Effective teaching in rural schools: examining local knowledge, sustainable development, and scientific agency within a multi-national curricular program

Group Submission Type: Paper Session

Proposal

In rural areas of Central America, youth rarely have the opportunity to pursue secondary education, with proximity to schools just one of the barriers that limits their enrollment (Urquiola & Calderón, 2004). Particularly, Honduras has incredibly low secondary enrollment rates for rural areas, and is stricken by high rates of child labor and extreme poverty (Pine, 2009; World Bank, 2006). When rural students are able to attend school, they are often met with a curriculum that is not suited to their lifestyle; the approach to content is theoretical and academic, separating topics like biology, mathematics, and social studies, with few references to rural vocational skills (One Country, 1996). In this way, rural students are further marginalized from achieving a successful academic education and career in their home communities. While the Honduran government has tried to expand middle schools into rural villages, the standard secondary education program uses a curriculum that is not at all applicable to their rural context (Murphy-Graham, 2012).
The Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial program (Tutorial Learning System or SAT) is an innovative educational program throughout Latin America created to develop rural communities in a holistic way. This approach on enhancing students’ capabilities integrates curricular domains into a series of workbooks with emphases on community service, ecology, and basic moral values, applied to local projects rooted in agriculture (Arbab, Correa, & de Valcarcel, 1988). With recruitment of tutors from local communities, whose backgrounds and cultural knowledge complement the assignments, the SAT program has been successfully implemented in several countries in Latin America. Additionally, other educational organizations have adapted the curriculum for implementation in rural regions in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific as well (Kwauk & Perlman Robinson, 2016).
The units in SAT have a specific design to focus on service to the community at the heart of all lessons. This is multi-faceted; one component of service is developed through moral and spiritual reflections, connection to living things, and perspective-taking (Kwauk & Perlman Robinson, 2016). Another realm of service to the community is by building collective capacity at the social, environmental, and economic levels. This is accomplished through sharing knowledge, conserving natural resources, and improving economic opportunities. By structuring these activities into the curriculum, the SAT program seeks for its graduates to develop the skills to become agents of change in their communities. This model mirrors the concept of ‘critical consciousness’ Freire describes in emancipatory education systems for students in other Latin American communities: students serve their environments by generating meaningful discussion on local issues and innovating on existing practices to promote a new reality (Freire, 2000). This critical practice, the meaningful application of local knowledge to innovate students’ communities, is the strand of development that this series of papers will examine in the SAT curriculum in Honduras, and in one adaptation of the curriculum in Zambia.
Our analyses of a systematized curricular program with a focus on local knowledge addresses several current issues in the field of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), in alignment with the CIES conference theme; (1) a dearth of research from Central and South America; (2) the colonialization of curriculum that silences traditional ways of knowing and cultural contributions to science; and (3) limited opportunities for self-determination and community autonomy (Aikens at al., 2016). Scholars have proposed alternative research approaches that support diverse cultural inclusion and broader participation in ESD, such as addressing complex human-environmental interactions, culture, and history (Dockry et al., 2015), and supporting a shift towards transformative and participatory educational experiences (as opposed to transmissive and authoritative; Jickling & Wals, 2008).
We use these structures, along with theories for participatory learning from critical education scholars, to analyze the relationship between science learning in SAT (and its affiliate curricular programs), and the development of sustainable practices in the communities where it is taught. In particular, we utilize the inclusive epistemological theories of Bang & Medin (2010) and cultural learning pathways (Bell et al., 2013) to analyze how, when, and with what groups of people the participants in SAT learn and participate in science practices. This places our analytical lens on the incorporation of social and historical contexts and ways of knowing into the teaching process, as well as the involvement of parents and community members in the design and implementation of learning environments.
This panel offers three intersecting contributions of how the SAT program in Honduras, and its local affiliate in Zambia, model participatory, effective science teaching in rural environments. Years of observations, interviews, and survey data, along with text analyses, contribute to our own emerging framework of the organizational and theoretical contributions the SAT programs. In the first paper (Shareff & Durán–López), one key piece of the framework, teacher professional development, is examined in detail with respect to building teachers’ capacity for incorporating and meaningfully engaging with local scientific knowledge. The second paper (Shareff) investigates the interaction between local knowledge and natural resources through two curricular projects in SAT, using an analytical emphasis on the activity structure of the projects to provide a dynamic comparison of the knowledge and sustainable environmental practices cultivated in each. The third paper (Lample) considers the intersection of science education and sustainable development through an exploration of the sorts of science agency fostered by the program in Zambia and the conceptions of knowledge that underlie activity within and outside of the classroom.
Overall the studies paint a rich picture of the processes of learning involved in SAT, and the contributions by students, teachers, and community members to a collective development of knowledge and practice. With a framing on sustainable development that promotes local knowledge, cultural history, and community self-determination, the principles of SAT, both structural and pedagogical, are valuable models for other rural educational systems and the wider international education research community. This panel takes these motives from the field of ESD and positions them alongside the critical cultural pedagogical framings of Freire and his contemporaries to analyze an educational model and lessons learned for contributions in both curricular design and theories of learning and organizational structure.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Environmental and Sustainability Education

Chair

• Erin Murphy-Graham, University of California, Berkeley

Individual Presentations

• Training and teaching for inclusive development: Combining community knowledge and science content in rural Honduras - Elena Durán-López, UC Berkeley; Rebecca Shareff, UC Berkeley

• A network of development: A comparative study of agro-science units in a rural Honduran secondary curriculum - Rebecca Shareff, UC Berkeley

• A look at science education for sustainable development: Enhancing capacity to participate in knowledge processes in Zambia’s PSA program - Emily Lample, Vanderbilt University

Discussant

• Paulo Blikstein, Columbia University