Negotiating Ideologies About Science and Language in Elementary Teacher Professional Development

• In Event: Interaction as a Site for Ideological Negotiation and Transformation in Science Teachers' Learning

Abstract

Objectives.
Expanding what counts as STEM learning is central to supporting students, yet harmful ideologies that center English monolingualism and canonical science as the way to learn are embedded in US curricula. Teachers are often unsure how to negotiate these competing tensions. This paper explores an elementary science professional development (PD) as a site for negotiating ideologies about science and multilingual learners. We consider how PD activities support and constrain teachers in negotiating expansive ideologies through interaction.

Theoretical framework.
We define ideologies as tools that teachers use to make sense of their work (Louie, 2020; Philip, 2011). Ideologies are inherently political because they highlight what is valued in a given space (Louie, 2020). Ideologies are dynamic and contradictory, rather than static and consistent (Louie, 2020; Philip, 2011). Teachers may draw on constraining ideologies (deficit perspectives of students) in one pedagogical context while relying on expansive ideologies (asset perspectives) in another.
We argue that ideologies are negotiated through interaction. We draw on Goodwin's (2013) construct of substrate (resources used to co-construct meaning in interaction) to analyze how substrate created in our summer PD became shared resources that teachers drew on in their academic-year interactions to negotiate ideologies about multilingual learners and science.

Methods and data.
Data come from year one of a multi-year PD on the use of representations in phenomenon-based science. Elementary teachers participated in a summer workshop, then met quarterly during the school year for student work analysis and video clubs (Sherin & van Es, 2009).
Using interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995), we identify moments of stance taking, stance building, and stance shifting in academic-year PD interactions. We present two cases of how teachers engaged in stance taking, shifting, and building by drawing on shared summer substrate that supported or constrained movement toward expansive ideologies.

Results and significance.
Our first case shows how teachers positioned kindergarten students' lived experiences as relevant to science, leveraging summer PD substrate that emphasized students’ out-of-school experiences as resources for learning. While a kindergarten teacher's initial stance positioned her lesson as not “real” science, other teachers engaged in stance shifting and building to reframe her lesson as an important way to connect students’ lived experiences to science standards in later grades.
The second case shows how summer substrate limited teachers’ opportunities for negotiating expansive ideologies. Summer PD positioned students’ multimodal resources as scaffolds for academic language development rather than resources to support heterogeneity in STEM (Warren et al., 2020). Some teachers engaged in stance taking and shifting that challenged constraining monolingual ideologies. However, these moments were not built upon to (re)negotiate limiting ideologies because necessary resources were not a part of the shared substrate.
These findings demonstrate the importance of seeding PD with expansive ideological resources and supporting reflection and negotiation around these ideologies. Moreover, they confirm that expansive and constraining ideologies can coexist because ideologies are context-dependent. PD designs should explicitly address multiple dimensions of deficit ideologies to support STEM teachers in (re)negotiating limiting ideologies and moving toward heterogeneity.

Authors

• Bethany Daniel, Vanderbilt University

• D. Teo Keifert, University of North Texas

• Ashlyn Pierson, The Ohio State University