Equity-Centered Approaches to Teacher Learning and Research in ISIs

• In Event: Informal Science Institutions and Equity: Taking This Moment to Act With Justice

Abstract

Objectives. The goal of this research was to understand the development of science teacher identities vis-à-vis their teacher learning experiences in ISIs. Through collaborative research and engagements both with the teacher participants and research team, what emerged from the data were theoretical approaches and frameworks that foregrounded the racialized, political and learner identities of the teachers vis-à-vis the social identities of their students and material and conceptual contexts for science teaching and learning.
Theoretical Framework. Racial storylines, as forwarded by Nasir et al., (2012) are pervasive narratives about race in societal discourses that gets enacted in schools and contexts of teaching and learning. These influence the identities and opportunities made available to stakeholders, for example Black teachers are subjected to the same prevailing deficit narratives as their Black students. Centring agency, teachers can create spaces where these storylines are resisted, creating new storylines, goals and expanded possibilities for identities. Teachers navigate these storylines and develop agency, the ability to access and appropriate resources at hand to meet goals, to resist and counter through the creative use of resources to design learning experiences that offer students new narratives around science.

Methods and Data Sources. Participants taught middle or high school science in a large, urban district and completed their professional training at a 4-year public, liberal arts college in courses that emphasized informal science learning approaches (i.e. learning in museums and place-based resources). The teachers and researcher met for over three years as a dialogic, collaborative group to cogenerate meanings and enactments of informal science teaching (Author, 2020). Data sources included recordings of the meetings and teacher-generated artifacts such as lesson plans, student work and digital communications. Analysis focused on a) what storylines emerged, b) how they viewed themselves vis-à-vis these storylines and c) they ways that these storylines influence their becomings/identities as teachers.
Results. Emerging from this data are two salient frameworks that describe how teachers accessed, adapted and transformed ISI resources and meanings towards equitable science teaching and learning and in responsive to their students’ racialized identities and positions. A) Critical Agentic Bricoleur—a fluid, adaptive teacher identity approach that is responsive to racial inequities and other social factors that present in the classroom while also centering teacher agency and creativity and B) Agency  UMC—a nonlinear process of bricolage where as teachers learn about and use of new-to-them resources (material and/or conceptual), they incorporate them into their existing “toolkit” through a computational thinking-like process of use, modification and creation.
Significance. To create equitable teacher learning in ISI that also contribute to equitable learning environments in the classroom, it is important that professional development move beyond the introduction of teachers to ISI resources and spaces. It is salient to offer teachers frameworks, examples and experiences that allow them to learn to modify ISI resources to meet the needs and identities of students with an eye towards expanded future imaginations expecially for racialized students.

Author

• Jennifer Dawn Adams, University of Calgary