Place-Based Science Education and Next Generation Science Standards

• In Event: 68.017 - Equity-Focused Implementation of Next Generation Science Standards: Exploring Models of Hope and Possibility

Abstract

Dynamics of perspective taking (psychological distance and construal level, see Trope & Liberman, 2003) and human positioning in socio-ecological systems impact sense making and forms of pedagogy in science learning. For example, ojaleto, Waxman, and Medin, 2013 suggest that relationally-focused explanations based on perspective-taking are misread as unwarranted explanations. This paper explores these dynamics in a participatory design research project (Expansive Meanings and Makings in ArtScience, EMMAS). EMMAS seeks to foster creative trajectories into meaningful STEM learning for youth who often experience school science as disconnected from their lives or interests in Seattle and Boston. This paper focuses on the Seattle project which engaged Native American students in 1st-12th grade in learning about complex ecological systems engaging key disciplinary core ideas, practice, and cross-cutting concepts reflected in NGSS. Youth investigated complex scientific phenomena (e.g. star fish wasting disease) in place specific ways through interpreting and creating artistic and scientific visualizations, models and performances from varied forms of perspective taking and ecological relationships. In addition, youth investigated multiple epistemological with respect to climate change related phenomena emerging from different cultural communities.

We view learning as a social phenomenon constituted in the experienced, lived-in world, through participation in the ongoing practices of social and cultural communities (Lave & Wenger, 1991). ArtScience emphasizes coming to know phenomena deeply—a process of making and re-making relations with phenomena, tools, materials, histories, and people (Bakhtin, 1981; Ingold, 2013; Massey, 2005; Nasir, 2012). This process is animated by knowledge systems, including ideology, and in our work we explore the generative relations between Indigenous and western scientific knowledge systems in learning about complex ecological systems. At the core of these systems are constructions of human-nature relations (Authors, 2012; Authors, 2015).

Using cognitive and discourse analytic methods, we studied the conceptual ecologies, identity narratives, and perspective taking that youth develop through their participation in a place based learning environment. Data sources include video and transcriptions of interview and classroom implementations, student produced artifacts, walking place-based classroom activities, and individual student interviews. Activities were designed were to cultivate attention across multiple epistemologies, scales, and disciplinary perspectives, using protocols that facilitated sustained engagement across multiple interpretive pathways, openness to emergent and uncertain meanings, and knowing as movement (Ingold, 2013).

Results suggest that youth explorations of multiple perspectives and scales supported reasoning about complex ecological systems. This paper will focus on the ways youth explored multiple causal pathways in narratives as well as the ways in which they wove cultural perspectives and stories into their understandings. Further youth considered and imagined multiple possible futures that included both individual and communal responses to address the socio-environmental changes reflected in the places studied. To exemplify these dynamics, we trace several activities in which engaging in perspective taking was generative and expansive as well as an example of when it was not. Further, we propose several practices that we suggest may support generative forms of perspective taking. Finally we draw out implications for science education engaged with critical socio-ecological challenges.

Authors

• Megan Bang, University of Washington

• Priya Pugh, University of Washington - Seattle

• Megan C. McGinty, University of Washington - Seattle