I'll show you how to survive.â Regardless of its form, it speaks to a perceived gap in theory and practice in our struggle to assist underrepresented students, and ...
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“How Can We Look Toward the Horizon, with Our Ears to the Ground?” Some challenges to conceptualize science teacher education from a culturally responsive perspective RANDY YERRICK AND Z AYN AB AL NAKEEB State University of New York–Buffalo
The gender and ethnicity gap in science achievement continues to plague our best hopes for science education reform and our science education discipline has tried to explain or justify this recurring trend since the Sputnik era. Explanations range from a disparaging cultural deficit interpretations to more progressive socioconstructivist models. The latter perspective explicates differences in science discourses as being so incommensurate with other home-based discourses that it’s a broad and specialized knowledge of science and culture to help underrepresented students achieve. Regardless of one’s perspective, there is irrefutable evidence that school science often acts as a stratifying tool to separate students (Anyon, 1997; Erickson, 1973; Oakes & Guiton, 1995). My colleague and I argue as advocates for underrepresented children in science but coming admittedly from the perspective of privileged backgrounds. Hence, we defer our right to speak on behalf of anyone but share our opinions that emerge from years of inserting ourselves as teacher/researchers in a variety of rural and urban contexts in Michigan, North Carolina, California, and New York schools. We have researched science classroom discourse and inserted ourselves into the lives of students who have been alienated by the school science experience and found that shifts in discourse are possible, albeit arduous. However, having taught children in a variety of contexts, we continue to see few advocates in the school context for helping underrepresented students with histories of failure learn and also appropriate science as a discourse. “Why,” we ask, “are there disproportionately small numbers of teachers advocating for the success of underrepresented students?” The problem may be that the task of teaching science has become so overwhelming often the best teachers want the students with greatest histories of success and the newest, less knowledgeable teachers are assigned groups of general science students with low expectations for their success. Another explanation deserved of study is attrition. Perhaps maintaining the fight
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against a traditional system drains the advocate of exactly what is required to continue, until finally see options outside the classroom as their better career choice. There may be plenty out there but schools beat them up until they exit. Perhaps it’s more innate. Troubling as this may seem, perhaps it’s because the nature of the people attracted to teaching science in the first place are so conservative that the teaching profession may never fully shed this problem. Regardless of the explanation, there are still too few advocates as we still face the problem of a gender and ethnicity gap in science achievement. So we see intervention studies as an important part of the solution where teachers, professors, and students work together to define issues and pose relevant solutions. But those of us who have worked in school contexts have all heard the push back. “That won’t work for my kids,” or “You just don’t understand, these students are so low.” Sometimes it comes in more subversive forms to our preservice teachers when we work with school colleagues who advise our new teachers, “Forget everything you learned at the university. I’ll show you how to survive.” Regardless of its form, it speaks to a perceived gap in theory and practice in our struggle to assist underrepresented students, and an obstacle of many school science interventions. This practice and theory gap cuts both ways. So far we have conceptualized the problem as one inherent to the school context but theorists have much to learn from practitioners as well. Perhaps the most poignant example I’ve seen was at a recent panel assembled to discuss academic versus public publishing and invariably, the rights of professed expertise. On this panel sat Ms. Molina, a young, aspiring Latina from one of the largest urban high schools in the country. In question was the integrity of her online publication of a minidocumentary, Sweatshops (2001), which had drawn tens of thousands of hits (Torres, 2000). The tension rose on the panel as an esteemed member of the academy from a local prestigious university challenged Ms. Molina’s credibility as a published author. After all, her work had not gone through any blind peer review and was not formally judged by a guild or group of “experts” for its publication value. Marco Torres jumped in on Ms. Molina’s behalf and offered, “I am glad you brought this issue up because in preparation for this talk this evening I anticipated such a division in our definitions of publications. So I went to the library and looked up your dissertation. Do you know how many people have checked out your dissertation—your finest work to date at that point of your career?” A hush dropped across the crowd, knowing that whatever number was produced would fall far shy of the literally hundreds of thousands of hits she had received worldwide for her pub-
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lished work. “Three times since it was published,” said Marco, “And twice by you!” A roar filled the auditorium as Marco had made his point that even the academy itself does not have a clear way of demonstrating value of a contributed piece.
Who Professes Expertise? This public verbal exchange highlights what happens when theory and practice are treated as separate domains. Our classrooms have changed significantly over the past few decades and by and large science teaching practices and the explicit curriculum for the most part has not (Aikenhead, 1996; McLaren, 1994). Further, as educators, we often work in areas where we are left to speak on behalf of students that are unlike ourselves (Giroux, 1996; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Solomon, 1992). The curriculum that we experienced in our educational past is the curriculum we expect all students from all backgrounds to identify with, because after all, if we were able to survive and succeed, then everyone should as well. So who shall speak for underrepresented children in science? There are few classroom advocates who empower student voices like Marco and the alternative interventions are inherently ideological. Whose framework shall we use? How do we know it is best for the children we serve? Must Gee’s definition of discourse, which describes that discourse communities are not only defined from within, but are often just as influenced by opposing discourses, lead to such a separation to prohibit a core framework from emerging? It takes both sides to figure out such questions and we still operate in a field where the gap between theory and practice poorly characterizes issues, much less resolves them.
What Framework is there to Bring these Worlds? While many theories can provide insights how students, teachers, and administrators think, learn, and feel about education, they do not often provide a practical guide for use in schools. If I am a White male I can use critical race theory (Ladson-Billings, 1999) to interpret my struggles to bridge the rift between students of diverse backgrounds and their White teachers, but there is too little guidance to fully reconceptualize the science discourse of the learning environment. I could use Aikenhead’s
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(1996) cultural border crossing to interpret students’ resistance of the acceptance of Western science when their world view is different, however, his work focused mainly on aboriginal students’ difficulties with Western views of science and it has not yet become clear how this view of the culture of science may ever become accepted as canonical or accepted. The National Science Teacher Association’s publications stress pedagogical approaches and standards-based curricular efforts but these documents have yet to demonstrate major inroads in reconceptualizing science teaching and learning to assist students of diverse backgrounds. Solutions are likely to emerge from more closely examining primary students’ discourse, students' participation roles in multiple settings, and proven ways norms get renegotiated in the class context. These are still undeveloped ideas that lie outside the norm or common language to understand teaching or learning of science but are sure to bare fruit in future studies. We must question absolutes in science education, we must provide specifics with our claims for advancing diversity (Hildebrand, 1998; Rodriguez, 1997), and we must co-exist within and without (both higher education faculty working in schools and school faculty learning in colleges of higher education). We also must press hard to find commonalities while rejecting pedantic, general, gloss-over approaches such as modeling, effective teaching strategies, multimodal teaching, homogeneous grouping, role model education, and purely economic or ethnic-light solutions. If you read the previous frameworks carefully they sometimes even border on the interpretation that majority teachers may never be able to learn how to teach effectively students who are unlike themselves. Yet, if in fact the popular learning theory precludes our expertise, we cannot sit and watch and not advocate for children we work with for we don’t believe we are necessarily bound to the dichotomous nature of discussing classrooms from the theory and practice paradigms—never to construct a cogent, functional interpretation for teaching and learning in economically and ethnically diverse contexts. Change must come from within as much as from outside. Those who know and are closest to these children must also have a broad enough perspective to advocate outside the classroom for resources, teacher knowledge, and reform.
References Aikenhead, G. (1996). Science education: Border crossings into the subculture of science. Studies in Science Education, 27, 1–52. Anyon, J. (1997). Ghetto schooling: A political economy of urban educational reform. New York: Teachers College Press.
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Erickson, F. (1973). Gatekeeping and the melting pot: Interaction in counselingencounters. Harvard Educational Review, 45, 44–70. Giroux, H. (1996). Living dangerously: Multiculturalism and the politics of difference. New York: Peter Lang Publishers. Hildebrand, G. M. (1998). Disrupting hegemonic writing practices in school science: Contesting the right way to write. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 35, 345–362. Ladson-Billings, G. (1999). Preparing teachers for diverse student populations: A critical race theory perspective. Review of Research in Education, 24, 211–248. McLaren, P. (1994). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education. White Plains, NY: Longman Publishing Group. Molina, C. (2001). Sweatshops. Retrieved February 16, 2007, from http:// sfett.com/home.php?id=iCan2. Oakes, J., & Guiton, G. (1995). Matchmaking: The dynamics of high school tracking decisions. American Educational Research Journal, 32, 3–33. Rodriguez, A. (1997). The dangerous discourse of invisibility: A critique of the National Research Council’s national science education standards. Journal of Research inScience Teaching, 34, 19–37. Solomon, P. R. (1992). Black resistance in high school: Forging a separatist culture. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Torres, M. (2000). San Fernando Educational Technology Team. Retrieved February 16, 2007 from http://sfett.com/
Dr. Randy Yerrick is a Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. As an advocate for underrepresented students of science he spends much of his time teaching in K–12 contexts and coordinates his university courses and school collaborations in order to engage preservice teachers, in-service professionals, and university researchers in the process of refining culturally responsive pedagogy and curriculum. Zaynab Alnakeeb is a doctoral student in Science Education at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The focus of her teaching and research is in understanding the cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic factors that contribute to the achievement gap in science education and advocating for minority student access to scientific literacy. She is employed by the SUNY Teacher Education Institute where she teaches and is involved in numerous projects.
