The Critical Practitioner Researcher: Learning to Recognize Children's Funds of Science Knowledge (Poster 5)

• In Event: Reengaging (With) Care in Equity-Based STEM Research

Abstract

Purpose: Children in lower-income communities experience marginalization in science education. Educators should embrace tools and methodologies which help them to trouble their power of recognition and engage with the knowledge and cultures of the communities with whom they work (Avraamidou, 2021). This poster highlights two moments of transformative learning in an educator’s journey to recognize and mobilize children’s funds of science knowledge (FoSK) in the context of a community-based after-school club initiative and demonstrates how educators can use critical practitioner inquiry to reorient themselves towards children’s assets.

Framework: In this study, I applied a conceptual framework to defy marginalizing deficit narratives in science education. I adapted Moll et al.’s (1992) and González et al.’s (2005) funds of knowledge framework into a funds of science knowledge (FoSK) framework to report on the range of science knowledge, resources and cultures children practice and access through their families, communities, peers, and pop culture. I theorize the term and explore its mobilization in the context of the club, how the children expressed and used their individual and collective FoSK in different spaces, as well as how I recognize and reinforce children’s FoSK.

Methods and Data Sources: A research team and informal science education provider worked with a local community to create a model science club at a public primary school in a major city in East-Central Canada. The club ran after school on Mondays for 20 weeks from November 2018 to May 2019. Twenty children aged 8 to 11 took part in the club. The club was staffed by two members of the organization running the club, and me, who acted in the role of a volunteer facilitator. Methodologically, I embraced Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (2009) critical practitioner inquiry to reflect on my experience of the club, and the challenges and affordances of working with a FoSK framework to recognize and mobilize children’s science. Critical practitioner inquiry asks educators to interrogate their practice, such that they may work towards more participatory, democratic forms of education in which all children flourish and thrive. In this poster, I examine two moments of transformative learning which supported me to becoming an asset-oriented science educator.

Findings: This poster dives into two key learning moments and critical analyses:

Sitting with examples of children’s acts of non-participation in the club, I suggest that children’s resistance and refusal to engage with certain activities reveals their agency with respect to their own FoSK (e.g., desire to creatively demonstrate their science learning), a provocation also witnessed by Yosso (2005).
In recounting a day-long free-choice exploration of the local science centre with a small group of club-goers, I propose how teachers might re-envision field trips and reiterate how museum education can be marginalizing when it mimics school (Archer et al., 2016).

Significance: This poster models and recommends funds of science knowledge and critical practitioner inquiry as method and methodology, respectively, which help educators to disrupt deficit narratives and better recognize and centre children as they learn science.

Author

• Kristen Schaffer, Mount Royal University
  Presenting Author