"It Starts With Thinking About What You Can Do": Critical Praxis Among Justice-Oriented Science Teachers

• In Event: 67.059 - Enacting Social Justice Through Transformative Science Education Research in Various Contexts

Abstract

Objectives and Framework: This presentation discusses a multi-year inquiry group that includes two university researchers (authors) and eight secondary science teachers. Each of the teachers integrates justice-oriented ideals into their classroom practice. The inquiry group serves as a space for communicating and supporting one another in building core practices around social justice science teaching, which the group has defined as necessarily including the following two principles: (1) promoting high academic achievement, and (2) facilitating opportunities for students to understand and take action on issues of injustice. We are centrally interested in how issues of power and oppression play out in science classrooms, how critical science education can serve to disrupt oppressive systems, and what it means to develop core practices that serve justice-oriented principles and goals for science education (Freire, 1971). We observe these themes as largely under-attended to within the core practices scholarship thus far (Cochran-Smith et al., 2015; Dutro & Cartun, 2016). This project uses a theoretical framework of student empowerment (Author, 2012) to examine practices of justice with a focus on science teaching and learning.

Methods: Each month the teachers identify “critical incidents”--moments that inspire or challenge our ideas about empowerment and justice in science education--and share a written reflection and curricular artifacts with the group in an online folder. The group meets monthly using an online video conferencing platform to discuss these incidents. Meetings are recorded and transcribed. The teachers are in five different states and work in schools that primarily serve low income minoritized students. In our meetings, teachers collaboratively reflect on how their practices supported (or not) empowering science learning experiences for their students.

Results: Data were analyzed using thematic and discourse analysis, grounded in Authors’ (2012, 2016) empowerment framework for social justice science teaching, which included four categories: Academic, Social, Political, and Emotional Empowerment. Initial findings reveal how teachers experienced increased opportunities to develop empowering practices by collectively negotiating critical incidents with other justice-oriented colleagues in our group. Specific examples from these critical incidents and conversations will be shared in the full paper--e.g., such as how some of these critical classroom incidents catalyzed conversations around what it means to develop classroom practices that “scaffold” for empowerment in science, prepare students for success in rigorous college level science courses, engage students in deep conceptual understandings and transformative action around local environmental justice issues, support students academically while attending to serious emotional needs, etc.

Significance: This project contributes to our understanding of social justice in science teaching from the perspective of how teachers can be supported, through critical collaborative inquiry as professional learning, to develop core practices that are both responsive to each teacher’s contexts and promote student empowerment. Our approach engages the teachers’ personal practical knowledge, professional knowledge, and the university researchers’ critical science education scholarship to cultivate a social justice praxis. A key contribution of this work is its explicit and central focus on issues of power and justice in science and education (see Authors, 2017; Dutro & Carton, 2016).

Authors

• Alexandra Schindel, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Sara E. Tolbert, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha University of Canterbury