Meeting, Manipulating, and Disrupting Standards for Equity and Justice in Secondary Chemistry

• In Event: 72.019 - Disrupting Intersecting Systems of Oppression in Science Education

Abstract

The Flint water crisis brought increased attention to lead poisoning and environmental racism, both problems which require scientific knowledge to address. Thus, science classrooms can be sites for disrupting environmental injustice. The NGSS include rhetoric about educational equity and human impacts on the environment, but do so within a “discourse of politeness” (Rodriguez, 2015). In this way, the NGSS eschew the root causes of inequity in science education and environmental racism.

This paper examines the work of high school chemistry teachers in Chicago who seek to meet these new standards by addressing these deeper issues of equity and justice. Drawing on data from three studies, this paper presents a cross-case analysis of the ways teachers navigate the tensions between NGSS-alignment and community concerns about lead contamination. Data sources include lesson plans, teacher interviews, and student work. Analysis of these data provides insight into curriculum that equips students to deal with the specific local impacts of environmental racism (especially lead contamination) while it also prepares students to be successful academically with canonical concepts and the NGSS.

This study employs justice-centered science pedagogy (Author, 2015) as a theoretical framework that treats inequity in science education as one component of larger systems of oppression. Justice-centered science pedagogy develops curriculum from Social Justice Science Issues (SJSI), which are socioscientific issues that are also Freirean generative themes (Dos Santos, 2009). By engaging with SJSI, students are supported to think in complex ways about scientific issues, social justice issues, and their intersection.

This study found that the NGSS were useful as a set of criteria for narrowing the focus of curriculum dealing with multi-faceted and potentially overwhelming SJSI. At the same time, this study found the NGSS to inhibit the development of justice-centered science curriculum in at least two ways. First, the ways in which the NGSS performance expectations (PEs) predetermine the relationships between specific disciplinary core ideas, scientific and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts limits their flexibility and applicability to authentic problems. For example, teachers found that the groupings found in PEs were not aligned to their authentic assessment on lead contamination. Secondly, the ways in which the NGSS define “disciplinary core ideas” in chemistry are well aligned with canonical content, but not with using chemistry concepts to study community concerns. This suggests that the NGSS reify the values of the enterprise of science rather than supporting students to use science in ways that are consistent with their lives. For example, an NGSS PE focused on maximizing the production of synthetic chemicals contrasted with one teacher’s use of the same disciplinary core idea to address the treatment of childhood lead poisoning.

This paper is among the first to examine the curricular impacts of the NGSS in urban schools. The findings imply that teachers must “manipulate the [structure and vision of the NGSS]” to teach for equity (Gallard, Mensah, & Pitts 2014, p. 1). The findings also imply collective curriculum development is necessary to support pedagogy that meets the expectations of both standards and communities.

Author

• Daniel Morales-Doyle, University of Illinois at Chicago