Teacher Sense-Making About Epistemic Practices in Science Learning: Considering Students' Community-Based Epistemologies

• In Event: 29.030 - Equity-Focused Implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards: Exploring Models of Hope and Possibility

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores the conceptual dynamic of 12 teachers in a professional learning environment simultaneously working towards understanding issues of equity, culture, and indigenous knowledge systems in the context of NGSS adoption. The paper focuses on what areas of practice teachers are both excited and challenged to take up in instruction.

Perspectives / theoretical framework
If the shift to science practices in NGSS is to have significant potential to reconfigure science learning and teaching toward more equitable, active, and engaged sense-making in U.S. classrooms it will require teachers to simultaneous attend (e.g. Rogoff, 2008) to change on at least three critical fronts: 1) engaging in science practices as integral to science learning; 2) dismantling entrenched, narrow conceptions of subject matter and sense-making that are appropriate to science learning (Bang et al., forthcoming); and 3) cultivating their ability to attend and engaged in students’ diverse sense-making repertoires—including ideas, experiences, perspectives and practices—in creating more equitable opportunities to learn in STEM for students from non-dominant communities.

Methods & Data sources
This mixed methods study is conducted in a the context of a nine-week hybrid professional development course called “Teaching Science to Indigenous Learners.” It includes pre-post survey data around teachers’ conceptions of science, culture, and Indigenous knowledge systems as well as qualitative analysis of teachers’ discussion of texts and practice and their written work including reflections, lesson plans and analytical annotations of classroom practice.

Results
We present three inter-related results. First, we found significant shifts in teachers’ conceptions of culture in relation to learning and teaching science. Second, teachers grappled with both being hopeful that the NGSS was a powerful opportunity for change and skeptical that schools systems were willing and capable of the sort of equitable change they imagined. A core dimension of this dilemma was around teachers’ experience of science as primarily focused on content knowledge rather than practice. As teachers engaged with science practices, they increasingly focused on possible shifts in their own instruction and began to see learning and teaching are cultural processes in which diverse experiences, ideas, perspectives, histories, and values constantly interact in learning environments (Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, & Tejeda, 1999; Nasir, Rosebery, Warren & Lee, 2006). Further, teachers grappled with larger systemic issues of equity specifically with Indigenous populations. Third, we present an analysis of the curricular adaptations and instructional shifts teachers conceptualized and engaged as they develop expertise in recognizing the kinds of opportunities and complexities that can arise in routine interactions between teachers and students as they engage in science practices.

Scientific / scholarly significance
The findings from this study help to understand the scope of teacher professional learning necessary for the NGSS to impact issues of equity. Further, this paper contributes to understanding teachers’ ideas about teaching science to indigenous learners specifically and historically under-achieving students in the sciences more specifically.

Authors

• Ceni M Myles, University of Washington - Seattle

• Megan Bang, University of Washington