Utilizing Complex Theories to Expand Conceptions of Effective Science Teacher Education

• In Event: Beyond the Modern: The Ethical Need to Make Matter Matter for Truth in Science Education

Abstract

Efforts to improve science teacher practice have taken on a wide array of images and visions. Much of past research works under the assumption that teachers (and even researchers) can ‘control’ the types of teachers they become. While this view of agency is true within a humanist ontological paradigm, there remain many facets of teacher experience that have become taken-for-granted as brute matter (e.g., curricula, desks, leaves, jackets, copy machines, etc) without serious consideration of the implications to teachers’ bodies of work (Author, 2021). Prevailing assumptions that assume ‘controlling teacher development and their practices’ to increase teacher effectiveness warrants ethicopolitical hesitation due to its enduring biopolitical implications (Author, 2018). If science teacher education continues to privilege one humanist ontology within a socipolitical context where racism and other forms of oppression exists “as a protean ontological phenomenon with an agency of its own” (Rosiek, 2018, p. 2), then there is a pressing urgency to engage in ontologically-responsive research and teaching in science teacher education. Simply put, if meanings and materializations of oppression are always-already on-the-move (thus also meanings of ‘equity’ and justice), teacher education must prepare teachers to work within a dynamic discourse of becoming-effective. Effective for whom? Effective for what purpose? Effective at what costs? Effective for whose benefits? Effective under what conditions? Effective according to what onto-epistemological assumptions?
In addition to sharing additional examples of related prior research that confront the aforementioned challenges of science teacher education, this presentation will also include specific information about two new studies situated within informal science institutions (ISIs). ISIs afford unique experiences that are not possible in school settings—they are places of wonder, curiosity, and learning where public engagement with science is rendered visible (McCallie et al., 2009), palpable, and/or imaginable for expanding one’s “Conocimiento (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2002, as cited in Guiterrez, 2013), knowledge that is both objective and subjective,” of the world around them with implications for developing equitable teacher identities (Adams, 2020; Adams & Gupta, 2015; Katz et al, 2013). The study described below extends Avraamidou (2014 & 2015)’s call to explore ways science teacher preparation might leverage ISIs as sites of complex possibility.
Findings from a unique paid internship program at a local ISI for pre-service teachers will explore ways in which community partnerships might illuminate the diverse ways in which decolonizing work can materialize: (a) soft-reform space; (b) radical reform space; and (c) beyond reform space. Within each of these domains, complex meanings of decolonizing range from “everything is awesome” mentality to “the modern system itself is perceived as inherently violent, exploitative and unsustainable” (de Oliveria Andreotti et al., 2015).
This project illuminates how science teacher preparation within ISIs might affordance opportunities for pre-service science teachers to embody multiple onto-epistemological attunements and “find ingenuity in everyday practices” (Gutierrez et al., 2017). Leveraging a theoretical assemblage (e.g., critical theories, phematerialists theories, posthumanist theories, and sociocultural theories), more complex images of ‘becoming effective’ within emergent relationships with science (“science synapses”) and diverse traditions of inquiry (“disciplinary dogma”) become thinkable.

Author

• Maria Ferris Greene Wallace, University of Southern Mississippi
  Presenting Author