The Impact of a Methods Course on PreService STEM Teachers’ Integration of Social Justice (Poster 1)

• In Event: Building STEM Teachers’ Social Justice Teaching Capacities: Future Directions for Teacher Education

Abstract

Objectives
How do preservice STEM teachers (PST) learn to center local social justice issues in their teaching? How do teacher education course activities impact their progress?

Theoretical Framework
We combine Morales-Doyle's (2017) justice-centered science pedagogy (JCSP) and Linn & Eylon’s (2011) knowledge integration pedagogy to design course activities and analyze their impact.

Centering social justice in STEM teaching enables K12 students to learn about values underpinning STEM instruction, deepen knowledge of STEM topics, and distinguish between the benefits and harms of STEM in society (Bradford et al., 2024; Gutierrez, 2018; Morales-Doyle et al., 2017). We introduce a new pedagogical orientation and practice to help PSTs leverage STEM disciplinary ideas to illustrate disparate impacts aligned with race, age, or gender and identify how communities can foster well-being. We used tested professional development activities in a course to support STEM PSTs to design a multi-day lesson sequence centering social justice (Gerard et al., 2022).

Methods
Seven secondary STEM PSTs refined a 2 to 5-day lesson sequence centering social justice in STEM by exploring social justice STEM issues and model curriculum in the course, positioning themselves and their students on the social justice issue during teaching rehearsals, and reflecting on their teaching through analysis of student work and video.

We used Morales-Doyle's (2017) JCSP dimensions, plus a new dimension, designing teaching practices to foster equitable participation, to show how each PST incorporated JCSP. Researchers and four Mentor Teachers experienced in teaching social justice in STEM jointly analyzed two PSTs lesson sequences and articulated emergent criteria for evaluation. We aligned these criteria with the JCSP dimensions to create the final rubric (Table 1).

Results
This summary includes an analysis of three of the seven lesson sequences the poster will include. We found that PSTs progressed in centering social justice across timepoints by (a) identifying a social justice STEM issue that fit within their curricular sequence and “could not be understood or addressed without understanding structures of oppression” (Morales-Doyle, 2017, p.1036); (b) connecting the issue to local sociopolitical factors and their students’ concerns; and (c) designing activities so students could share their ideas and teachers could limit unintentionally hurtful comments.

We found that PSTs needed more course guidance to link the STEM disciplinary ideas underlying the issue and community-based solutions. PSTs’ reflections on teaching indicated a need for more support to link the issues and their students’ racial and place-based identities, and to align the disciplinary instruction with their students’ initial ideas. Two of the three PSTs reported that they reverted to lectures to respond to the unexpectedly vague ideas expressed by students. They wanted further course support to anticipate their students’ disciplinary and justice-related ideas to address this issue.

Scholarly Significance
The study identifies methods course activities that guide beginning teachers to center social justice in STEM instruction. It reveals that teaching rehearsals and reflections using student work and video evidence advance PSTs’ justice-centered pedagogy. It identifies criteria teacher educators can use to guide the design and assessment of social justice-centered instruction.

Authors

• Libby F. Gerard, University of California - Berkeley

• Allison Bradford, University of California - Berkeley

• Kyle Beckham, University of California - Berkeley

• Marcia Linn, University of California - Berkeley