Professional Development in an Informal Science Institution: Translating Science Museum Experiences Into the Classroom

• In Event: 66.055 - Suspension Bridges: Cultural Historical Activity Theory as a Tool for Understanding Productive Tensions Across STEM Learning Communities

Abstract

Introduction
The Teacher Institute (TI) is a professional development program housed at the Exploratorium museum of art, science and human perception in San Francisco. TI has over 30 years experience of supporting Bay Area middle and high school science teachers to engage their students in hands-on inquiry based science activities. The core programming consists of a 3 week summer institute during which teachers learn science content and pedagogy through engagement with museum exhibits and low-cost, material rich versions of those exhibits that teachers learn to use in their classrooms. One core objective of this program is to support teachers in engaging their students in learning opportunities similar to what they might experience on the museum floor. This professional development activity system brings together two disparate activity systems with the common objective of student learning in science. In this paper, I identify how the professional development, as an activity system, supports teachers to translate the tools and resources, as well as the norms of practice at the Exploratorium into useable tools and resources for their science classrooms.

Theoretical Framework
Human activity is mediated by tools and resources that have a history of use (Cole, 1998). In this paper, I focus on the tools and resources of each activity system --- the professional development and the classroom --- to understand how tools are transformed into usable resources for teacher and student science learning. Often times, educators feel constrained in bringing open-ended inquiry activities similar to what a student can experience in the museum into their classroom for a variety of reasons. TI works to understand those constraints and tensions and create tools and resources that can support teachers in that work.

Methods and Data Analysis
In order to understand the process by which teachers translate their experiences on the museum floor into tools and resources they can bring into their science classrooms, I developed two case studies (Yin, 2003) of two teachers’ participation in the Summer Institute and their use of activities learned at the museum in their classroom following the institute. I analyzed interviews, video of teacher participation in the workshop, and field notes from teachers’ classrooms to follow the tools across the two activity systems. I created profiles of the activity in the professional development and in their classrooms to identify each of the critical components of the activity system: tools and resources, the norms of participation, the distribution of labor, and the objective of the activity. In comparing each of the teachers’ profiles in each activity system, I identified areas of translation where the teachers changed the activity from the professional development to his or her classroom.

Findings
In the final paper, I will present the two cases to show that the school context of norms of participation and distribution of labor in the classroom mattered in how the teachers organized their students’ participation in the activity translated from their experience at the museum. Ultimately, these differences in activity systems were consequential for the outcome of students’ activity.

Author

• Sara C. Heredia, University of North Carolina - Greensboro