curriculum (DRK12)}
  Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada .
  https://peer.asee.org/55694

Geling Xu, Kristen B Wendell, Tyrine Jamella Pangan, Debra Bernstein, William Church, and Ethan E Danahy.  "BOARD # 327: Biomimicry as an authentic anchor: Giving teacher the tools to adapt an interdisciplinary middle school curriculum (DRK12)".  2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada , 2025, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2025.  https://peer.asee.org/55694 Internet.  19 Aug, 2025

\bibitem{asee_peer_55694}
  Geling Xu, Kristen B Wendell, Tyrine Jamella Pangan, Debra Bernstein, William Church, and Ethan E Danahy.
  "BOARD \# 327: Biomimicry as an authentic anchor: Giving teacher the tools to adapt an interdisciplinary middle school curriculum (DRK12)".
  \emph{2025 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada , 2025, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2025.
  https://peer.asee.org/55694 Internet.  19 Aug, 2025

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_55694
author = "Geling Xu, Kristen B Wendell, Tyrine Jamella Pangan, Debra Bernstein, William Church, and Ethan E Danahy"
title = "BOARD \# 327: Biomimicry as an authentic anchor: Giving teacher the tools to adapt an interdisciplinary middle school curriculum (DRK12)"
booktitle = "2025 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition "
year = "2025"
month = "June"
address = "Montreal, Quebec, Canada "
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/55694}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - In recognition of the importance of integrated STEM yet the difficulty of implementing it effectively in classrooms, the community has called for research on how to support better integrated learning (English, 2016; Kelley & Knowles, 2016). The Biomimicry as an Authentic Anchor (BAA) project, funded by the DRK12 program of the NSF Division of Research on Learning, takes up this call by designing and researching a professional development model that supports middle school science and engineering teachers to adapt, plan, and enact design-based integrated STEM units focused on biomimicry. Through the BAA professional development model, teachers learn to engage their students in biology and engineering by (a) implementing biomimetic design challenges and (b) supporting students’ design work with structure/function analysis, an invariant concept common to both disciplines. In this poster, we report on a study we have done within this project that has focused on teacher choices, a major focus of this grant. For this study, we analyzed the curricular decisions of seven middle school STEM teachers who were implementing biomimetic design challenges in their classrooms. Guided by activity system theory, we found that different rules for timeframe and required topics, different pre-existing curricular and physical tools, and different teacher goals were consequential to the different teachers’ biomimicry implementations. These findings suggest the flexibility afforded by biomimicry for supporting STEM teachers who want to enact integrated curriculum with their students. In addition to this study of teacher choices, we also report project outcomes to date in terms of student participation. In future work, we plan to analyze students’ learning outcomes and the relationship between these outcomes and teachers’ curriculum choice-making.
AU  - Geling Xu
AU  - Kristen B Wendell
AU  - Tyrine Jamella Pangan
AU  - Debra Bernstein
AU  - William Church
AU  - Ethan E Danahy
CY  - Montreal, Quebec, Canada 
DA  - 2025/06/22
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - BOARD # 327: Biomimicry as an authentic anchor: Giving teacher the tools to adapt an interdisciplinary middle school curriculum (DRK12)
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/55694
ER  -