Embracing the Ideological Dilemmas: An Exploration of Preservice Science Teachers' Expansive Science Learning

• In Event: Interaction as a Site for Ideological Negotiation and Transformation in Science Teachers' Learning

Abstract

Objective.
Cultivating opportunities for expansive science learning involves more than weaving together heterogeneous ways of knowing into explanatory harmonies. Nurturing these spaces requires disrupting dominant norms in school science classrooms that diminish every day or experiential forms of knowing, even when these can advance understandings of phenomena. For instance, there is often an emphasis on techno-rationales, a descriptive norm that overrepresents technological functions as applicable models for all of existence. Historically, techno-rationales are accepted as infallible truth, as technology is viewed as separate from human fallibility (Benjamin, 2019). Over-emphasis on techno-rationales and other dominant norms can limit opportunities for heterogeneous science learning (Discussant, 2020).
Recognizing the need to disrupt the dominance of norms that exclude other ways of knowing reveals the ideological dimensions of STEM learning—the socially organized ways of reasoning that legitimize particular ways of thinking over others (Hall, 1996; Philip, 2011). It highlights how teachers and students need to navigate the inevitable ideological contradictions of expansive science learning. The goal of this project is to explore these dilemmas as critical locations for realizing educational equity.

Theoretical Framework.
Contact between different knowledge systems inevitably generates tensions and contradictions (Engeström, 1987; Gutiérrez, 2008; Miettinen, 2009). Engeström (2008) highlights how historicizing and making visible these contradictions within hegemonic systems (here, dominant science norms) reveals opportunities leverageable towards radical transformation. In particular, this analysis historicizes contradictions surrounding notions of human experience and techno-rationales arising in pre-service teachers' (PST) collaborative scientific sensemaking. We ask, how are contradictions between dominant and non-dominant ways of scientific thinking produced, maintained, and resolved?

Methods and Data.
This project takes place within a 14-week Science Modeling Course for secondary science PSTs, where students were supported to draw from non-dominant resources for scientific sensemaking. Conducted synchronously online over the Zoom Video Conferencing Platform, video data of whole-class and breakout-room discussions were collected along with course artifacts. This analysis draws from breakout-room small group discussions, where groups explored student-generated questions regarding the nature of light and color.
We use interaction analysis methods (Jordan and Henderson, 1995) to understand the mechanisms that facilitated ideological tensions and contradictions. Specifically, we focus on ideological dilemmas--topical cycles where interactional dynamics co-constructed legitimacy or illegitimacy (drawing from Philip et al.'s [2018] stances of alignment and disalignment, respectively) around contradictions centering techno-rationales-- to understand how tensions were produced, maintained, and resolved.

Results and Significance.
In our focal case, a group of PSTs co-constructed ideological dilemmas positioning human experience alongside technological outputs as legitimate resources for explaining light and color phenomena. Using mechanisms such as validation and contestation, PSTs resisted converging towards techno-rationales as the single legitimate resource, maintaining space for other ways of knowing to be constructed as legitimate. These mechanisms enabled students to achieve heterogeneity by disrupting dominant norms that privilege techno-rationales. We argue that the co-construction of these dilemmas signal more expansive science learning. The nuances of these cases can offer science teacher educators touchstones in ways to anticipate and navigate tensions with dominant norms in science towards actualizing expansive science learning.

Authors

• Natalie Annabelle De Lucca, Vanderbilt University

• Jessica Watkins, Vanderbilt University

• Serena Pao, Vanderbilt University