Reframing Science Teaching and Learning

Students and Educators Co-developing Science Practices In and Out of School

David Stroupe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317272816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Enseñanza de ciencia y tecnología

Responding to recent reform efforts, such as the Next Generation Science Standards, which call for students to learn science practices, this book proposes a conceptual reframing of the roles of teachers and students in formal and informal science learning settings. Inviting the field to examine the state of "science practice, " it provides concrete examples of how students, supported by the actions of educators, take on new roles, shifting from passive recipients of information to active participants in conceptual, social, epistemic, and material features of science work.

Each chapter provides an examination of how and why science practice evolves in learning communities in which students and teachers negotiate disciplinary work; an analysis of how specific pedagogical and social actions taken by someone with authority (a teacher or other educator) provides opportunities for students to shape science practices; a set of concrete recommendations for working with young students in formal and informal learning settings; and a set of suggestions and questions to catalyze future research about and the evolving relationships between educators, students, and science practices in the field of science education. Showing how and why the conceptual ideas presented are important, and providing specific, actionable suggestions for teachers and other educators for their daily work, this book includes both elementary and secondary learning sites.

Thematic strand III

Informal Settings

6

Faith’s Fancy hat

Engineering WITH Community

Christina Restrepo Nazar, Angela Calabrese Barton, and Annescia Rollins

Faith,1 a 14-year-old “engineer and psychologist,” is interested in using engineering to help people feel better about themselves physically and emotionally. Now a 9th grade student in Great Lakes City, Michigan, Faith constantly looks back at her work done in the equity-oriented community makerspace club at her local Boys and Girls Club. In 7th grade, when she began regularly attending the makerspace, she stated that the engineering she did at the club could be used to “take care of her community” in ways that traditional school curriculum did not support her in doing. She also stated that “[in the makerspace] we learned about green energy and using technology to help people; they told us to think about an invention that can help other people in our community. If you notice the name of [my website] it is called imagination creator. I really think I create things with my imagination and if we don’t use our imagination then how can we make up new ideas?”

Faith’s invention, a solar-powered FANcy hat has all the elements of style and comfort. She wanted to make sure she was “being funny while keeping cool” and that people were “sure of themselves in ways that they don’t have to be hot and sweaty all the time.” Cool has many meanings for Faith. Her FANcy hat could help her grandmother stay cool while attending church service in an un-air-conditioned church in Florida. She also thought about her family. Faith didn’t want them to be “hot and sweaty” in public, developing “skin blisters” from exposure to sunlight and “facial skin cancer.” Faith also designed the hat to help her grandmothers (her elders at church) be stylish at church:

A lot of the elderly women are stylish, but at the same time it is difficult for them to keep cool during the church service. In Michigan during the summer time, it gets very hot, but because there is limited to no air conditioning we can’t do anything about it. I always admire the grandmothers and their hats. They should be able to keep their hats on the whole time [during church service], but sometimes I notice they take it off because it really does get extremely hot in church. They also bring their hand paper fans but that takes away from them wearing their hats. This is one of the reasons I decided to do my invention.

Faith’s FANcy hat design work foregrounds an important tension we face in teaching and learning STEM:2 all students engage in science with their own unique cultural repertoires of practice (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003), yet many students from non-dominant communities, like Faith, do not have their cultural knowledge and experience recognized as legitimate resources for engaging in STEM (Gutiérrez & Calabrese Barton, 2015). What counts as “the nature, status and production of knowledge and the ways one knows and understands the world” (Delgado Bernal, 2002, p. 107) is often different between youth’s everyday worlds and that of STEM. Engaging in STEM can be an experience in epistemological contradiction. We are particularly interested in how youth and their teachers negotiate these moments of contradiction. Thus, in this chapter we elaborate on Faith’s journey to design the FANcy hat in collaboration with her community members and afterschool mentors. In particular, we describe critical “stuck moments”—or those moments when her cultural knowledge and practice sat in tension with that of STEM—to make sense of how Faith, in collaboration with her mentors and community, recreated what it meant to engage in STEM in ways that bridged and transformed local and STEM epistemic knowledge and practices towards engineering design. If youth, such as Faith, are supported by educators to work within these tensions, they can become new hybrid epistemological tools for advancing learning.

Expansive Learning

Our study is grounded in expansive theories of learning. Important here is the role of contradiction. Engeström describes contradiction as the “driving force” of the new transformed and future-oriented activity (Engeström & Sannino, 2010, p. 5). This stance is important in our work because of the contradictions between STEM epistemological knowledge and practice and that of the youth’s culturally grounded ways of knowing and doing, and the ways in which these contradictions emerge in practice.

Gutiérrez’s (2012) work on expansive learning also calls attention to movement as central to expansive learning. She suggests that attention ought to be paid to two forms of movement—the vertical (e.g., novice to experience within a domain) and the horizontal (across communities of practice)—and the intersections among them. Here, movement refers to the ways in which ideas, tools, and practices are re-authored and re-purposed towards new possibilities for becoming in-practice across setting and over time. As learning takes place, new activity structures are produced as vertical and horizontal dimensions interact, leading to new forms of activity. Gutiérrez describes these new forms of activity as dynamic forms of hybridity that emerge as tensions and contradictions that arise within and between activity systems, transforming how and why these systems overlap. In these studies, hybridity refers to the novel combinations of different repertoires of knowledge and practice (e.g., science and peer/family/community) as individuals horizontally move ideas and practices. However, it also refers to the hybridity that exists at multiple levels of the learning environment, where many activity systems come together (e.g., science, student, teacher, schooling, etc.).

From an equity standpoint, an expansive view of learning brings into focus the importance of contradictions, which for the youth in our study takes the form of epistemological contradictions in STEM, as she engages in engineering design. It is our view that students’ repertoires of practice should be an important epistemological tool to drive STEM teaching and learning, particularly in supporting youths’ cultural ways of knowing and doing in practice, with and through STEM learning.

Researchers as Educators in the Equity-Oriented Makerspace

Since 2012, Faith has been a participant in the equity-oriented makerspace, located inside a community-based club focused on youth development, homework assistance, and sports activities for youth from low-income backgrounds. The makerspace welcomes approximately 20 youth per year where they work on identifying problems, designing solutions for and with community members that use green energy technologies. We, as mentors, take the stance that the makerspace supports youth in bringing their epistemological home, community, and school expertise into the space. In particular, we discuss, analyze, question and confront their realities and needs, and also those realities most important to their communities. As such, the youth define problems important to them and their communities. They then include these varying problems and perspectives in their engineering designs.

Our study was carried out as a critical ethnography over a two-year period. Importantly, critical ethnography positions youth as co-producers of research knowledge. Likewise, it positions us, as researchers and mentors in the program as a part of (not apart from) this investigation. Critical ethnography also allowed us to focus on participatory critique, transformation, empowerment, and social justice. Critical ethnography is grounded in the idea that researchers can use the tools of ethnography to conduct empirical research in an unjust world in ways that examine and transform inequalities from multiple perspectives (Trueba, 1999). Critical ethnography allows us to “politicize” the interaction between actors and the social structures through which they act, grounded in the belief that these relationships are never neutral. This approach was important as we attempted to make sense of how Faith was positioned in this makerspace, and how we made sense of these epistemological contradictions, especially as issues of race, gender, and class emerged in her engineering activities.

We, along with two other graduate students and 3 undergraduate engineering and science education majors, served as mentors across the school year. In this role, we designed activities, helped troubleshoot problems, and opened up access to resources. We have taken the stance that the youth lead the projects, but that we, as experienced science/engineering educators, can provide important support and resources. I (Christina) worked extensively with Faith on her project. In particular, I supported Faith with collecting and analyzing community insider perspectives collected through the critical ethnography, helping to set criteria and constraints on the FANcy hat design. Together, we figured out the best ways Faith’s home/community practices could support her FANcy hat design.

Faith’s Narrative

During the 2013–2014 school year Faith and her peers were engaged in a design challenge focused on sustainable communities and portable power. We began with this broader problem space because it was identified by youth as an important area of investigation. We also felt that the challenge allowed us to cover important content in energy (e.g., forms of energy, energy transformations, and energy requirements) as it relates to communal green energy sources (e.g., solar, wind for portable power needs). It also offers a wide array of possible design projects that could incorporate youth’s repertoires of practice. We also felt that as portable electronics become an increasingly common feature of students’ lives, a deeper understanding of how these devices operate, including energy requirements and flow, will help instill mastery over them, such that the device is less of a “black box.” The design challenge focused on an initial driving question, “What devices, powered by alternative energy, will help solve problems in my community?” and were geared towards moving students from an initial prob...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Halftitle
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• THEMATIC STRAND I Formal Secondary Settings
• THEMATIC STRAND II Formal Elementary Settings
• THEMATIC STRAND III Informal Settings
• Contributors
• Index