"Looking Through the Kids' Perspectives Made Me Change": Teacher Learning From Youth Narratives

• In Event: 60.065 - Decentering Dominant Discourses and Reimagining Privileged Spaces in STEM Education

Abstract

Objectives
School science continues to fail to engage youth from non-dominant communities (Carlone et al, 2011). At the same time, research demonstrates that informal science learning supports both knowledge gains and increasing interest in science among youth from non-dominant communities (Dierking, 2007; Falk et al, 2007). Despite the successes, little is known about how teachers can learn from informal science practices to support student engagement in science.
In this paper, I examine how inservice middle school science teachers interpret youth narratives of learning and doing science in informal settings and bring these understandings to their teaching. My study is based upon professional development experiences where teachers interacted with youth-authored cases regarding how science is meaningful in their lives, how they learn and do science in their communities, and their hopes for school science.

Theoretical Framework
Drawing from social practice theory (Holland & Lave, 2009) I analyzed teacher meaning making of youth cases across “two forms of history”, the personal and institutional. Personal experiences carried out in local practice are enacted against the broader background of cultural and historical narratives. This plays out in the struggle between how school values certain ways of knowing and doing science and cultural meaning making practices youth bring with them. The intersection of these histories impacts how teachers working within their own historical intersections view the youths’ stories as learning and doing science.

Methods
This study was carried out as a critical ethnography. Cases were constructed with four female middle grades youth from non-dominant communities and shared with three male middle grades science teachers. Data sources include: professional development meetings, teacher interviews, classroom observations, youth conversation groups and youth case development meetings.

Findings
Findings indicate teachers initially drew upon institutional narratives when making sense of youth cases resulting in descriptions of why experiences communicated would not work in a classroom context. Roadblocks included lack of time, curricular freedom and desire of their students to engage in these types of experiences. The institutional narratives slowly broke down as teachers began focusing on youths’ narratives of meaningful science learning juxtaposed against their own experiences participating with science. Following the PD, teachers enacted change in classrooms focused on active student participation, varied forms of participation and connection to youths’ lived experiences but struggled to find balance between institutional narratives and proposed changes.

Significance
This project reveals ways in which informal science learning opportunities hold power to influence formal science instruction. I highlight the tensions in balancing institutional and personal narratives when attempting to reform classroom practices. There are very few studies that address a connection between informal and school-based learning opportunities with science or build on how findings from one venue impact the other (NRC, 2009, Dierking et al. 2003). This study contributes to this small area of research by taking a critical stance toward the outcomes and purpose of school science, as well as the examining the role informal science experiences can assume in reforming classroom practices.

Author

• Daniel Birmingham, Colorado State University