Using the Affordances of Museums in Learning to Teach

• In Event: Context-Specific Teaching Practice: Collaborating With Children's Families, Communities, and Community-Based Organizations to Support Equitable Teaching

Abstract

In this paper, we present findings from a study that examines the experience of participants enrolled in a museum-based Earth science teacher preparation program. The program brings together two distinct fields of education practice and research—informal science education and urban teacher residency pre-service models. The model includes a clinical component consisting of two summer residencies at a museum and two semester residencies at partner public schools. The context of learning to teach in a museum setting affords opportunities to focus upon several core practices of teaching such as learning about student understanding, eliciting student thinking during interactive teaching and anticipating student responses (Grossman, Hammerness and McDonald, 2009). Over the first two-month period, Residents enroll in a museum learning theory course and participate in the museum residency that consists of three rotations: facilitating touch carts, co-teaching in a science pipeline program for middle and high school youth and designing and teaching lessons for high school students in a weeklong space science institute at the museum.

Two questions guided our inquiry into the teacher candidates’ experiences: 1) in what ways do the affordances of learning to teach in an ISI contribute to agency in teaching? 2) what kinds of emerging teaching identities do the teacher candidates appear to develop? The described study includes a subset (n=36) of the total number of Residents. The data sources examined focused on the first rotation and include semi-structured conversations with candidates immediately after using the carts, online forum posts, surveys and field notes from faculty. The candidates were required to post daily reflections on their experiences with the carts, some of the reflections were prompted while others were open-ended. A total of 994 posts, each approximately 150 words or more, were examined.

A socio-cultural lens guided our analysis and description of how the structures of an informal setting consisting of particular schema and practices mediate the agency of Residents in teaching (Sewell, 1992). With structures and agency in a dialectical relationship, neither existing without the other, as the agency of the Resident changed, it mediated changes in the schema and practices present in an informal learning setting. Through learning how to engage visitors as science learners, the teacher candidates began to learn how to use museum affordances, like the objects and exhibits, in fluid ways. The diversity of learners that they encountered helped to shape their views about learners and changed their orientations towards learners from being the one who “held” all of the knowledge to one who recognized and leveraged visitors’ knowledge in the learning interactions. With each visitor encounter, their agency changed and so did, therefore, the experience for visitors. The multiple learning interactions with diverse visitors challenged their assumptions about science teaching and learning in ways that allowed them to experience ontological shifts in their identities and roles as teachers. This points to how learning to teach in informal spaces affords positive science teaching identity development with dispositions that could lead to core, student-centered science teaching practices.

Authors

• Karen M. Hammerness, American Museum of Natural History

• Preeti Gupta, American Museum of Natural History

• Jennifer Dawn Adams, Brooklyn College - CUNY