Empowering Science and Mathematics Education in Urban Schools

Edna Tan, Angela Calabrese Barton, Erin Turner, Maura Varley Gutiérrez

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226037998
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Math and science hold powerful places in contemporary society, setting the foundations for entry into some of the most robust and highest-paying industries. However, effective math and science education is not equally available to all students, with some of the poorest students—those who would benefit most—going egregiously underserved. This ongoing problem with education highlights one of the core causes of the widening class gap. While this educational inequality can be attributed to a number of economic and political causes, in Empowering Science and Mathematics Education in Urban Communities, Angela CalabreseBartonand Edna Tan demonstrate that it is augmented by a consistent failure to integrate student history, culture, and social needs into the core curriculum. They argue that teachers and schools should create hybrid third spaces—neither classroom nor home—in which underserved students can merge their personal worlds with those of math and science. A host of examples buttress this argument: schools where these spaces have been instituted now provide students not only an immediate motivation to engage the subjects most critical to their future livelihoods but also the broader math and science literacy necessary for robust societal engagement. A unique look at a frustratingly understudied subject, Empowering Science and Mathematics Education pushes beyond the idea of teaching for social justice and into larger questions of how and why students participate in math and science.

CHAPTER ONE

Changing the Discourse on Equity and Math and Science for All

“Mmmmmm! Now That’s Science!”

It was late morning on a sunny but brisk November day. The students in Mrs. Tiller’s classroom had been engrossed in a science unit focused on dynamic equilibrium and the human body. One of the goals of the unit was to support students in learning how to bring scientific evidence and reasoning to bear on making healthy eating and activity choices. The curriculum was introduced to Mrs. Tiller’s school as part of a much larger federally funded project. Along with all of the material resources needed to teach this unit, Mrs. Tiller had weekly access to professional development and classroom support.

Mrs. Tiller had been a teacher at Jefferson Middle School for many years, with a long-standing reputation for caring deeply for her students but also for being a no-nonsense kind of teacher. While her background was not in science, a typical situation in underresourced urban districts, she did have a background in nutrition and home economics, giving her a particular knowledge base to bring to a unit on dynamic equilibrium in the human body.

The first unit of the curriculum focused closely on the complex system of influences on young people’s food and activity choices, which are biological, environmental, personal, and cultural in origin. In the second unit, students learn about how taste influences food choices. They learn about the biological taste preferences that humans have for fats and sugars, and how stores, fast food establishments, and food advertisements take advantage of our innate taste preferences, making it challenging to achieve health-oriented goals.

The curriculum instructs the teacher to begin the lesson by telling students that they are to close their eyes and listen to the following scenario:

You are walking down the street and smell French fries cooking at a fast food restaurant. They smell hot and delicious [please add any relevant descriptors]. You and your friends are hungry so you decide to go in and order some food. The French fries smelled so good you decide to order some with your meal. When you get the fries, they are exactly what you wanted. They taste even better than they smelled! Each one is crispy and satisfying. You eat all your fries.

The teacher is to read the scenario out loud, and then, after listening to the scenario, the students are to individually answer questions on a five-point scale (from never to always), about whether the smell of French fries makes them want to buy some, whether they order French fries in fast food restaurants after smelling them, and whether French fries taste good to them. After students discuss their responses in groups, the teacher tallies up the student responses and uses that to help students build initial theories about the biological preferences of taste.

Mrs. Tiller was excited to teach this lesson! In our professional development sessions with her before the implementation of the unit, she was never short of a story on how her students lived on a diet of fast food. However, she was not satisfied with a simple visualization, especially given her background in home economics. As she said,

I know what I’m going to do for this lesson. I’m going to get some potatoes and cook up in my classroom some home-made French fries. Just imagine how the smell of those fries will linger in the hallway as they walk to my classroom. I’m even going to let them eat the fries. Savor their taste. Enjoy them. They are going to have to answer those questions honestly with the fries right there in front of them! (Field notes, professional development session)

True to her word, Mrs. Tiller made the fries and the smell wafted down the hall just as predicted. In the class periods before lunch, the smell for many of her students was irresistible. As she anticipated, her students entered her class curious, excited, and hungry. The hot fries sat in the front of the room, and getting her students to step away from the fryer and back toward their seats proved somewhat challenging. One student seemed to get the whole class laughing when he said rather loudly, “Mmmmm . . . Now that’s science!” However, Mrs. Tiller used her students’ excitement to engage them immediately in the lesson:

OK, who wants fries? Hot, crispy fries? Hmmm. Don’t they smell good? Sit down and raise your hand if you want fries!

As she passed out the plates of French fries, she re-created the initial visualization scenario for them, inviting her students to think about how much the smell of the fries made them want to eat them. As she enticed the class, “The smell is just making my mouth water. How about you?” she asked them to record their observations in addition to their scores to the questions on taste and preference. After she finished passing out the French fries, she directed her students to answer the questions on smell, taste, and preference while she made a chart on the board, which she used to tally student responses (see Table 1.1).

Using the students’ tallies, Mrs. Tiller worked to get her students talking about the patterns in the table. Did students like French fries? Did they want to buy them? The students seemed to key in more to what they liked about French fries and whether Mrs. Tiller’s French fries were good. After turning their table into graphs, she was able to get her students to notice that most of the students in class liked fries and would buy them because they smelled good. When one student said, “Well, just about all of us picked 4 or 5 for all of the questions,” Mrs. Tiller capitalized on the comment, telling her students, “That’s right! Our bodies are naturally inclined to want fast food and we are hardwired to want to eat fries!”

Whereas Mrs. Tiller initially intended to spend most of the class period talking about the pattern of taste preferences, talk about French fries led the students to insist on a more complex and perhaps realistic discussion about the social and cultural influences of taste and healthy eating. As one student said, “Why say fast food is bad if we are supposed to like it?” Another student wondered why one student in the class actually voted that French fries do not ever taste good if the human body is supposed to prefer fatty food. Creating lots of laughter was a student comment about how businesses make their money off their smells. Compared to normal discursive patterns in Mrs. Tiller’s class and around Jefferson more generally, students were loudly engaged in debating the value and relevance of the science of taste and its sociopolitical connections. They began to build evidence-based claims not only around the intended focus (i.e., the biological preferences of taste) but also around unintended ideas and experiences central to making healthy eating decisions in everyday life (i.e., the role of the complex environment in food choices) and the limits of scientific ideas (i.e., not everyone has the same preferences for sweet and fatty foods).

TABLE 1.1. A representation of how Mrs. Tiller tallied her students’ responses on the board.

While the entire activity (estimated in the curriculum to take about 10–15 minutes) took her entire class period, Mrs. Tiller felt satisfied with the results. Later Mrs. Tiller justified her pedagogical decisions:

It was a little chaotic in there. Everyone wanted fries, seconds and thirds. It was the perfect set up. I know that my students will just want to give the “right” answer. But there is no right answer. I just want an honest answer. How else can I get them to really use their knowledge to make healthy choices if they don’t know what they know? (Interview)

Mrs. Tiller wanted her students to answer “honestly,” rather than in a fashion that parroted back the content. She believed that her students had rich, personal experiences directly relevant to this science topic and creatively engaged her students in activities that allowed those rich experiences to emerge as valuable threads in the classroom discussion. Even though her classroom looked and sounded unconventional, Mrs. Tiller was committed to helping her students engage in authentic inquiries that are essentially messy in nature. Mrs. Tiller told us that while the science of dynamic equilibrium in the human body, or “energy in and energy out,” is “pretty straightforward,” making healthy choices is not, because “science mixes with all of the things in kids’ lives.” She viewed her task as the teacher of this unit as helping her students use science to reason through good choices and helping her students see that the question of healthy eating, like many science questions, is not neatly “answered by a textbook.”

Unpacking Equity, Access, and Empowering Science and Math Education

What Constitutes Equitable Opportunities to Learn Math and Science?

Math and science hold uniquely powerful places in contemporary society. These domains open doors to high-paying professions; provide a knowledge base for more informed conversations with health care workers, educators, and business and community leaders; and demystify issues of global importance, such as air and water quality standards, population density, toxic dumping, and the economy. Despite the interconnectedness of science and math with global sustainability, Western culture has a history of limiting access to the influential discourses that shape decision making in these areas (Buckingham, Reeves, and Batchelor 2005; Newman 2001; Gutstein and Peterson 2005; R. Gutiérrez 2007; Powell and Frankenstein 1997).

Schools play a crucial role in mediating access to math and science. Yet schools have also been complacent in the reproduction of the demographic trends of who has access to science and math and who does not (Gilbert and Yerrick 2001; Oakes, Joseph, and Muir 2003). While access to science and math actively occurs through tracking and the course-taking patterns allowed or supported by a school or district, it is almost always amplified by the ways in which classroom practices maintain norms and routines that depict science and math as “objective, privileged way[s] of knowing pursued by an intellectual elite” (Carlone 2004, 308), and as discontinuous with the ways of knowing and doing held by students from nondominant backgrounds (Martin 2000; Turner and Font Strawhun 2007; Warren et al. 2001).

When schools equate teaching science and math and learning with “knowledge acquisition” (at best) and “doing school” (more likely)—rather than with scaffolding participation in a community of practice of which knowledge is only one dimension—students have few, if any, school-based opportunities to develop the kind of mathematical and scientific literacies necessary for broader societal engagement (Gutstein 2006a). Such focus on “what” students learn to the exclusion of “why” or “how” they might learn to participate in science- or math-related communities of practice delimits the possibilities for understanding why students opt out of science and math, and why these trends noticeably manifest themselves along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines. It should be no surprise that research continues to indicate that not only do students from urban and nondominant backgrounds lose interest in learning science and math as early as middle school but also that this trend has not changed in the past 15 years (Atwater, Wiggins, and Gardner 1995; Barmby, Kind, and Jones 2008).

The need to address equitable access to science and math education dates back several decades, even centuries (Spencer 1859; Wilkinson 1857). While the reason and scope for the call for science and math education “for all” has shifted over time from legitimizing the core courses in the standard school curriculum in the late nineteenth century, to national security in the mid-twentieth century, the call to make equitable math and science instruction has tended to reside in the policy sector with extension into curricula, rather than in any systematic line of inquiry into what this should look like and why. Further, and relevant to our course of inquiry, there has been no attempt to examine how equitable experiences might also be empowering experiences, especially for those students from nondominant backgrounds. There has also been scant attention to the specific needs of urban learners in the effort to promote science and math for all, despite decades of research outlining the inequities present in urban communities.

Bill Tate (2001) has argued that high-quality science and math education is a civil right for all students, and that this right is especially significant for those from nondominant groups. He rests his case on the mounting evidence that science and math education has been and continues to be mired in inequality. That is, children of racial and ethnic minority backgrounds and from high-poverty backgrounds living in high numbers in cities and rural communities disproportionately lack access to opportunities to learn science or math, even though they may have gained the physical space in schools to do so. In fact, he argues that to address fundamental issues of equity in science and math education, the research community must shift from arguments for civil rights as shared physical space in schools to demands for high-quality academic preparation that includes opportunities to learn. We concur with Tate in his call for equitable opportunities for all learners in math and science. And yet, we wonder, what exactly do these equitable opportunities to learn science or math that Tate and others rightly demand for our children look like? What are their outcomes?

Equity as Equality

The lines of reasoning around equitable opportunities to learn are anything but straightforward. In the immediate post–civil rights and post–women’s rights eras, equity-driven concerns in math and science education, as instantiated in educational policy and practice, tended to draw upon a focus on equality, or in other words, an understanding or measurement of either “equal treatment” or “outcomes,” usually based upon comparisons of demographic groups (Secada, 1989, 68). The focus in science and math education, therefore, has centered on whether opportunities to learn exist for all students (i.e., equal treatment) or on whether all students are achieving in science and math, and if not, where the achievement gaps exist (i.e., equal outcomes).

Studies of equal treatment and equal outcome have played, and continue to play, powerful and historically important roles. Most researchers are generally familiar with the chilling statistics that describe high-poverty and minority urban and rural students’ differential access to resources in US schools, and are aware that these trends have changed little in the past three decades. Students attending zoned schools in low-income urban and rural communities by and large continue to have limited access to updated science and math books, equipment, and extracurricular activities (Oakes, Joseph, and Muir 2003; Campbell and Silver 1999). They also continue to have limited access to certified teachers or to administrators who support high-quality science and math teaching, such that either students are denied high-level courses (because they are not offered) or they take courses with uncertified or unqualified teachers (Allexsaht-Snider and Hart 2001; Darling-Hammond 1999; Ingersoll 1999; Spade, Columba, and Vanfossen 1997). High-poverty, urban students are disproportionately tracked into low-level classes where educational achievement typically focuses on behavior skills and static conceptions of knowledge (Oakes, Joseph, and Muir 2003). In fact, some studies have shown a complete absence of science in low-track science classes (Page 1990; Gilbert and Yerrick 2001).

While equity as equality has provided a rich look into the basic landscape of access and opportunity, more socioculturally and critically oriented approaches to equity argue that such a view does not account for how participation and achievement in science and math are mediated by a complex set of sociocultural and systemic factors. For example, why is it that students with access to the same resources can have radically different learning outcomes that often pattern along gender and ethnic lines? Embedded within a discourse of equality of input and outcome is the assumption that science and math are objective and universal knowledge bases, and that with adequate access to these knowledge bases students can become successful in these areas. Without consideration of the sociocultural and systemic factors that shape science and math education, all students are viewed as homogenous, promoting a reform agenda best described as “one science [or math] fits all” (Calabrese Barton 1998, 531). Gutiérrez (2002) further critiques the notion of equity as equality, noting that “it is not clear that having all students reach the same goals represents ‘justiceí for studentsí own desires or identities” (p. 152). Instead, she proposes a definition of equity that assumes neither equal approaches (e.g., teaching strategies or resources) nor equal outcomes, but instead focuses on the goal of being unable to predict student achievement and participation patterns solely on the basis of characteristics such as race, language, gender, or class. In short, sociocultural and critical perspectives bring the social, political, and economic realities that students grapple with daily into sharper focus and take an integrated view of how the daily contexts in which children live, play, and learn should matter and critically inform opportunities for all to learn science and math.

Dynamic Communities and Transformations: A Basis for Empowering Education

Our stance on empowering education is informed by the contexts in which we work, in addition to the theories that inform our thinking. We work closely with youth in urban settings from low-income families who are also predominantly of ethnic and racial minority backgrounds. Learning within and across communities must always call to question the sociopolitical dimensions of participation within community. The reasons and the ways that communities enact and sustain various networks of power are important for understanding learning, because they shape how communities develop a history of privileging particular discourses, identities, and forms of participation over others (see also, C. Lee and Majors 2003; Moje et al. 2001). While such privileging may often be the result of the nature of the practice (i.e., science communities valuing science discourse over other discourses), they are often just as much the result of gender, race, class, and other cultural-historical structures that shape how and why people relate to one another (Bell et al. 2009). How such histories are disrupted is something we are keenly interested in as we seek to advance our understanding of student learning in math and science.

Our stance on empowering science and math classrooms is deeply informed by critically oriented sociocultural perspectives on schooling, learning, and society. Critically oriented sociocultural lenses draw attention to how the culture of classrooms is dynamic and activity based (K. Gutiérrez and Rogoff 2003; O. Lee 2002). K. Gutiérrez and Rogoff (2003) argue that an activity-oriented understanding of learning suggests that culture can be understood only through its context development, and never as a set of definable, measurable traits. Instead of expecting students to “cross o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• CHAPTER 1. Changing the Discourse on Equity and Math and Science for All
• CHAPTER 2. Empowering Teaching and Learning in Math and Science Education
• CHAPTER 3. Critical Mathematical Agency in the Overcrowding at Francis Middle School Project
• CHAPTER 4. A Narrative Pedagogy for Critical Science Literacy
• CHAPTER 5. Becoming an Expert: Critical Engagement with Science and the Community
• CHAPTER 6. Community Spaces as a Part of Hybrid Math Learning Spaces: Integrating Multiple Funds of Knowledge
• CHAPTER 7. Hybrid Spaces for Empowering Learning in Math and Science
• Notes
• References
• Index