Using Student-Generated Questions to Create a Culturally Responsive Science Classroom

• In Event: Teacher Research Into Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Science Teaching: Not Going Back to How Things Were Before

Abstract

My research exploring the use of student-generated questions to create a culturally responsive classroom was inspired by a definition of culturally responsive education as centered around the students' experiences (López, 2017). I examine the research question, How can we use student-developed questions to inform instruction? Inspired by professional development on using student questions to guide teaching, I developed a questioning method to gain an insight into students’ lived experiences. A major requirement for my method was that it had to align with the next upcoming unit I was expected to teach, weather and climate. At the start of the unit I divided students into groups of three or four to look over and discuss eight images that I chose, using on an interactive whiteboard (during remote teaching). Students were instructed to post any questions they had about these photos directly on top of the image.

While analyzing the questions students created I immediately found this useful as a pre-assessment method. By looking over the questions most of the insight I gained was the students’ background knowledge on this topic. This led me to change my instruction the following day. While my intention was to focus on what the students wanted to learn about, I immediately realized this was not fully possible, as I had to direct their questions towards weather and climate by purposely selecting the images for the whiteboard. One category I decided to organize the data by was questions I anticipated students asking, and questions I did not expect students to ask. This revealed that the majority of questions I anticipated students would ask, based on the image I chose, meant that I was not really gaining an insight into the students’ experience because of the curriculum restraints.

Similar obstacles have been discussed in conversations with coworkers and the professional learning group. This struggle has led me to examine systematic barriers to culturally responsive sustaining education (CRSE) that teachers will meet when trying to implement or extend CRSE practices. I divide these systematic barriers into two categories: social reproduction in the classroom (Collins, 2009; Macris, 2011) and education policy (Milner, 2012). We need to understand and discuss these barriers to fulfill the needs of our students. We must be advocates for fixing systematic barriers that prevent us from using CRSE methods in the classroom, calling upon the tenet to adopt a critical stance toward sociopolitical structures and processes and helping students to develop the same in our own practice. 

The Covid-19 pandemic gave an interesting insight into what teachers can do with their students when some of these barriers, such as state testing, are removed. More time and energy can be focused on student-centered education, social emotional learning, and building relationships with students. At this session, I will describe the strategy I used to gather student-generated questions, and use this as a way to discuss other successes and challenges in using CRSE, including the feedback from my students during this unique time. 

Authors

• Samantha Swift, American Museum of Natural History

• Elaine Howes, American Museum of Natural History