Article

Troubling Troubled Waters in Elementary Science Education: Politics, Ethics & Black Children’s Conceptions of Water [Justice] in the Era of Flint

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Abstract

The study of water as a K–12 science idea often divorces its properties from its deeply politicized history as a resource that has been limited, compromised, and intentionally withheld from nondominant communities. Although a robust body of scholarship has aptly critiqued decontextualized and depoliticized pedagogies and called for critical science-learning environments designed through the lens of equity, historicity, and power, more insight is needed into how children develop in relation to these design imperatives and within sociopolitical contexts where environmental issues pose a direct threat. We report select findings from a 2-year ethnographic project that investigated Black student agency in a school with a place-based design. Specifically, we hone in on the themes of water and water justice, which inspired the development of a socio-scientific unit enacted in two 4th-/5th-grade classrooms. This unit coincided with the initial spike in public awareness around the still unresolved water crisis in Flint, MI. For this article, we situate the “Flint” module as an illustrative case of justice-centered science pedagogy and analyze Black students’ disciplinary, affective, and sociopolitical understandings. We found that children’s meaning-making shifted from individualized accounts to critical, systemic explanations of environmental justice issues. The saliency of children's affective understandings throughout the unit was also captured. We expound on these findings and conclude with a discussion of implications, particularly as it relates to the ethics and politics of developing critical scientific capacity in young children to confront lived environmental human rights issues.

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... First, ecology studies often focus on systems in faraway contexts (e.g., Amazon, Arctic), or alternatively, maintain superficial level inquiries into local ecosystems that don't engage the underlying relationships and mechanisms (Metz, 2011;Metz et al., 2019). Second, these common approaches rarely elevate and interweave children's social and ecological expertise of local landscapes into their ecology studies (Davis & Barsoum, 2022;Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Lim & Barton, 2006;Marin, 2020;Pugh et al., 2019), instead centering textbooks and teachers as the sources of expertise. Lastly, elementary science often provides children with few opportunities for formulating questions, producing and visualizing data, and discussing findings through collaborative modeling practices (Lehrer et al., 2008;Manz, 2012Manz, , 2016Pierson et al., 2017;Schwarz et al., 2022). ...
... Learning about complex socio-ecological systems entails further considering how social and ecological systems are entangled with one another across temporal, spatial and organizational scales (Hecht & Nelson, 2021;Lanouette et al, 2024;Learning in Places Collaborative, 2020), elevating interrelationships among species, kinds and behaviors in relation to place, lands and waters (Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Marin, 2020;Pugh et al., 2019). Teaching about complex socio-ecological systems thus entails attuning to the relationships among human and more than human species, kinds and behaviors, in ways that center the political and ethical dimensions (Kissling & Barton, 2015;McGowan & Bell, 2022). ...
... In doing so, children can more easily integrate their understandings of the built, historical and ecological dimensions of their daily lives into their science sensemaking as part of collective inquiries into complex systems functioning and futures (Huffling et al., 2017;Lim & Barton, 2006). Additionally, centering ecology studies around local or immediate ecological systems provides a requisite complexity for science inquiry pursuits, simultaneously elevating both the socio-cultural and political dimensions shaping ecological systems (Carlone, 2016;Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Frausto Aceves & Morales-Doyle, 2022;Morales-Doyle & Frausto, 2021;Stroupe & Carlone, 2021) and the material complexity sparking the need for emergent science practices such as modeling and argumentation (Manz, 2015b). ...
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Over the last two decades, there has been an increasing focus on spatial technologies in teaching and learning, revealing the potential to support new forms of youth sensemaking across varied settings and modalities. Recent scholarship has shown the possibilities of participatory digital mapping technologies, enabling young people to collect data within community settings and create interactive data-rich maps about complex phenomena and processes that build from their local expertise and inquiries. Yet to date, these technologies and related pedagogies remain less researched within K-5 educational contexts. In this article, we examine the most recent iteration from a multi-year design research project that centered 5th grade students’ learning about socio-ecological systems by engaging in participatory digital mapping to study their schoolyard soil ecosystems underfoot. We examine the possibilities of centering digital participatory map making as a basis for modeling and argumentation in elementary science. Analyzing whole class discussion video within the 10-week curriculum, we show how children authored their collective maps in numerous ways, making visible their social and ecological knowledge of the schoolyard, as well as their experiences defining, producing and visualizing qualitative and quantitative data. As part of this broader design-based research project, we find that children were able to reason about complex socio-ecological systems across spatial, temporal, and relational dimensions in inventive ways, often considered out of reach for elementary aged students, while also expanding what could count as data and what ways of knowing were valued within the science classroom. Implications for science education, place-based education, and emerging geospatial technologies are discussed.
... As Duke et al. [10] suggested, "knowledge begets comprehension begets knowledge" (p. 55). ...
... Furthermore, texts can be designed and used to introduce social justice issues relevant to students' lives and the role of science in redressing injustice. Illustrative of this is the work of Davis and Schaeffer [55] who developed a unit of study on the Flint Water Crisis. Davis and Schaeffer [55] conducted, and reported selected findings from, a two-year ethnographic project in which they investigated the agency and meaning making of fourth-and fifth-grade Black students. ...
... Illustrative of this is the work of Davis and Schaeffer [55] who developed a unit of study on the Flint Water Crisis. Davis and Schaeffer [55] conducted, and reported selected findings from, a two-year ethnographic project in which they investigated the agency and meaning making of fourth-and fifth-grade Black students. The instructional context was a socio-scientific unit that addressed water and water justice and coincided with broadening public awareness of the water crisis in Flint, MI. ...
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In this conceptual paper, we present a discussion of how we have embraced two challenges, posed by Aukerman and Schuldt, in their call for a more socially just science of reading, to which this special issue is responsive. Specifically, we share lessons learned from years of designing texts that (a) advance knowledge-building in the context of project-based science teaching and (b) advance readers’ textual dexterity. Our research is conducted in the context of project-based learning in science, and we approach our inquiry from multiple theoretical perspectives. We argue for the importance of text in science instruction. We present theories, empirical support, and national standards consistent with the integration of text in science. We discuss the role that texts can play in project-based science instruction. We also illustrate the design and optimization of texts and tasks, as well as the role of the teacher in this instruction.
... This illustrates the common frustration students feel about their science education experiences. The habitually abstract, high-level, and impersonal nature of science curriculum plays a significant role in disengaging students, particularly students of color, from seeing the relevance of science learning in their everyday lives and practices [3,4]. ...
... Responding to Davis and Schaeffer's [4] call for more research that investigates the process of creating curricula that develop students' justice-focused science agency and meaning-making in local, place-based ways, this study seeks to explore the design features of a community-based science (CBS) curriculum developed by a teacher and researcher. Specifically, supported by Schenkel and Barton's [7] argument that promoting CSA is a powerful way to promote justice in science classrooms, this study seeks to address how the CBS curriculum can be explicitly designed to develop and exercise students' CSA. ...
... When students are involved in community problem-solving in school science, learning transcends preparing students solely for future science classes, to engaging students in everyday, relevant science activities. Further, when community-based learning is situated in a social justice-oriented perspective, we "problematize privileged forms of science and situate learning in the context of larger justice movements" [4] (p. 369) by leveraging students' funds of knowledge and welcoming multiple epistemological ways of thinking in the classroom, to create space for diverse and critical interpretations of phenomena. ...
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Much of the literature that examines critical science agency (CSA) focuses on how students enact their CSA to support knowledge construction and agentic action. Few studies, however, address how science curricula can be specifically designed to support students in exercising their CSA. In this study, I examine features of a community-based science (CBS) curricular design that engages students in justice-oriented science learning to advance their CSA. More specifically, I analyze the design and structure of an environmental science elective course to investigate features of CBS curricular design that support students in exercising their CSA, including: (1) leveraging learning goals to create community change, (2) developing students’ toolkits, (3) cultivating spaces for advocacy and critical hope, and (4) critical and ongoing reflection. The findings suggest that science curriculum can be purposefully designed to assist students in exercising their CSA through generative learning experiences that empower them as community change agents. As we move toward more equity and justice-centered science learning, I recommend that future science curricula take community-based science approaches to design, structuring learning around students’ CSA by attending to how formal science learning can be used as an avenue to support community change.
... For example, the Next Generation Science Standards (a national framework for science education that focuses on engagement in science practices toward developing scientific literacy) 2-ESS2-2 asks learners to develop a model that represents the shapes and kinds of land and bodies of water in an area. While understanding these properties of water are important and necessary, we worry that dominant models of water education attend only to these technical aspects, and fail to engage with humans' relations and ethical responsibilities to water or to the political context of water in history and the present (Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Nxumalo & Villanueva, 2019;Bang et al., 2012). Building systems of education that cultivate right relations with water will require greater attention to the nature-culture relations that are inherent in the broad structure of schooling, as well as the pedagogical details of how one teaches about and with water. ...
... These dimensions were developed in the context of a community-based design research project in collaboration with children, families, and community educators (Bang et al., 2016). We also build with other communities and scholars who have been working toward water pedagogies that are lifegiving, relational, and lean into the political and ethical dimensions of water education (e.g., Nxumalo & Villanueva, 2019;Nxumalo, 2021;Pacini-Ketchabaw & Clark, 2016;Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Marin & Bang, 2018;Bang et al., 2012). ...
... We suggest that making relations should be the starting point for any learning experience with water and depict this in the following vignettes. Dominant models of science education tend to focus on the physical properties of water and its utility to humans, leaving little room for, or even actively discouraging, deeper questions around what it means to be in relation with water (Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Nxumalo & Villanueva, 2019;Bang et al., 2012). Centering relations with water opens up space for ethical deliberation and "should we?" questions that facilitate reflection on how we ought to live in the world if we are to contribute to the collective thriving of human and MTH communities (Tzou et al., 2021;Ferkany & Whyte, 2012). ...
... In this study, community-driven science is viewed from a critical stance where communities are layered, dynamic, embedded in a racialized society and hold significant power and agency (Holland et al., 1998;Lee, 2008). I build from scholars who conceptualize justice-centered science pedagogy as a disruption of systemic injustices and power structures in promotion of disciplinary learning and social transformation (Calabrese Barton et al., 2020;Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Morales-Doyle, 2017). Further, I build on conceptions of the ways futureoriented practices, where science is intentionally integrated with histories of race, place, and power can disrupt single stories of communities, reclaim multiple place-stories, and support reimagining of communities and the people that live in them (Adichie, 2009;Gutiérrez & VISINTAINER 3 Jurow, 2016; Taylor, 2018). ...
... Further, I build on conceptions of the ways futureoriented practices, where science is intentionally integrated with histories of race, place, and power can disrupt single stories of communities, reclaim multiple place-stories, and support reimagining of communities and the people that live in them (Adichie, 2009;Gutiérrez & VISINTAINER 3 Jurow, 2016; Taylor, 2018). This approach engages the sociopolitical, historical, and relational aspects of community structure and agency; balancing an interrogation of science education and systemic injustices with an asset-based perspective of community cultural wealth and resilience (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2010;Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016;Morales-Doyle, 2017;Yosso, 2005). Scientific research, historically and presently, is commonly done on communities of color rather than in collaboration with and/or as a means to benefit those communities (Morales-Doyle, 2017). ...
... Examining communities and health at this intersection allows for an interrogation of systemic injustices that would otherwise be lost if various factors were explored in isolation. To support this intersectional approach, I build on literature that critically examines narratives of community and health and engages the historical, social, political, and economic intersections of future-oriented dreaming (Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016;Morales-Doyle, 2017). As described by Adichie (2009), the central power resides in who controls the narrative: "How stories are told, who tells them, when they are told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power." ...
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This study explores how a biology teacher from a summer science program engaged high school students of color in a three‐week science unit exploring community health at the intersection of history, race, place, and power. The goal of this study is to better understand what community‐driven science looks like in a science classroom when a health equity unit is guided by a biology teacher who engages the socio‐historical, political, and relational aspects of community structure and agency. Using student and instructor interviews, program observations, and student artifacts, I examine how the instructor's positioning as a Black woman scientist shaped her goals and vision and the instructional and pedagogical resources made available during the unit. In addition, I explore how engaging in community‐driven science practices during the unit such as critical inquiry and data analysis supported students' sense making about community health and the possibilities they imagined for their communities. Findings illuminate how engaging community health at the intersection of history, race, place, and power shaped engagement in community‐driven science practices and supported student sense making in ways that surfaced challenges, tensions, and opportunities for disrupting and reimagining community narratives. Further, finding highlight the importance of an instructor's lived experiences and pedagogical vision in supporting emergent forms of student agency and place remaking, and generating possibilities for community healing and hope.
... Approaches to identifying SSI to facilitate in the elementary classroom often includes consideration for selecting issues that have personal connections to students lives as well as issues that have alignment with institutionalized educational processes, such as mandated curricula. For instance, Davis and Schaeffer (2019) studied fourth and fifth grade Black children in Atlanta as they were taught an SSI lesson focused on the water crisis in Flint, MI. While the issues were not local, they found that selecting an issue that students were culturally connected to provide deeper contextual science learning and strong links to scientific enterprise in the real world. ...
... While this issue is not local, it aligned with the mandated curricula and provided opportunities for Chloe to incorporate ELA-based nonfiction resources within her lesson. Similar to Davis and Schaeffer (2019), Chloe was able to relate the development within the Everglades to the privilege of local development in the city where the school was located to help them make personal connections of human impact on other animal species. ...
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Socioscientific issues (SSI) have been found to improve scientific literacy skills among K—12 students. Existing literature shows, however, that elementary preservice teachers are reluctant to implement SSI due to a lack of confidence with subject matter knowledge and knowledge of instruction concerning SSI. Previous research has focused on helping elementary preservice teachers overcome these concerns through microteaching, adapting existing curricula, and experiencing SSI through methods courses. While it has been noted that formal preparation is required for preservice teachers to feel confident in their abilities to facilitate SSI, little has been done to prepare elementary preservice teachers to facilitate SSI during field experiences. In this study, we explored the factors that influenced elementary preservice teachers' instructional decision‐making while planning and enacting SSI‐based instruction in the classroom. Community of practice (CoP) meetings provided formal training to prepare these elementary preservice teachers to facilitate SSI. Recordings of the CoP meetings, reflective journals, observations, and interviews served as data sources. Our findings revealed knowledge of students, instructional knowledge, and context as most influential in these elementary preservice teachers' pedagogical reasoning concerning SSI‐based instruction, while subject matter knowledge was the least considered. We discuss these findings and offer recommendations for how to use these considerations when planning future research to study elementary preservice teachers' SSI‐based instructional practice.
... The exploratory analysis presented in this paper is an exercise in seeing the design of schools through the eyes of children. Black students featured here were learners enrolled in an innovative city school with an articulated commitment to empowering elementary-aged children as intellectuals and critical civic actors (Davis, 2017;Davis & Schaeffer, 2019). The school, here referred to as Mission City School (MCS), 1 was also developed with a place-based, communal mission. ...
... Our commitments to elevating children's voices and questioning power asymmetries in this study are resonant with Mitchell's ( , 1953 arguments for seeing children as capable of complex sensemaking. Children can demonstrate sensitivity and savvy with respect to socio-political dynamics in school and more broadly (Davis, 2017;Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Lee, 2017). Like , we reject the notion that "[t]he world is too complicated for them to understand" (p.7) and have structured our analysis accordingly. ...
... However, none of the studies that addressed Approach 4 (seeing science and engineering as part of justice movements) included elementary learners. This may reflect a perceived challenge of connecting science content at the elementary level with justice issues (Grapin, Haas, et al., 2023) as well as concerns among elementary educators and researchers that these issues would be unsettling for young students or not developmentally appropriate (Davis & Schaeffer, 2019). ...
Article
Research on translanguaging in science and engineering education has grown rapidly. Studies carried out across diverse contexts converge in their commitment to fostering equity in science and engineering learning for linguistically marginalized learners. However, the rapid growth of this research area has exposed different approaches to conceptualizing “equity” itself. The purpose of this review of literature was to examine what equity approaches have undergirded research on translanguaging in US K–12 science and engineering education and whether these approaches vary over time and across contexts. We systematically analyzed studies ( N = 15) using the four equity approaches articulated in a recent report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2022). Findings of our review indicate that, while studies aimed at increasing opportunity and access to high‐quality science and engineering learning (Approach 1) and, to a lesser extent, identification and representation with science and engineering (Approach 2) were the two most prevalent equity approaches, studies focused on expanding what constitutes science and engineering (Approach 3) and seeing science and engineering as part of justice movements (Approach 4) were somewhat less common. Furthermore, justice‐oriented approaches to equity (Approaches 3 and 4) were increasingly visible in the literature since 2020 as well as in research carried out in nontraditional educational contexts (e.g., out‐of‐school programs, classes outside of the core school subjects). Based on these findings, we propose the need for future research that (a) explicitly conceptualizes and operationalizes constructs related to equity (e.g., what is meant by “achievement” and how it is measured), (b) examines the possibilities and tensions associated with expanding what constitutes science and engineering in traditional educational contexts, (c) leverages the affordances of multiple STEM subjects for addressing justice issues impacting linguistically marginalized communities, and (d) iterates on the equity approaches themselves.
... Their study indicated that SARS could be an effective contemporary context to teach various aspects of NOS, such as the links between science, technology, politics, and society, the humanistic character of science, and scientific inquiry processes in real life (Wong, Hodson, Kwan and Yung 2008). Davis and Schaeffer (2019) designed and implemented a place-based unit on water and water justice with Black American elementary students in the context of the Flint water crisis. Their data showed that students developed the ability to construct critical and systemic accounts of environmental justice issues after the intervention. ...
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Modern society is under increasing threats of natural and technological disasters, which involve complex interactions among science, technology and social structures. Although a scientific understanding of disasters is an immediate global issue, there is limited discussion about how disasters can relate to science education. To address this gap, we report findings from a research study to support preservice science teachers’ learning about disasters and its relevance to science education. Fifteen preservice science teachers participated in a six-hour workshop focused on the scientific and sociotechnical aspects of the humidifier disinfectant disaster, which caused severe lung injuries to half a million people in South Korea. The study aim was to identify preservice science teachers’ perceptions about how disasters can be incorporated into science teaching. The participants were engaged in a series of group activities using the official investigation report, followed by a discussion on the aspects of science, technology, and society that unfolded in the disaster. Our analysis suggested that the participants were able to discover important aspects of the mutual relationship between science and disasters, and propose various cognitive, attitudinal, and functional aims that could be pursued by embedding disasters in science lessons. The lesson plans showed that the participants were able to suggest how to use disasters in science lessons and leverage diverse teaching methods to achieve their lesson goals. However, the shift in their perceptions before and after the workshop was limited. We argue that support is necessary for preservice science teachers to incorporate disasters into the science classroom, by providing more time and resources and lowering the barriers related to the political and traumatic aspects of disasters.
... In the 'risk society' characterised by the emergence and dominance of risks as a central feature (Beck, 1992), technological disasters such as transport accidents, infrastructure collapses, and chemical and nuclear accidents have become regular events rather than exceptional ones. These disasters have been of enduring interest to science education researchers (Cross et al., 2000;Davis and Schaeffer 2019;Kuroda et al., 2020;Neumann, 2014;Neumann & Hopf, 2013;Park et al., 2024), but the focus has often been on examining individual disasters rather discretely rather than the considering the continuity, trends and patterns 'across disasters' (Fortun & Morgan, 2015). Sociologist of disaster Charles Perrow (2013) highlighted the importance of identifying patterns in nuclear disasters that are temporally and spatially apart (the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan; the plutonium plant accident at Windscale, United Kingdom; the power plant accidents at Three Mile Islands, USA, Chernobyl, Soviet Union, and Fukushima, Japan). ...
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There is a growing emphasis on integrating school subjects and cross disciplinary boundaries to address local and global challenges, particularly when teaching about complex and sensitive issues such as disasters. This study explores how the integration of science and history can facilitate learning about disasters through a cross-curricular teacher professional development project in England. Seven teachers (four history, three science) from state-funded secondary schools and two museum educators in Southampton, UK collaborated with university researchers over eight months to develop a curriculum unit on the Titanic disaster for Key Stage 3 pupils (aged 11–14). Through a qualitative analysis of teacher feedback, workshop recordings and artefacts, and interviews, we illustrate the teachers’ initial excitement at the prospect of cross-curricular integration and how this excitement was then tempered by practical and logistical challenges that prevented their integration ideas from materialising into the curriculum unit. Nevertheless, teachers found that the CPD helped them to see and attend to the connections across the curriculum. Teachers rediscovered Titanic as a tragic event with historical significance for local students, which needs to be taught with reverence and ethical sensitivity. Using the Titanic disaster as an example, the study points to the potential for cross-curricular integration and teacher collaboration in teaching about disasters holistically in secondary schools.
... Emotions play a crucial role in the process of learning. Researchers have analyzed emotions as conditions of learning-focusing on certain emotional states that support cognitive development (e.g., Davis and Schaeffer, 2019;DeBellis and Goldin, 2006;Immordino-Yang, 2015;Schutz et al., 2009) -and as a form of learning itself (Weissberg et al., 2015) because it affects know-how (Hollett and Ehret, 2017). In this paper, we acknowledge and embrace these aspects, understanding emotions as "thoughtful feelings" (Ratner, 2000, p. 6) that shape meaning making, an integral part of learning and its outcomes. ...
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Background Given that K-12 schools necessitate leaders who can advance equity and justice, preparation programs in higher education institutions have prioritized the development of equity-oriented school leaders. However, there has been relatively limited exploration of pedagogical approaches that equip educational leaders to navigate adverse emotional responses and utilize their discomforting emotions as a source of transformation toward equity-oriented principles. When negative emotions are suppressed and/or unexplored within leadership development programs, adult learners will likely miss crucial opportunities for personal growth and transformative change. Purpose This theoretical article aims to enhance and expand existing scholarship on the pedagogies of emotional discomfort by developing a conceptual-pedagogical framework for preparing equity-driven school leaders. Conceptual Model We explore the role of emotions in/as learning, drawing insights from the learning science literature, and analyze empirical studies in leadership education to unravel how and why discomforting emotions are triggered and operationalized when learning about racism and inequities. We present a framework, the pedagogy of discomfort toward critical hope, drawing on scholarly work bridging emotional discomfort and critical pedagogy, and exemplified by various examples of pedagogies of discomfort. Building on this foundation, we introduce an emotional scaffolding design centered around three concepts: generating discomfort to make oppression and privilege visible, guided emotion participation for engaging critical reflection and dialogue, and appraising emotions with metacognitive and meta-affect tools. Discussion and Implications This article extends the scholarship on teaching and learning for developing equity leaders by bridging insights from learning science and critical pedagogy.
... There is evolving interest in science learning that develops elementary school children's agency to knowledgeably act on environmental justice issues. It is often assumed that, because of their age, elementary-age children will be fearful when presented with environmental issues, despite being capable of complex and nuanced social justice learning (Davis & Schaeffer, 2019). In fact, this was the fear the fifth graders thought they would give rise to in the kindergarten class if they went ahead with their original idea to present an embodied performance about lead to them. ...
Article
Children are often denied science education that engages their emotions and multiple identities. This study focused on ways in which embodied arts‐based experiences offer opportunities for such engagement in pedagogical efforts associated with justice‐centered science. The conceptual framework that informed the study considers the body as a site of learning, embraces social justice in science education and engages with the dialectical relationship between various structures and children's agency, and frames the transdisciplinarity of imagination. The instrumental case study centered on a fifth‐grade class of Latinx students in an urban public school, as they grappled with lead contamination and peoples' rights to clean water through an embodied, arts‐based pedagogy in their science class. Analysis of video clips, student work, and other artifacts pointed to three findings on how children engaged with justice‐centered science learning via arts‐based embodied activities. Through perspective‐taking in the dramatizing, children engaged with science ideas intertwined with sociopolitical understandings. Through centering emotions that drama afforded, children experienced empathy and solidarity with others affected by environmental injustices. Through imagined and enacted participation in struggles that the embodiments necessitated, children engaged in actions to resist injustices. These findings suggest that exploring children's arts‐based embodied meaning making in science is a robust area of inquiry. Furthermore, the findings compel researchers and practitioners to consider emotions in performing arts, and how they can deepen engagement in, and exploration of, justice‐centered science. Recommendations emerged for practitioners poised to explore justice‐centered science with children through the arts.
... Melalui pendidikan, seseorang memperoleh keterampilan dan perilaku yang sesuai dengan norma-norma yang berlaku di masyarakat. Salah satu hal yang membantu tercapainya tujuan pembelajaran adalah menciptakan proses pembelajaran yang aktif, efisien, efektif dan menyenangkan bagi siswa sehingga pembelajaran yang dimediasi guru dapat diterima dan mudah dipahami oleh siswa (Davis, 2019;Fauth, 2019;Utley, 2019). Guru berperan penting dalam meningkatkan motivasi dan hasil belajar siswa. ...
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Penelitian ini dilatarbelakangi oleh hasil belajar mata pelajaran Pendidikan Pancasila. Penguasan materi Pendidikan Pancasila siswa rendah. Pengetahuan siswa lebih terfokus pada guru, menciptakan komunikasi satu arah yang mengakibatkan menurunnya kinerja siswa hanya menerima informasi dari guru. Dampaknya, siswa mengalami kesulitan memahami materi pelajaran dan kurang menarik perhatian siswa saat proses pembelajaran. Penggunaan model pembelajaran Problem Based Learning berbantuan media kokarpin (kotak kartu pintar) di sekolah dasar memiliki sejumlah pengaruh positif yang signifikan terhadap siswa. Model Problem Based Learning mendorong siswa untuk aktif mencari solusi atas masalah yang diberikan. Kokarpin yang menarik membuat proses belajar menjadi lebih menyenangkan dan memotivasi siswa untuk berpatisipasi aktif dalam pembelajaran. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kuantitatif dengan bentuk quasi experimental design yang menggunakan rancangan penelitian posttest only control design. Populasi dalam penelitian ini adalah seluruh siswa kelas V SDN Ketintang I/409 Surabaya. Sampel diambil dengan purposive sampling sehingga terpilih kelas V-A sebagai kelas kontrol dan kelas V-B sebagai kelas eksperimen. Teknik pengumpulan data yang digunakan yaitu tes hasil belajar siswa. Teknik analisis data menggunakan uji-t dengan taraf signifikansi 5% (α = 0,05). Berdasarkan hasil yang ditunjukkan oleh analisis statistik SPSS Versi 25 diperoleh bahwa ada pengaruh model pembelajaran problem based learning berbantuan media kokarpin (kotak kartu pintar) terhadap hasil belajar Pendidikan Pancasila siswa kelas V di sekolah dasar.
... The contours of this profile may suggest that high racial centrality and resistance motivation can develop before, after, or alongside a clearly articulated consciousness of societal racial prejudice. This underscores the need for adults' emotional sensitivity for engaging the work of consciousness-raising among Black children 68 . Theories of culturally relevant and emancipatory education emphasize warmth and positivity, naming Blackness as good in parallel with their advocations for a critical race analysis of social inequities 58,69-71 . ...
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This study investigates the racial-mathematical identity profiles of Black American adolescents. Survey data were collected in five schools across one U.S. urban school district at two time points (spring 2018 [ n = 197] and spring 2019 [ n = 210]). Based on extant research regarding psychological response patterns to racialized school stress, we investigated the existence of an identity negotiation pattern in which students were motivated to resist negative stereotypes about Black people by achieving well in mathematics. We conducted a latent profile analysis combining students’ self-beliefs across five indicators: racial centrality, racial public regard, mathematics attainment value, mathematics mastery experiences, and resistance motivation. Three distinct racial-mathematical identity profiles emerged: (1) Mathematics Devalued/Ambivalent, (2) Moderately Math Attained, and (3) Resistors. We found associations between profile membership and students’ gender, negative math emotions, and their receipt of cultural and critical mathematics instruction. We also found an association between the identity profiles and school type (academically selective “magnet” schools vs. open-enrollment neighborhood schools), but not in the direction that might be assumed. Moreover, we found that certain school environment factors (i.e., racial stereotyping and cultural and critical mathematics instruction) were significantly different in racially diverse magnet schools than in the neighborhood schools. Overall, our data reveal the existence of a highly motivated Resistor profile among Black students, that is predicted by cultural and critical mathematics instruction but underrepresented within this district’s selective magnet schools.
... Thus, social studies has negotiated and re-negotiated which subjects should fall within its umbrella since the discipline's conception (Evans, 2004). Researchers in the growing realm of interdisciplinary social studies have explored ways to teach elements of science and social studies that transcend disciplinary divides and expose students to ways in which both science and social studies can work together to help us better understand issues of humanity (e.g., Bennett et al., 2007;Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Levy et al., 2021;Tan et al., 2023). We believe highlighting psychology's interdisciplinary power will open the door for more students to access HSP and understand how psychology influences their daily lives. ...
... • Discourse 1: Providing access to the fields of science and thus the "culture of power" (Delpit, 1988(Delpit, , 1995 • Discourse 2: Engaging in authentic scientific learning experiences to nurture achievement and identity development Though these discourses were originally used to summarize the literature in everyday learning, because of their usefulness, they have also been used in many formal contexts (e.g., Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Oakes et al., 2018). Equity work within Discourses 1 and 2 may improve individual outcomes, though it does not impact (or intend to impact) macro-level inequities. ...
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We explore how experienced informal educators worked towards equitable and consequential opportunities for learning in informal STEM settings through pedagogical practice. Drawing from a justice‐centered social practice stance we argue that pedagogical practice that promotes social transformation towards more just futures must confront and respond to, in integrated fashion, how unequal power dynamics, connected to systemic, structural oppressions, impact individual and collective learning. We refer to this focus on the entanglements between justice and responsibility as the ethical and relational dimensions of teaching and learning. In a research‐practice partnership, we drew upon participatory ethnography to explore how practice partners operationalized these “big justice ideas” in their practice. Using two detailed vignettes of practice we illustrate five interconnected patterns of practice: Recognizing, authority sharing, shifting narratives, co‐designing, and embracing humanity. We illustrate how these practices, and their variations, took shape in‐the‐moment, and worked in transformational ways. Last we discuss how these practices are consequentially directed towards shifting power —who has the power to name and legitimize what and who matters in informal STEM learning (ISL), how, and why—and about how youths and educators alike engaged each other towards affecting their lives, social relations, and possibilities. Findings can help informal educators refine and expand their mental models of youth, what matters to them, how and why, and what this could mean for their futures.
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This chapter explores how learning to be in relation is core to human learning. Reductive views of cultural variation and individualized conceptualizations of thriving overlook the processes through which human beings learn to live relationally in ways that support systems transformation and collective well-being. Synthesizing literature on learning and development, we provide a conceptual model that examines four interrelated dimensions of relationality: (a) embodiment, mobilities, attention, and place; (b) affect, awe, and emotion; (c) pedagogical interactions, supports, and participation; and (d) reimagining learning and the disciplines. We argue that attending to relationality in ways that include between-persons + place + more-than-human relations helps conceptualize learning as deeply tied to the ongoing forms of adaptation, ethical relations, and worldmaking required for socio-ecological well-being.
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Imagination is often relegated to the margins of African American children's schooling experiences. Furthermore, the varied role of children in liberation struggles and their centrality in ushering in just futures remain underexplored. This article examines five African American first graders’ sociopolitical knowledge and how they used their imagination to develop counternarratives of refusal and agentic possibilities. I offer imaginative praxis as a conceptual tool to analyze how young African American children name historical and contemporary racialized realities and generate joyful visualizations of actionable resistance. Young children's imaginative praxis challenges the notion that the fight for liberation is void of joy.
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Instructional practices in science education often create dichotomies of “expert” and “outsider” that produce distinct power differences in classrooms. Building upon the idea of “making present practice” to disrupt these binaries, this paper presents select findings from a year-long study investigating two urban teachers' use of community-based science (CBS) instructional practices to create relational shifts that reframe expert and expertise in science instruction. By examining how CBS instructional practices reframe power through co-learning experiences, our findings demonstrated that teachers positioned youth as knowledge constructors through three instructional practices: (a) creating space for students to share their knowledge and experiences, (b) positioning students’ lives and experiences as assets to/within science, and (c) being responsive to assets in future lessons. We use these findings to demonstrate how CBS instructional practices support shifts in relational dynamics by creating spaces of rightful presence, where students are viewed as legitimate classroom members who contribute scientific knowledge in practice and have power in the classroom space. By relinquishing traditional boundaries in science teaching to deconstruct ideas of who holds power, we position CBS instructional practices as a means to expand educational equity by legitimizing students’ diverse sensemaking and re-mediating hierarchical structures in classroom spaces.
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Justice-centred science pedagogy has been suggested as an effective framework for supporting teachers in bringing in culturally relevant pedagogy to their science classrooms; however, limited instructional tools exist that introduce social dimensions of science in ways teachers feel confident navigating. In this article, we add to the justice-centred science pedagogy framework by offering tools to make sense of science and social factors and introduce socioscientific modelling as an instructional strategy for attending to social dimensions of science in ways that align with justice-centred science pedagogy. Socioscientific modelling offers an inclusive, culturally responsive approach to education in science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics through welcoming students’ diverse repertoires of personal and community knowledge and linking disciplinary knowledge with social dimensions. In this way, students can come to view content knowledge as a tool for making sense of inequitable systems and societal injustices. Using data from an exploratory study conducted in summer 2022, we present emerging evidence of how this type of modelling has shown students to demonstrate profound insight into social justice science issues, construct understandings that are personally meaningful and engage in sophisticated reasoning. We conclude with future considerations for the field.
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The diversifying impacts of global disasters such as climate change and COVID-19 call for systematic consideration of how disasters can be addressed in different school subjects. In this paper, we discuss how the relationship between disaster and science education has been codified and framed in South Korea through an analysis of national curriculum and policy documents in the 2010s, a period marked by several human-caused disasters with lingering social impacts. A genealogical reading of policy documents reveals how disaster emerged as a curricular theme at the intersection of two policy discourses: the discourse of safety and the discourse of integration. Further analysis of the documents points to three tensions about science education that underlay this process, as disaster, a non-traditional topic, was introduced into the science curriculum. Our findings provide insights into the tensions and conflicting ideas about what should be learned in school science. We contend that a stronger theoretical and empirical base is needed when introducing new curriculum topics such as disaster into the curriculum. More effort is needed to justify the new topic against the existing aims and structures of school subjects, to consider the unique social and political context, and to bridge the gap between curriculum policy and classroom practice.
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Many global challenges require us to deal with uncertainties. For example, soil loss due to erosion illustrates complex and dynamic human-environmental interactions with an urgent need for protective measures. System competence helps to identify and model system characteristics and to derive adequate intervention strategies. Therefore, it is crucial to provide and evaluate methods to promote systems thinking in young people. The aim of the here presented pre-post study is to empirically compare the system competence development of 15- to 18-year-old students using (#1) analogue or (#2) digital soil erosion models or (#3) a combination of both approaches within equal-length treatments. Based on the four-dimensional “Freiburg heuristic competence model of systems thinking” (Rieß et al., Geographie aktuell und Schule 37(215):16–29, 2015), test items are developed, validated, and applied. Analyses of variance show significant group differences (n = 203): the post-test mean value of system competence in group #3 using combined analogue and digital models is significantly higher compared to group #2 using digital-only models (p = 0.024, with a small effect size Cohens f of 0.1). Furthermore, considerable differences become apparent between the four system competence dimensions. To effectively promote systems thinking in the context of soil erosion, the combined use of analogue and digital models is recommended for teaching practice. In addition, factor analyses of the study data set provide empirical evidence for the heuristically derived four-dimensional structure of system competence (Rieß et al., Geographie aktuell und Schule 37(215):16–29, 2015). Keywords: System competence development - Intervention study - Competence dimensions - Soil erosion - Models comparison
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This chapter explores how we, the authors, have come together in dialogue and across differences to conceptualise how working towards social justice in science education can serve as a uniting perspective to bridge contexts. This process of coming together can support striving towards a science education practice grounded on equity, inclusion, and justice. We situate our perspectives through a brief overview of our work and then discuss what we are learning from coming together across a range of differences and how that as a process has brought us collectively to an understanding of a shared vision for a socially just science education praxis. We hope that this discussion will provide a reader with new perspectives on the ways in which working towards social justice, as a uniting theme to science education, has the potential to transform contexts of learning and support students in developing values important for making informed decisions and taking action.KeywordsDemocratic participationScience literacyContextually-relevant teaching
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Why do we need education for sustainability? What is education for sustainability? What are some of the challenges and opportunities a sustainability approach affords? How might a sustainability approach inform science teacher education? This chapter will provide a brief review of the literature on sustainability, environmental education, and education for sustainability, provide a brief history of the concept, and explore how it has been applied in two science teacher education contexts. In addition, by investigating the theoretical and practical challenges of integrating sustainability with the science curriculum in particular, the chapter will provide a basis for understanding the varied approaches taken by other authors in this volume.
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Teachers can play critical roles in challenging or reinscribing dominant narratives about what counts as STEM, who is seen within STEM disciplines, and how these disciplines should be taught. However, teachers have often experienced STEM in limited ways in their own education and are thereby provided with few resources for re-imagining these disciplines. While teacher educators have designed learning environments that engage teachers in new forms of disciplinary activities, there have been few accounts that describe how teachers make connections between these experiences and dominant narratives that impact their own and their students’ learning. In this study, I report on the experiences of Alma, a white, working-class, female elementary teacher in an online graduate certificate program for K-12 engineering educators. Through her engagement in engineering design in the program, Alma appropriated—transformed and made her own—discourse of the engineering design process in ways that trouble some of the narratives that restrict her, her family, and her students in STEM and in school. Alma’s experiences emphasize the need to consider not just what teachers learn about disciplinary tools and discourses, but how they transform these for their own purposes and contexts.
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This is a report of a National Science Foundation-supported conference about integrating equity into whole school STEM reform. originally planned as an in-person conference in summer of 2020, it was moved to a virtual conference held in the spring of 2022. Researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners shared their visions of equity in STEM over the course of four days spread out over six weeks. The presentations and synthesis shared here set the stage for future empirical studies of equity in STEM education and whole-school reform. Findings from these presentations are primarily informal, as per our goal of providing concrete, practical findings for a broad audience of leaders, teachers, school staff and community partners, parents, and researchers.
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In this paper, we—a participatory action group—use the tenants of critical pedagogy to articulate how youths developed relationships for and with STEM disciplinary practices through participation in spaces outside of the official scripts of their high school STEM classrooms in the United States. Spaces included their robotics team, a hybrid digital collaborative space, and in an extra project with a teacher. Each of these cases surfaces youth’s ongoing orientation to the fact that STEM learning is relational, and political, exemplifying pockets of resistance against the structures of schooling that foreground learning as an act of individuals. These pockets of resistance take a certain sociopolitical solidarity between learners and educators that centers STEM education which has the possibility to remake power structures to center relations with worlds, human and non-human, and the futures they help learners imagine.
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Human rights and environmental protection are closely intertwined, and both are critically dependent on supportive legal opportunity structures. These legal structures consist of access to the courts; 'legal stock' or the set of available standards and precedents on which to base litigation; and institutional receptiveness to potential litigation. These elements all depend on a variety of social, political, and economic variables. This book critically analyses the complexities of uniting human rights advocacy and environmental protection. Bringing together international experts in the field, it documents the current state of our environmental human rights knowledge, strategically critical questions that remain unanswered, and the initiatives required to develop those answers. It is ideal for researchers in environmental governance and law, as well as interested practitioners and advanced students working in public policy, political science and environmental studies.
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The chapter examines and reviews science education research over the last 20 years that offers insights into how discourse mediates science learning in elementary school students’ classrooms and age-equivalent out-of-school learning environments in the United States. It highlights perspectives that center the intellectual, social, and cultural repertoires of students from minoritized racial, ethnic, and linguistic communities (e.g., African diaspora, Latinx, Native American, and immigrant children), alongside addressing hierarchies of power and epistemologies in science learning and teaching in order to disrupt dominant ideologies of what it means to know and do science. That is, we focus on how science education researchers have engaged with, accounted for, described, theorized, and explained discourses in US classrooms and beyond that have been called for by multicultural education perspectives. In our review of the literature, hybridity and heterogeneity of knowing and discourse, relationships between teachers and students and among students themselves, identity construction and social and affective dimensions of knowing, and structure-agency dynamics associated with authority emerged as constructs that researchers and educators continue to grapple with to reimagine science learning for elementary-school-aged children. The chapter also captures the movement from discourse as language-centric to perspectives that embrace multimodal development and expression of science understandings. Building on these ideas, it identifies areas of research on science discourses to continue the focus on designing and understanding spaces and places for science learning that disrupt hierarchies of science knowing and communicating.
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What accounts for identity’s staying power in science education? What is on the horizon for identity studies? This Chapter provides an overview of my perspectives on how identity scholars in science education operationalize and study identity. I draw on the work from this book’s authors, providing readers with immediate resources to consult as they journey to understand the ‘hows’ and the ‘whys’ of studying identity in science education. Two trends in sociocultural identity studies are highlighted: (1) from studying identity as an individual construct to lens-toggling between the individual and multi-level contexts, and; (2) from studying identities as instances of authoring or performance to understanding patterns of identity work over time, while avoiding overly linear portrayals of identity work. Five affordances of identity studies are mentioned, including: (1) recognizing mechanisms of cultural reproduction and production; (2) interconnections between identity work and everyday practices; (3) intersections of power and identity work; (4) recognizing and pursuing new forms of local science focused on changing the field versus changing the individual, and; (5) attending to individuals’ agency as a resource for restructuring science education. I suggest that future identity studies could benefit from additional criticality and design-based, justice-oriented designs.KeywordsIdentityConceptual framework
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Thinking alongside feminist science studies scholars, in this article I contend with how early childhood education pedagogies do metabolisms. To conceptualize metabolisms as an activity is to centre the ethical and political practices, relations, knowledges, and vulnerabilities that flood bodies in contemporary times. I ask: What possibilities for doing bodies with children might we open toward if we take metabolism as a postdevelopmental pedagogical question in early childhood education? Utilizing examples from pedagogical inquiry research with children, shivering and sweating are engaged as modes of “doing” metabolisms. I propose doing metabolisms as a practice for thinking postdevelopmental pedagogies with the body, tracing how we might engage metabolic bodies beyond a developmentalist frame.
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With a shared focus on resiliency, agency, and pro-sociality, environmental education and positive youth development (PYD) have numerous intersections. Recognizing and supporting this synergy can help both fields achieve their goals, namely increased pro-environmental action and improved youth outcomes. To better understand this convergence, we undertook a systematic review to explore what environmental education outcomes reported in the peer-reviewed literature support PYD. We searched empirical research and identified 60 relevant studies. Qualitative coding revealed environmental educators are supporting PYD with a range of audiences and in varied settings via documented outcomes from all categories of the 5Cs model of PYD: competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring. Analysis revealed eight programme strategies and approaches that support PYD outcome development, including incorporating meaningful daily-life connections; emphasizing student-centred activities; and building in opportunities for teamwork, environmental action, and experiential learning. We conclude with research and practice implications for PYD and environmental education.
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Background Within mathematics education research, policy, and practice, race remains undertheorized in relation to mathematics learning and participation. Although race is characterized in the sociological and critical theory literatures as socially and politically constructed with structural expressions, most studies of differential outcomes in mathematics education begin and end their analyses of race with static racial categories and group labels used for the sole purpose of disaggregating data. This inadequate framing is, itself, reflective of a racialization process that continues to legitimize the social devaluing and stigmatization of many students of color. I draw from my own research with African American adults and adolescents, as well as recent research on the mathematical experiences of African American students conducted by other scholars. I also draw from the sociological and critical theory literatures to examine the ways that race and racism are conceptualized in the larger social context and in ways that are informative for mathematics education researchers, policy makers, and practitioners. Purpose To review and critically analyze how the construct of race has been conceptualized in mathematics education research, policy, and practice. Research Design Narrative synthesis. Conclusion Future research and policy efforts in mathematics education should examine racialized inequalities by considering the socially constructed nature of race.
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In this study, we present a case for designing expansive science learning environments in relation to neoliberal instantiations of standards-based implementation projects in education. Using ethnographic and design-based research methods, we examine how the design of coordinated learning across settings can engage youth from non-dominant communities in scientific and engineering practices, resulting in learning experiences that are more relevant to youth and their communities. Analyses highlight: (a) transformative moments of identification for one fifth-grade student across school and non-school settings; (b) the disruption of societal, racial stereotypes on the capabilities of and expectations for marginalized youth; and (c) how youth recognized themselves as members of their community and agents of social change by engaging in personally consequential science investigations and learning.
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The failure by the city of Flint, Michigan to properly treat its municipal water system after a change in the source of water, has resulted in elevated lead levels in the city's water and an increase in city children's blood lead levels. Lead exposure in young children can lead to decrements in intelligence, development, behavior, attention and other neurological functions. This lack of ability to provide safe drinking water represents a failure to protect the public's health at various governmental levels. This article describes how the tragedy happened, how low-income and minority populations are at particularly high risk for lead exposure and environmental injustice, and ways that we can move forward to prevent childhood lead exposure and lead poisoning, as well as prevent future Flint-like exposure events from occurring. Control of the manufacture and use of toxic chemicals to prevent adverse exposure to these substances is also discussed. Environmental injustice occurred throughout the Flint water contamination incident and there are lessons we can all learn from this debacle to move forward in promoting environmental justice.
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Data visualizations are now commonplace in the public media. The ability to interpret and create such visualizations, as a form of data literacy, is increasingly important for democratic participation. Yet, the cross-disciplinary knowledge and skills needed to produce and use data visualizations and to develop data literacy are not fluidly integrated into traditional K–12 subject areas. In this article, we nuance and complicate the push for data literacy in STEM reform efforts targeting youth of color. We explore a curricular reform project that integrated explicit attention to issues pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation, representation, visualization, and communication of data in an introductory computer science class. While the study of data in this unit emphasized viewing and approaching data in context, neither the teacher nor the students were supported in negotiating the racialized context of data that emerged in classroom discussions. To better understand these dynamics, we detail the construct of racial literacy and develop an interpretative framework of racial-ideological micro-contestations. Through an in-depth analysis of a classroom interaction using this framework, we explore how contestations about race can emerge when data visualizations from the public media are incorporated into STEM learning precisely because the contexts of data are often racialized. We argue that access to learning about data visualization, without a deep interrogation of race and power, can be counterproductive and that efforts to develop authentic data literacy require the concomitant development of racial literacy.
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The lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s water is popularly framed as a case of “environmental racism” given that Flint’s population is mostly black and lower income. In this essay I argue that we see the environmental racism that underlies Flint’s water poisoning not as incidental to our political-economic order, nor even as stemming from racist intent, but as inseparable from liberalism, an organizing logic we take for granted in our modern age. I expand on the idea of “racial liberalism” here. While upholding the promise of individual freedoms and equality for all, racial liberalism—particularly as it was translated into urban renewal and property making in mid-20th-century urban America—drove dispossession. In Flint racialized property dispossession has been one major factor underlying the city’s financial duress, abandonment, and poisoned infrastructure. Yet, through austerity discourse, Flint is disciplined as if it were a financially reckless individual while the structural and historical causes of its duress are masked. Tracing the history of property making and taking in Flint and the effects of austerity urbanism on its water infrastructure, my central argument is that our understanding of Flint’s predicament—the disproportionate poisoning of young African-Americans—can be deepened if we read it as a case of racial liberalism’s illiberal legacies.
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Drawing on critical childhood studies, Michael J. Dumas and Joseph Derrick Nelson argue that Black boyhood is socially unimagined and unimaginable, largely due to the devalued position and limited consideration of Black girls and boys within the broader social conception of childhood. In addition, the "crisis" focus of the public discourse on Black males-focused as it is on adult Black men-makes it difficult to authentically see young Black boys as human beings in and of themselves. A critical reimagining of Black boyhood, the authors contend, demands that educators, policy makers, and community advocates pursue pedagogical and policy interventions that create spaces for Black boys to construct and experience robust childhoods. Further, a (re)commitment to critical research on Black boyhood should inspire inquiry that asks young Black boys who they are, what they think, and what they desire in their lives now.
Chapter
In this chapter, we argue that learning and teaching are fundamentally cultural processes (Cole, 1996; Lee, 2008; Lee, Spencer, & Harpalani, 2003; Nasir & Bang, 2012; Rogoff, 2003). The learning sciences have not yet adequately addressed the ways that culture is integral to learning. By culture, we mean the constellations of practices communities have historically developed and dynamically shaped in order to accomplish the purposes they value, including tools they use, social networks with which they are connected, ways they organize joint activity, and their ways of conceptualizing and engaging with the world. In this view, learning and development can be seen as the acquisition throughout the life course of diverse repertoires of overlapping, complementary, or even conflicting cultural practices. Diversity along multiple dimensions is a mainstay of human communities. National boundaries evolve and change, bringing together people from different groups that have different ethnicities, languages, worldviews, and cultural practices. Migration and transmigration are not new phenomena. However, technological advances have accelerated cross-national movement. In 2010, international migrants constituted 3.1 percent of the world population. The greatest concentrations of international migrants relative to the national populations are in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Canada, across Europe, and Oceania (largely New Zealand and Australia).
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In the past decade, critical ethnography has moved from the periphery of scholarly attention to the forefront, spreading from the traditional social sciences into other disciplines, such as education, business, and nursing. However, the emergence of the perspective from the shadows of marginalization and the use by a broader range of scholars has created a rather variegated mosaic that often clouds the fundamental precepts shared by practitioners. This too often results in scholars labeling any form of cultural criticism as "critical ethnography." Fortunately, volumes such as this one provide the opportunity for researchers to share and compare their diverse views as a way of illustrating their common themes of social critique in order to distinguish critique from simply criticism. Here, I summarize a few core themes of critical ethnography and illustrate one (of many) ways it can be applied to address the symbolic violence of conventional research.
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Taking the position that “critical pedagogy” and “place-based education” are mutually supportive educational traditions, this author argues for a conscious synthesis that blends the two discourses into a critical pedagogy of place. An analysis of critical pedagogy is presented that emphasizes the spatial aspects of social experience. This examination also asserts the general absence of ecological thinking demonstrated in critical social analysis concerned exclusively with human relationships. Next, a discussion of ecological place-based education is offered. Finally, a critical pedagogy of place is defined. This pedagogy seeks the twin objectives of decolonization and “reinhabitation” through synthesizing critical and place-based approaches. A critical pedagogy of place challenges all educators to reflect on the relationship between the kind of education they pursue and the kind of places we inhabit and leave behind for future generations.
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Native Hawaiian young adults face challenging sociopolitical condi-tions. It is necessary to involve them in critically understanding their environment and encourage them to take action. This article highlights the growing literature linking health disparities to the construct of place. It examines critical indigenous pedagogy of place (CIPP) as a method that encourages young adults to question the social inequali-ties that exist in their communities with a focus on Native Hawaiian epistemology. Data are drawn from a case study in rural Hawai'i of a community-based, youth-run organic farm. A content analysis of the interviews was conducted using critical indigenous qualitative research to build a working conceptual model of CIPP. Findings indicate that CIPP can serve as a major conduit to the sociopolitical development of Native Hawaiian youth as it helps them become change agents in their communities.
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If we want children to flourish, says educator David Sobel, we need to give them time to connect with nature and love the Earth before we ask them to save it. Just as ethnobotanists are descending on tropical forests in search of new plants for medical uses, environmental educators, parents, and teachers are descending on second and third graders to teach them about the rainforests. From Brattleboro, Vermont, to Berkeley, California, school children are learning about tapirs, poison arrow frogs, and biodiversity. They hear the story of the murder of activist Chico Mendez and watch videos about the plight of indigenous forest people displaced by logging and exploration for oil. They learn that between the end of morning recess and the beginning of lunch, more than 10,000 acres of rainforest will be cut down, making way for fast food "hamburgerable" cattle. The motive for all this is honorable and just, but what's emerging is a strange kind of schizophrenia. Children are disconnected from the world outside their doors and connected with endangered animals and ecosystems around the globe through electronic media. What really happens when we lay the weight of the world's environmental problems on eight and nine year-olds already haunted with too many concerns and not enough real contact with nature? The crux of the issue is the developmental appropriateness of environmental curricula. One problem we have in schools is premature abstraction – we teach too abstractly, too early. Mathematics educators have recently realized that premature abstraction was one of the major causes of math phobia among children in the primary grades. Unable to connect the signs and symbols on the paper with the real world, many children were turning off to math. Mathematics instruction has been reinvigorated in the last two decades through the use of concrete materials (such as cuisinaire rods, fraction bars, and Unifix cubes) and the grounding of math instruction in the stuff and problems of everyday life. The result has been the turning of the tide against math phobia. Perhaps to be replaced by ecophobia – a fear of ecological problems and the natural world. Fear of oil spills, rainforest destruction, whale hunting, acid rain, the ozone hole, and Lyme disease. Fear of just being outside. If we prematurely ask children to deal with problems beyond their understanding and control, then I think we cut them off from the possible sources of their strength.
Article
SUMMARY During middle childhood, children begin to navigate their own ways through societal structures, forming ideas about their individual talents and aspirations for the future. The abil- ity to forge a positive pathway can have major implications for their success as adults. The pathways to success, however, may differ for children of diverse cultural, racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds. This article provides a conceptual model of child development that incorporates the contextual, racial, and cultural factors that can play critical roles for children who are not part of mainstream society. Key observations emerging from this model in- clude the following: It is the interplay of the three major deriva- tives of social stratification—social position, racism, and segregation—that creates the unique conditions and pathways for children of color and of immigrant families. A segregated school or neighborhood en- vironment that is inhibiting due to limited resources may, at the same time, be promot- ing if it is supportive of the child's emotional and academic adjustment, helping the child to manage societal demands imposed by discrimination. The behavioral, cognitive, linguistic, and motivational deficits of minority and immi- grant children are more appropriately recog- nized as manifestations of adaptive cultures, as families develop goals, values, attitudes, and behaviors that set them apart from the dominant culture. Society should strive to promote positive pathways through middle childhood for all children, regardless of their background, by ensuring access to critical resources now and in the future. The authors conclude by suggesting various strategies for working with children of color and children of immigrant families to accomplish this goal.
Article
Unlike school-aged youth attending well-resourced suburban schools, working-class poor students attending inner-city public schools are oftentimes denied the opportunity to develop a sense of agency within their schools and communities. In this article, the author addresses one way that educators and researchers can encourage young people to engage in participatory processes of teaching and learning aimed at developing personal and collective agency. In addition, she describes how a group of university-based students participated in on-the-ground experiences that contributed significantly to their understandings of how individual and collective agency energizes teaching and research processes. The author embeds those discussions within the framework of a participatory action research project she engaged in with a group of middle school adolescents in the northeast region of the United States.
Book
Estudio sobre el desarrollo de los seres humanos, visto como procesos culturales que ocurren a través de la participación del sujeto, junto a otros miembros de su comunidad, en la construcción y reconstrucción de prácticas culturales que han sido heredadas de generaciones anteriores. Temas clásicos del desarrollo humano como la crianza, la interdependencia y la autonomía, las transiciones a lo largo del ciclo vital, el desarrollo cognoscitivo, el aprendizaje, los roles de género o las relaciones sociales son examinados desde una perspectiva cultural, que reúne ideas de la psicología evolutiva, la antropología, la educación y la historia.
Article
This article argues for a nuanced understanding of how Black youth respond, resist, and work to transform school and community conditions. It posits that community-based organizations in Black communities provide Black youth with critical social capital, which consists of intergenerational ties that cultivate expectations and opportunities for Black youth to engage in community change activities. Data for this study were collected from 3 years (October 2000—December 2003) of participant observation and interviews of 15 Black youth who were members of Leadership Excellence, a small community-based organization in Oakland, California. This study demonstrates how critical social capital is facilitated by challenging negative concepts about Black youth in public policy, cultivated by strengthening racial and cultural identity among Black youth, and sustained through ties with adult community members who help youth frame personal struggles as political issues.
Article
While numerous quantitative studies across disciplines have investigated children's knowledge and attitudes about environmental problems, few studies examine children's feelings about environmental problems—and even fewer have focused on the child's point of view. Through 50 in-depth interviews with urban children (ages 10–12) this research aimed to fill the scholarly gap in our understanding of children's environmental concerns by voicing children's feelings about environmental problems. Findings revealed 82% of children expressed fear, sadness, and anger when discussing their feelings about environmental problems. A majority of children also shared apocalyptic and pessimistic feelings about the future state of the planet. These results suggest that many children are “ecophobic” (i.e., fearful of environmental problems), which scholars argue may have serious implications for children's participation in environmental stewardship and conservation efforts more broadly. Understanding children's perspectives regarding these issues is critical, considering that children are important environmental stakeholders, consumers, residents, and future voters facing the pernicious effects of local and global environmental degradation.
Article
A growing set of research projects in science education are working from the assumption that science literacy can be constituted as being centrally focused on issues of social justice for the youth and for communities involved in such work (Calabrese Barton, 20036. Calabrese Barton , A. , Ermer , J. L. , Burkett , T. A. and Osborne , M. D. 2003 . Teaching science for social justice , New York : Teachers College Press . View all references). Despite well-established links among race, class, and exposure to environmental health risks, environmental education is failing to take into account the environmental issues pertinent to youth who are most impacted by the most pressing modern environmental issues (Lewis & James, 199520. Lewis , S. and James , K. 1995 . Whose voice sets the agenda for environmental education? Misconceptions inhibiting racial and cultural diversity . Journal of Environmental Education , 26 ( 3 ) : 5 – 12 . [Taylor & Francis Online]View all references). We therefore need to better understand how the places where environmental education occurs are themselves sites of cultural conflict that position youth in ways that limit access to certain learning pathways. Here, we ask the following questions: (a) How are places constructed for and by youth in traditional environmental education? and (b) What are implications of this construction of place for the design of instruction that connects youths’ sense of place with environmental learning? Through ethnographic analysis we have identified two social processes in how place gets constructed for and by youth: through multifaceted and juxtaposed narratives and through the social positioning of youth, by themselves and other social actors, in places where environmental education occurs.
Article
This article, via the use of ethnographic research methods, suggests that critical theory and critical pedagogy can fruitfully redirect the attention from the predominant rhetoric on oppression to the developmental, cognitive, and academic needs of immigrant, low-income, and culturally different children. The Vygotskian approach is advocated to stress the need for the creation of linguistically and culturally appropriate learning environments that link the social and cognitive processes which constitute the basis for genuine empowerment in schoolchildren. The use of concrete examples will illustrate the major points of the article.
Article
“Science for All” is a mantra that has guided science education reform and practice for the past 20 years or so. Unfortunately, after 20 years of “Science for All” guided policy, research, professional development, and curricula African Americans continue to participate in the scientific enterprise in numbers that are staggeringly low. What is more, if current reform efforts were to realize the goal of “Science for All,” it remains uncertain that African American students would be well-served. This article challenges the idea that the type of science education advocated under the “Science for All” movement is good for African American students. It argues that African American students are uniquely situated historically and socially and would benefit greatly from a socially transformative approach to science education curricula designed to help them meet their unique sociohistorical needs. The article compares the curriculum approach presented by current reform against a socially transformative curriculum approach. It concludes with a description of research that could support the curricular approach advocated. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 301–316, 2011
Article
Some cultural ecologists have proposed a classification of minority groups as “autonomous,” “immigrant,” or “castelike,” and have defended the dichotomies between “macro” and “micro,” “explanatory” and “applied” ethnography. Other scholars, arguing against this position on both theoretical and empirical grounds, suggest that culture is crucially important at the collective and individual levels for the academic achievement and overall psychological adjustment of immigrant, refugee, and other minority children. The construction of learning environments guaranteeing academic success for all children requires theoretical and practical approaches that (1) recognize the significance of culture in specific instructional settings, (2) prevent stereotyping of minorities, (3) help resolve cultural conflicts in school, (4) integrate the home and the school cultures, and (5) stimulate the development of communicative and other skills that children need in order to participate meaningfully in the instructional process. These approaches have permitted applied ethnographers to rapidly turn failure into success.
Article
Recognizing the persistent science achievement gap between inner-city African American students and students from mainstream, White society, this article suggests that the imposition of external standards on inner-city schools will do little to ameliorate this gap because such an approach fails to address the significance of the social and cultural lives of the students. Instead, it is suggested that the use of critical ethnographic research would enable educators to learn from the students how science education can change to meet their aims and interests. The article includes a report on how a science lunch group in an inner-city high school forged a community based on respect and caring and how this community afforded African American male teens the opportunity to participate in science in new ways. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 1000–1014, 2001
Chapter
In the following essay, I reflect on the chapter by Rebecca A Martusewicz, John Lupinacci, and Gary Schnakenberg. I do so from many standpoints: that of scientist, mother, person of faith, middle-school science teacher, and science teacher educator. I do not see these roles as distinct; rather they all help to shape my pedagogical project in ways that strive for coherence, despite the many contradictions.
Article
This paper offers an analysis into low-income, urban middle school children's sense of place and what and how their sense of place matters in science learning by focusing on the following questions: In what ways is students' sense of place leveraged in a science classroom? How does the content and context of science class shape how students leverage their sense of place? What learning opportunities emerge when sense of place is leveraged in class? Drawing from an ethnographic investigation into an environmental statistics class in a mid-sized public middle school, we examined sense of place events from their source, process, and outcome perspectives. Our findings are presented from two aspects of sense of place events, (1) characterizing students' sense of place by exploring sources of the sense of place events, and (2) examining processes of how students' sense of place is being leveraged in the episodes. We also examine two kinds of tensions that emerge in the class when sense of place is leveraged by students and acknowledged by the teacher: epistemological tensions (related to what the students are learning) and procedural tensions (related to how they are learning).
Article
Following a brief historical survey of the popular 'slogans' that have influenced science education during the past quarter century and a review of current international debate on scientific literacy and science pedagogy, the author takes the view that while much of value has been achieved, there is still considerable cause for concern and that it is time for action in two senses. First, it is time to take action on the school science curriculum because it no longer meets the needs, interests and aspirations of young citizens. Second, it is time for a science curriculum oriented toward sociopolitical action. The author argues that if current social and environmental problems are to be solved, we need a generation of scientifically and politically literate citizens who are not content with the role of 'armchair critic'. A particular concern in North America is the link between science education, economic globalization, increasing production and unlimited expansion - a link that threatens the freedom of individuals, the spiritual well-being of particular societies and the very future of the planet. The author's response is to advocate a politicized, issues-based curriculum focused on seven areas of concern (human health; food and agriculture; land, water and mineral resources; energy resources and consumption; industry; information transfer and transportation; ethics and social responsibility) and addressed at four levels of sophistication, culminating in preparation for sociopolitical action. The curriculum proposal outlined in the article is intended to produce activists: people who will fight for what is right, good and just; people who will work to re-fashion society along more socially-just lines; people who will work vigorously in the best interests of the biosphere. At the heart of this curriculum is a commitment to pursue a fundamental realignment of the values underpinning Western industrialized society. Achieving that goal is a formidable task - one that will not be achieved by conventional approaches to curriculum development and teacher education. The author's solution is action research linked to community involvement.
The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways in the Urban Landscapes of Harlem Renaissance Poetry
  • M E Loveland
Loveland, M. E. (2018). The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways in the Urban Landscapes of Harlem Renaissance Poetry. Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism, 11(1), 9.
May 8) The Role Of Water in African American History
  • T Parry
Parry, T. (2018, May 8) The Role Of Water in African American History. Black Perspectives. Retrieved from: https://www.aaihs.org/the-role-of-water-in-african-american-history/.