Reflections on the Co-Design of a Socioscientific Unit on Water (Justice) for Health, Healing, and Transformation

• In Event: Redressing Health Inequities in Science and Mathematics Education

Abstract

Normative K-12 science curriculum tends to privilege the teaching of discrete content while overlooking how these concepts are imbued with sociopolitical and experiential meanings. This tendency to presume mundanity and objectivity has been argued as contributing to the maintenance of White supremacy through settled expectations in science education (Bang et al., 2012). Settled expectations privilege inquiry into science topics through a narrow ahistorical and apolitical lens, simultaneously dismissing the expansive, cultural and communal forms of knowledge that students may bring into the classroom. A robust body of scholarship has advanced pedagogical models that problematize “settled” forms of science and situate learning within the context of larger justice movements and everyday practices of survival (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Barton & Tan, 2010; Hodson, 2014; Varelas et al., 2018). Some of this research features cases of collaborative, cross-disciplinary work with activists and health experts. Most often, examples of justice-oriented pedagogical practice involve adolescent students studying science. Less is known about the process of conceptualizing and co-designing elementary science curricula with activists and towards the ends of equity and holistic well-being. How might co-planning and dialogue with community activists open up unique opportunities for expanding the disciplinary domain with younger children? What tensions and possibilities emerge through strategic partnerships that leverage elementary science classrooms as sites for cultivating collective agency, ethical responsibility and healing?

This paper reports select findings from a 2-year ethnographic project that investigated pedagogy, Black student agency and learning in a place-based school. Specifically, we analyze the development and enactment of a socio-scientific unit on water/water justice that took place in two 4th-/5th-grade classrooms. This unit involved teaching artists and perspectives from activists directly involved in local water justice efforts. Besides covering topics related to water’s composition, properties, and function in a normative sense, classroom activities included inquiries into local governance systems and discussions of reparations for individuals whose health had been jeopardized by lapses in clean water access. The corpus of data contains unit planning documents, analytic field notes from a panel with activists, and 20 semi-structured interviews with educators and children.

Findings show that over the course of the unit, science teachers and community activists co-constructed pedagogical imaginary spaces (Domínguez, 2019), or sites for “harnessing imagination to disrupt normative assumptions . . . and explore untested, liberatory possibilities and discourses” in science and health education (p. 54). This was particularly evident in the guiding questions developed and later posed to students (e.g. If people need water to survive, why isn’t it free? What would water justice look like in our community?). Such questions helped to advance a conception of science that was fundamentally concerned with sociopolitical context, human well-being and the advancement of just social futures. At the same time, co-designers sometimes struggled in negotiating how best to help children understand the complexities of local water (in)access and varied theories of change. This paper offers a nuanced view into the collaborative design of justice-oriented curricula for children who are directly impacted by the socioscientific phenomena they are studying.

Author

• Natalie R. Davis, Georgia State University