Justice-Centered Ambitious Science Teaching and the Enactment of a Culture Setting Unit (Poster 1)

• In Event: Supporting Teacher Learning of Justice-Centered Ambitious Practice

Abstract

Recent events like the disproportionate effect of Covid-19 on racialized people in the US (Oppel, 2020), the killing of George Floyd (Dreyer et. al., 2020), and state-level enactments of anti-CRT laws (Schuessler, 2021), combined with the recognition that the enterprise of science has been built upon and equally implicated in systemic racism and injustice (Morrison et al., 2012) make apparent the need for Justice-Centered Ambitious Science Teaching (JuST). Here, we define JuST as science teaching that is grounded in critical consciousness, responsive to students' cultures and communities, dependent on teachers' interpretive power to recognize and build upon expansive forms of student meaning-making, and committed to naming and disrupting oppression and injustice in society (Luehmann, 2022; Thompson et al., 2021). Consequently, in this context, this research explored the experiences of a group of 13 predominately white mostly secondary science teachers as they collaborated in the first year of a larger project aimed at supporting JuST. As part of a multi-state collaborative, teachers engaged in PLCs to identify, develop, test, and refine JuST practices. One focus of the PLCs during the first year was the enactment of a JuST culture setting unit in school contexts. This research examined the ways in which the culture setting unit supported teachers' JuST professional identity development, with teacher professional identity development conceptualized in alignment with Luehmann (2008) "as being recognized by self or others as a certain kind of teacher" (p. 827). Data for this research included audio recordings of 21 PLC meetings and PLC work artifacts. Qualitative research methods were used in the development of a codebook (Campbell et al., 2013) before thematic analysis was completed (Braun and Clarke 2006) to capture the unit implementation. We identified how the anchoring unit about a politically charged topic (i.e., COVID19) that addressed racial injustice opened up space for conversations between teachers and school administration, while also supporting teachers' personal and professional reflection about their capacity to talk about race with students. Additionally, we found both (un)supportive administrators greatly influenced the extent to which the culture setting unit influenced teachers' JuST professional identity development. As examples, one teacher shared how, “I sent the whole unit to my admin and said, 'This is what I'm doing.' They were for it.” Conversely, another teacher shared how an administrator directed her stating, "’You need to shut this down, you cannot go forward with this.’ Those were her words . . . She wouldn't even like—and usually, she's pretty supportive of this, she's never done anything like this . . . I told her in a meeting, it was hard because she didn't even let us try to fix things or modify things to work . . ." Additional findings will be shared in the structured poster session so that more about the role of designs like a culture setting unit intended to support JuST professional identity is understood. This work responds to Philips and colleagues’ (2019) critique of the practice-based teacher education by prioritizing justice in the teacher-developed curricular materials.

Authors

• Todd Campbell, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Hannah Cooke, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author