Teacher Customization Trajectories When Teaching Justice-Centered Science Units (Poster 3)

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

Abstract

Purpose
We identify teachers’ progress in customizing social justice science units over two years. Their unit customizations motivate students to distinguish historical policy factors that link to scientific mechanisms (Bradford et al., 2023). We discuss how teachers leverage their awareness of systemic inequities and integrate localized social justice content with NGSS-aligned science content (Morales-Doyle, 2017; Valdez & Bianchini, 2023). We show how teachers exploit their personal experiences and backgrounds to customize social justice-oriented STEM units.

Theoretical Framework
We introduced Knowledge Integration (Linn & Eylon, 2011) and Justice Centered Science Pedagogy (Morales-Doyle, 2017) during co-design workshops. We synthesized the pedagogies into design principles (Table 2) to inform the design of social-justice science units. Each principle takes a step of the KI cycle and integrates social justice science issues and justice-centered STEM teaching. We use the principles to clarify the analysis of teachers’ customizations.

Methods
Three in-service teachers (one 8th and two 9th) used a justice-centered science unit that connects genetics content to the story of Henrietta Lacks and issues of medical racism. We collected field notes from classroom observations, analytic memos from design meetings, and customization artifacts and resources. We used the design principles to create a codebook (Table 3) to code the data and create trajectories of teachers’ customizations over two years. We compared trajectories to identify themes across the three cases.

Results
We identified two themes. First, teachers progressed in their ability to create customizations that supported students in distinguishing the role of historical and current policies (Principle 3) in Henrietta’s story and in connecting those ideas to explain current inequities in medicine and other justice issues today. For example, in year 1, one teacher created a five-minute lecture that contrasted consent practices in Henrietta’s Lacks story to practices familiar to students today but did not discuss how larger systems of oppression contributed to how Henrietta was treated. In year 2, she asked students to write answers to several questions centered on the role of segregation in research practices and patient care, then had a classroom discussion about the impact of segregation in medicine over time. The full poster will detail findings from the two other teachers.

Second, teachers identified relevant resources to refine their customizations and used them in ways that targeted different design principles. One elicited ideas using questions from book club sites for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Skloot, 2010) (Principle 1). Another teacher with a public health background identified examples from public health publications to distinguish historical and contemporary medical racism (Principle 2). A third incorporated new technology he previously leveraged during distance learning, utilizing Padlet to facilitate connecting peers' ideas about justice issues (principle 4).

Significance
We provide examples of how teachers create scaffolds to support students in integrating ideas about systems of oppression to explain social justice science phenomena. Teachers leaned on a variety of available resources to support their work. Bridging and facilitating the sharing of resources and customization ideas can support future teacher learning and implementation of justice-centered science teaching.

Author

• Kelly R. Billings, University of California - Berkeley