Leveraging Place-Based Science to Mediate and Transform Teacher, Family, and Student Relationships

• In Event: Collaborative Science Teaching and Learning Toward Social Transformation and Justice

Abstract

21st-century challenges such as climate change demand equitable forms of science education that centralize the impacts of social and ecological decisions on and with families and communities. Shifts in policy and research reflect this need with greater inclusion of field-based sciences in K-12 and more attention to interactions between natural phenomena and human communities (Atran et al., 2005; NRC 2012). Family engagement research points to the necessity of incorporating diverse knowledges and repertoires of practice in supporting student achievement broadly, and developing scientific identities more specifically (Calabrese Barton et al., 2004; Ishimaru et al., 2015). However, many primary grade teachers are underprepared and undersupported to implement scientifically rigorous and culturally responsive teaching practices (McIntyre, et al, 2001). This paper articulates a model for equitable family-school collaborations that leverages the heterogeneous knowledges and repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) of families and communities through co-designed place-based tools. We trace how (re)making relationships with places afforded opportunities for expansive learning as well as transformed relationships between schools and families.

This paper is drawn from an NSF-funded project that engages young children K-3 in co-designed, innovative research and practice involving educators, families, and community-based organizations. Leveraging third generation cultural-historical activity theory (e.g., Engeström, 2001)  and land-based education (Author et al., 2010; Simpson, 2014), we collaboratively designed activity systems that emplaced science learning across schools, families, and neighborhoods. We use boundary crossing and boundary objects (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011) to understand how field-based science demands learning across physical boundaries of place and makes visible the roles and repertoires of practice attendant in places. We use narrative analysis to describe the iterative process of designing, implementing, and sensemaking around boundary objects (tools and frameworks) that support field-based science learning across places. We analyze transcript data from four seasonal “design summits” where families, teachers, and researchers came together to co-design field-based tools and activities. 

We illuminate two preliminary findings. First, boundary object tools helped support teachers in attending to the complexity of student and family lives. For example, during a design summit, we collectively analyzed evidence of socio-ecological reasoning from a family tool implemented during the school year that asked families to go on a nature-walk and record one observation and one “wondering”. One teacher’s observations of a student’s drawings and wonderings about new houses being built in his neighborhood sparked a conversation about the effects of displacement, class, and racial dynamics that communities grapple with daily. This demonstrated the complexity inherent in learning across places and the necessity of navigating the realities facing communities, including refugee and immigrant families making their own relations with place amidst social and political turmoil. Secondly, we argue that (re)making relationships with places mediated subject-subject relations between schools and families. Engaging families in place-making co-design served as authentic collaboration practice that differed from traditional ways to involve families such as cleaning classrooms or fundraising. 

Implications: In re-imagining family-school-teacher relations, this paper documents how justice-oriented relations to place can emerge through co-design and collective reflection around tools for boundary-spanning place-based learning.  

Authors

• Charlene Montano Nolan, Western Washington University

• Megan Bang, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Learning Sciences

• Carrie T. Tzou, University of Washington - Bothell