Learning to Be Community-Responsive: An Informal Educator's Attempt to Recognize Children's Funds of Scientific Knowledge

• In Event: Science Teaching and Learning: Out-of-School Science

Abstract

This paper recognizes how children from low-income communities are underserved and disproportionately represented in science education and seeks to disrupt deficit narratives denigrating children’s science expressions. In the context of a community-responsive research initiative for informal science education in Canada, I operationalize a funds of scientific knowledge lens to recognize the myriad of ways children practice science in a new after-school club serving a low-income neighborhood. Via critical reflexive analysis I interrogate my assumptions about, expectations for, and recognition of children’s funds of scientific knowledge. In exposing my actions as the club volunteer, I explore how I validated, challenged, and at times undermined children’s science practices to provoke myself and others to become more responsive, equity-oriented science teachers and researchers.

Author

• Kristen Schaffer, University of Toronto