Redressing Harm: Relationalities in Preservice Secondary Teachers’ Science Preparation (Poster 3)

• In Event: Justice-Centered Pedagogy: Context-Specific Adjustments and Cross-Cutting Constants

Abstract

Objective
Preservice science teachers (PSTs)—particularly PSTs of color—often endure racialized, classed, and gendered harm in their scientific preparation (McGee, 2020). Therefore, we redesigned a content-focused science teacher education course for PSTs to experience more affirming forms of science. Within this course, we consider how PSTs grapple with relationalities in science to navigate and redress the harm they have experienced and to imagine more equitable futures for their students.
Theory
We foreground relationality to understand that who we are, what we do, and our rules for interacting with one another are not formed in isolation, but rather through our engagement with others. For instance, Anglo-European men did not pre-exist as scientists, but became scientists partly through their subjugation and elimination of pagan and Jewish women healers during the Roman Catholic Inquisition (Hoagland, 2007). These historical relationalities ripple through our current engagements in science, with ongoing interactions that situate science as the property of white scientists, typically male and middle or upper class (Mensah & Jackson, 2018). Dominant logics deny these relationalities; therefore, we are interested in how they surface in PSTs’ science reasoning and reflections.
Data sources
In the course, students engaged in extended investigations of phenomena, keeping an online science journal with their wonderings, observations, reflections, procedures, photographs, and personal notes. Inspired by Kimmerer’s (2013) reflection: “Isn't this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?” (p. 239), students are asked to create a final project that reflected their “gifts” in science, how these could be disruptive and do good in the world. We use a comparative case study approach (Vavrus & Bartlett, 2022), to examine how three students from different worlds grapple with relationalities in science.

Findings
We briefly summarize the three cases in Table 1 and expand on one case here.
Ally’s case grapples with the ways Japanese Americans have had to navigate serving as “model minorities,” particularly in STEM (Shah, 2017). Ally’s final project resisted these dominant logics. She connected her ease with materials in the course to her family’s crafting practices and acknowledged that crafts helped her ancestors cope with the emotions of enacting as “model” citizens. By incorporating and celebrating these cultural practices as part of her scientific work, Ally re-negotiated the relationalities of the model minority myth, positioning science as entangled with culture, politics, art, and emotion.
Significance
All three students experienced different forms of harm in their scientific preparation as teachers. Importantly, their stories do not end with harm, but with the reparative work they did to resist dominant logics and acknowledge the social, historical, and political relationalities of their experiences. As teacher educators conceptualize expansive and humanizing teacher education (Carter Andrews, et al., 2019), these cases shed light on the need to create opportunities for PSTs to grapple with relationalities as part of their becoming in science and as future educators.

Authors

• Jessica Watkins, Vanderbilt University

• Natalie A. De Lucca, Vanderbilt University