Engaging Cultural, Relational, and Sociopolitical Considerations in Responsive Science Teaching

• In Event: Noticing and Responding to Student Thinking for Equity

Abstract

Objectives
Responsive science teaching (RST) revolutionized how science teachers attend to student thinking by encouraging teachers to elicit, leverage, and use students' ideas as valuable resources for learning, including ideas that were previously discarded as misconceptions. By positioning students’ ideas as assets instead of hindrances to learning, RST troubles deficit perspectives and, in turn, holds potential for fostering more humanizing learning spaces. That said, RST has traditionally foregrounded learners’ disciplinary ideas without explicit consideration for who the learners are, whose ideas are being privileged, and the larger social, cultural, and political context that shapes learners’ ideas and participation.

Equity-focused literature expands notions of what students bring to the classroom, and what teachers need to attend to in their interactions with students. Equity-oriented approaches consider learners as whole persons with complex and heterogeneous ways of being, knowing, feeling, and acting. Thus, being responsive to students in ways that align with equity goals goes beyond responding to the disciplinary substance of their thinking. This paper proposes a framework for expanding RST that accounts for the cultural, relational, and sociopolitical in teachers’ in-the-moment interactions with students.

Theoretical Perspective
We examined a broad body of work on resource pedagogies that share a commitment with RST to move beyond deficit approaches, and that also intentionally consider more than the disciplinary substance of students’ ideas (e.g., Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Moll et al., 1992; Paris, 2012). We draw on this body of work to synthesize three themes for describing what teachers can notice and respond to towards promoting equity: drawing on students’ identities and cultures, nurturing relationships within the classroom community, and cultivating students’ critical and sociopolitical consciousness.

Data sources
Using vignettes of classroom interactions from a larger study, we imagined multiple ways a teacher might respond to students' contributions while considering their ideas, identity and culture, relationality, and sociopolitical underpinnings. Through these imaginings and drawing on the literature above, we developed the FIERST framework – Fostering Inquiry into Expansively-Responsive Science Teaching – as a tool for leveraging and responding to expanded resources that might create more equitable science learning spaces.

Results
Our FIERST framework made salient four overlapping considerations a teacher might attend to during their interactions with students: disciplinary (i.e., attention to scientific aspects of a students’ contributions); identity/cultural (i.e., promoting the wealth of experiences, knowledges, languages, and ways of being that students bring to the classroom); relational/interpersonal (i.e., attending to human relationships and interactions); and critical/sociopolitical (attending to, and making visible, larger societal systems). By foregrounding each consideration and potential responses, the FIERST framework provided us a tool for exploring potential tensions and synergies between the considerations in the moment-to-moment discretionary spaces of teacher responsiveness.

Significance
The FIERST framework makes these multiplicity of teacher considerations and decision-points visible and nameable. Thus, we see this framework as a tool for empowering teachers as they develop awareness of the possible affordances of their responses, and in turn, to influence their future interactions with students towards more expansive, equity-centered, responsive teaching.

Authors

• Allison Bradford, University of California - Berkeley

• Sara Dozier, California State University - Long Beach

• Emily Adah Miller, University of Georgia

• Jennifer Richards, Northwestern University

• Lama Ziad Jaber, Florida State University

• Leema G. Berland, University of Wisconsin - Madison