Making Space for Justice-Centered Ambitious Science With In-Service Elementary Teachers (Poster 5)

• In Event: Supporting Teacher Learning of Justice-Centered Ambitious Practice

Abstract

In response to conflicting images of science-as-convergence versus science-as-heterogeneity (Pierson et al., 2020), this poster showcases the instructional design choices of two elementary school science teachers—Anne (3rd) and Soren (K)—that made space for students’ cultural and everyday knowledge. We argue that this shift occurred as a result of teacher professional development (PD) in which teachers engaged in collective reflection and feedback. Given the variety of strategies to approach justice-centered teaching, we ask the question: How do teachers navigate the tensions between accountability to standards (convergence) and to equitable sense-making (heterogeneity)?

This poster builds on the work of Haverly et al. (2018) to contribute to conceptualizations of how teachers can make space for equitable sense-making—collaboratively constructing knowledge with students’ diverse epistemic resources—in classrooms. As such,our PD design also built on responsive teaching (Robertson et al., 2015) and culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies (Gay, 2018; Paris & Alim, 2014).

We focused on two of nine teachers from a larger, multi-year project focused on developing teachers’ ambitious science practices (Windschitl et al., 2018): Anne, who was in her second year of teaching, and Soren, who was in her 14th year. We conducted two to three lesson observations per teacher and four video club PD meetings each academic year where teachers, in cross-grade-level groups, presented a clip from their classroom practice to reflect on representations used (Sherin & van Es, 2005). Our research team then engaged in iterative video analysis using interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). We (1) time indexed and content logged videos (Derry et al., 2010); (2) wrote memos and timestamped episodes when teachers made space (e.g., validated student thinking, adding zooms on diagrams); and (3) collectively viewed episodes to refine our hypotheses (Engle et al., 2007) about how teachers worked within or around the tensions between convergence- and heterogeneity-seeking images of science.

Anne and Soren reflected on their practices in Year 1 and changed their activities to be more expansive and open-ended in Year 3. Anne adapted a consensus building activity in the moment to include an unanticipated piece of cultural knowledge from a student. Soren revised her material categorizing activity so that children decided on the rules of activity, as opposed to a predetermined worksheet she used before our PD. We argue that teachers were able to achieve this “deep learning” and inspiration to revise their practice via video clubs and the feedback from the community built by this research project.

Authors

• Sarah Jaewon Lee, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author

• Adam Bell, TrainingConnections LLC
  Presenting Author

• D. Teo Keifert, University of North Texas
  Presenting Author

• Heather J. Johnson, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author

• Ashlyn Pierson, The Ohio State University
  Presenting Author

• Andrea W. Henrie, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author

• Rachel Diane Askew, Freed-Hardeman University
  Presenting Author