Informal Science Institution Educators Reflecting on Teaching for Equity

• In Event: Informal Science Institutions and Equity: Future-Oriented Historiography of Research and Practice

Abstract

An ISI’s educational professionals play an important role in the organization’s endeavors for centering on equity and dismantling systematic inequities. These educators work at the interface among the objects within the organization’s collections and the cultural, conservation, historical, and scientific knowledge embodied by those objects and the visiting public (Author, 2008). This work is expansive, e.g., support youth, interact with visitors, and teach teachers. Their collective effort broadens the scope of their organization’s reach and grow the organization’s social capital in its local community and beyond its physical footprint (Authors, 2019). Given the significant contributions of educators in ISIs to their organization’s outcomes, how are they supported in their growth and development to teach for equity? How do the educators think about teaching for equity? How does their practice reflect their position and understanding?
Sleeter (2012) drew attention to four persistent faulty and simplistic understandings of culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP, Gay, 2018) among classroom teachers. First, teachers tend to interpret culturally responsive pedagogy as celebrating culture, while disconnecting it from academic learning. Learning “about” culture then substitutes for learning challenging academic knowledge and skills through the cultural processes and knowledge learners bring to school. Second, CRP is trivialized as a set of strategies to use or steps to follow, rather than understanding it as a paradigm for learning and teaching. Third, teachers tend to assume “culture” to be static and homogenous, and characteristic of all individuals who belong to a group. Finally, there is presumption that attending to culture will bring about equity and inclusion. It is assuming that valuing learners’ culture and teaching through these values will be enough. Thus, despite their good intentions for using equity pedagogies, educators teaching anywhere might not have the positive impacts they strive for if they aren’t critically conscious of our own understanding and how they use them.
Through the [name removed] professional learning program (Authors, 2019), we are developing a new module that aims to insert teaching for equity into ISI educators’ conversations about their own practice within their communities. This module leverages the framework and routines of the program that has been designed for communities of educators to learn together, and in that process, they shape the language and meanings by which they do and talk about their work to support visitors’ experiences. The purpose of the new module is to raise critical consciousness among educators, offer routines for reflecting on teaching for equity, and make discourse on the effects of sociopolitical context on education a regular occurrence among communities of educators. Six ISIs around the U.S. are field-testing the new module. Preliminary findings suggest educators want conversations on equity relevant to their practice, recognize gaps in their knowledge of local history and the sociopolitical context, and struggle to put equity pedagogy into practice in ISIs wherein relationships with learners are fleeting. We will present findings from the field test, including impact on educators and their communities and insights for designing such experiences.

Author

• Lynn Uyen Tran, National Science Foundation