Drawing and Reflecting on Experiences to Craft Science Teaching in and With Urban Communities

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

Abstract

Teachers of Color bring certain insight to understanding issues of equity and justice in teaching (Gist et al., 2014; Villenas & Irvine, 2010), particularly when having connections with the school district they teach (Gist et al., 2019), as their experiences in the world influence instructional decisions (Kind, 2016). Moreover, non-for-profit organizations (NFPOs) often provide teachers with opportunities to consider particularities of justice-centered science teaching (Authors et al., 2018a). This study builds on previous work by focusing on Latina pre-service teachers (PSTs) and how their experiences as students in the district in which they were learning to teach framed their positionality and became intertwined with their shifting ideologies of science teaching while processing NFPO workshops.
This study was grounded in ideology-in-pieces (Authors, et al, 2019; Philip, 2011), and the structure-agency dialectic. Ideology-in-pieces frames PSTs’ sensemaking as interwoven with their experiences and formalized thinking about social structures, while the structure-agency dialectic frames PSTs’ agency in relation to multiple structures they encountered and conceptualized (Sewell, 1992; Author et al., 2015). Past scholarship has identified community-based workshops as places to cultivate sociopolitical understandings of structures of oppression (Authors et al., 2018a; 2018b; Hallman & Rodriguez, 2015; 2015; Zeichner et al., 2016).
A phenomenological design (Patton, 2014) was used with three oral reflective conversations and five written workshop reflections by each PST as primary data sources. Data were coded using provisional and descriptive coding (Miles et al, 2014). The five workshops varied by topic, ranging from river ecosystem health to triumphs and tribulations of an environmental justice organization. Conversations were semi-structured and prompted PSTs about teaching practices, sociopolitical understandings, and science teacher identities.
PSTs drew on their own learning experiences in positioning themselves as science teachers. Challenges once faced were lenses to understand workshops. Esperanza identified structures impeding students’ learning (“those injustices, [students] distracted by…jobs, bills”) as a lens for rethinking community (“…communities…lack green space [to] grow their own [so]…youth ha[ve] very little experience and knowledge about where our food comes from”). As she reflected on workshops, she suggested teachers position themselves as learning from and with community (“so many resources… [to]take a part of and collaborate with”). Esperanza connected availability of resources to being responsive–“No matter what community…you can connect with and build something for the students.” Eventually Esperanza argued that teachers (re)learn about community even when familiar with it­–“I had grown up there…knew about the power plant but…been so disconnected from my community…the community garden.” That workshop helped Esperanza connect more deeply with her community, and consider the dissonance between structures of formal school spaces and partnerships that provide contexts for responsiveness–“school, it takes the fun out. [but] in summer where there is not as much content and testing, [we] instead [need to be] building love of science.”
This study adds to the work on examining out-of-school experiences for learning to teach science for equity, capturing PSTs’ ways of drawing on multiple identities–as students, teacher candidates, and community residents–in order to construct conceptions of what teaching science for equity should be in practice.

Authors

• David Segura, Beloit College

• Maria Varelas, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Daniel Morales-Doyle, University of Illinois at Chicago