Cultivating Interpretive Power in Science Teaching

• In Event: 54.044 - Exploring Varied Approaches to Supporting Responsive Teaching in Science and Mathematics

Abstract

Early career teachers are rarely offered explicit, sustained support for addressing issues of diversity and equity as an integral part of learning and teaching. Even with increasingly systematic attention in professional development to student thinking, issues of diversity and equity continue to be approached obliquely (e.g., “equity for all”), without explicit linkage to the particularities of everyday classroom interactions between teachers and students (Authors, 2011b; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Lee, 2007; Lee, Spencer, & Harpalani, 2003; Martin, 2009; Nasir, 2011).

Along with others, we view everyday classroom interactions as critical sites of professional learning (Authors, 2008a, 2009, 2013a; Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2011). Like any cultural activity, however, classroom interactions can carry and sustain settled hierarchies of seeing, thinking, acting, and knowing that are embedded in our society and educational systems (Authors, 2014b; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). In science, these settled hierarchies can profoundly shape who and what is seen and heard as scientifically meaningful (Authors, 2011b, 2013b). Thus, a major challenge facing the field of science education is to support teachers in learning how to desettle these hierarchies by creating learning spaces that expand possibilities for meaning-making and action for students from historically non-dominant communities (Authors, 2012, 2015, 2016b; Seiler, 2013). In this research, we focused our efforts on one step in this direction by supporting early career teachers in developing an interpretive, rather than diagnostic or evaluative, stance towards their students’ sense-making.

This poster reports on design research to create a 30-hour professional development seminar focused on cultivating the interpretive power of early career teachers who teach science to students from historically non-dominant communities. Interpretive power refers to teachers’ attunement to (a) students’ diverse sense-making repertoires as intellectually generative in science (Authors, 2008c; Authors, 2013c; Authors, 2011b) and (b) expansive pedagogical practices that encourage, make visible, and intentionally build on students’ ideas, experiences, and perspectives on scientific phenomena. In the seminar, teachers investigated student sense-making, scientific ideas, teaching practice, and matters of equity and diversity on the same plane of professional inquiry. They engaged in learning plant science together, analyzed classroom video cases, experimented with expansive discourse practices in their own classrooms, and analyzed these experiments in data groups.

Twenty-eight teachers participated in two cycles of design research. We designed an interview-based transcript analysis task that captured shifts in teachers’ interpretive power through their participation in the seminar. Findings showed that the teachers developed greater attunement to: complexity in students’ scientific ideas; the intellectual generativity of students’ sense-making; student talk as evidence of in-process, emergent thinking; and co-construction of meaning in classroom discussions. Findings also showed that participants developed deeper understanding of the functions of expansive teaching practices in fostering student sense-making in science and greater commitment to engaging in expansive practices in their classroom science discussions.

Authors

• Ann Rosebery, TERC

• Beth M. Warren, Boston University

• Eli Tucker-Raymond, TERC