Using Project-Based Learning to Leverage Elementary Students' Home and Cultural Resources in Sensemaking

• In Event: 42.030 - Developing Optimal Learning Moments in Science by Engaging Students in Project-Based Learning Across K–12

Abstract

Objectives
We explore how Project-Based Learning (PBL) provides a context for leveraging students’ agency by activating, valuing, and building on their Funds of Knowledge (FOK) (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). We explore how agentive sensemaking in a place-based PBL science context is culturally relevant. By agency we mean that students intentionally work to develop their own knowledge and shared understanding (Damşa, Crina, Kirschner, Andriessen, Erkens & Sins, (2010). We ask, “How do students’ construction of artifacts in PBL give rise to culturally sustained competence in sensemaking?”

Theoretical Foundation
Ladson-Billings (1995, 2014) expands resource pedagogies as culturally relevant. This pedagogical theory potentially supports assigning agency to students in sensemaking. Ladson-Billings describes the goals of teaching. Students will: 1) achieve academic excellence, 2) become competent in their own and one other culture, and 3) acquire a critical stance to socio-political systems. Paris (2012) adds to cultural relevancy by focusing on maintaining and fostering pluralistic cultural competence. For science, this fostering of pluralistic cultural competence leads to students becoming adept in the students’ cultures, science, and, at the same time, reflexively critique science.

The tenets of PBL promote students in actively co-developing practices and participating in the construction and evaluation of knowledge (Authors, 2014). Students take on agency for their own learning. As students offer ideas that make sense to them based on their lived experiences and prior understandings, they draw from intellectual resources from home and the community and other socio-political perspectives. Therefor, PBL can enable bridging home/culture with school, and the enactment of science to be culturally relevant and sustaining.

Methods
We observed one 3rd grade class enacting PBL to make sense of a local phenomenon. Using a data-driven approach, we analyzed four small group discussions as students figured out the question, “How do squirrels survive outside our school when no one takes care of them”. We analyzed the affordances of PBL as students solicited each other’s home/cultural experiences and knowledges.

Analysis and Discussion
For the process and artifact coding, we used theoretical constructs of culturally sustained teaching and learning (Paris, 2012; Paris, & Alim, (2014), and modified dialogic coding schemes of agency (Stroupe, 2014). We also analyzed students’ models to show how they made use of other students’ ideas and for FOK. Our analyses characterized how ideas presented were taken up according to the intellectual resources from home and culture.

Analysis reveals that PBL allowed students to participate agentively in knowledge construction and evaluation to engage in practices around a placed-based phenomenon. As one group engaged in discourse to develop models of squirrel survival that were designed with a peer review. Student discussion brought up hunting squirrels, homelessness, and perspectives of scientists. The learning environment enabled culturally sustained competence and critical ability to make sense of the world.

Scholarly Significance
Our work suggests that PBL supports students in agentive sensemaking that offers culturally sustaining affordances adding to the literature on how to support all learners in developing capabilities to make sense of their world (NRC, 2012).

Author

• Emily Miller, University of Wisconsin - Madison