Each day this week I'll post about one of 7 intersecting #SciEd equity projects including thoughts, resources, examples & open issues to explore. I encourage you to add to the 🧵 #NGSSchat#NGSS
Given the complexity of inequity in social life, it is very productive to approach equity work from an INTERSECTIONAL PERSPECTIVE on individual identities & experiences as they relate to various systems of oppression.
⚖️ EQUITY PROJECT: CENTERING RACIAL JUSTICE ⚖️
By focusing on the brilliance of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Polynesian, Pacific Islander & other racialized groups and how science has and continues to produce racialized harms— in classrooms, communities, scientific fields…
…you can help disrupt anti-Indigeneity, antiblackness, and other forms of racism. Disrupt racist assumptions, practices, policies & systems that uphold whiteness.
EXPLORE: SCIENCE TEACHING & ANTI-RACISM edited by Dr. @LeenaBMc for @NSTA
ACTIONS
🌿Create a culture of discourse on social justice
🌿Cultivate learning experiences that embrace each of your students
🌿Dismantle structural & systemic inequities in #SciEd
To develop a broad, historical understanding of how racial equity & justice has been promoted through teaching & teacher education (including in #SciEd), read this new @Spencer_Fdn review by Dr. Niral Shah. He also highlights recommendations for the field. spencer.org/learning/racia…
Dr. Shah recommends teacher learning efforts:
⚡️Explicitly name & focus on race & specific types of racism⚡️
In addition to anti-Indigeneity & antiblackness (see above), my network has been attending to anti-Asian racism. #AAPIHeritageMonth
In a decade, I think we will have a robust infrastructure to promote racial justice in & through #SciEd (& beyond). Awareness has been growing around fabulous existing work, new resources are being developed & @NSF just launched a new R&D program to help… nsf.gov/funding/pgm_su…
In terms of new materials for centering racial justice, colleagues @SciEdHutch—led by Dr. @jchowning—have developed fabulous high school #SciEd#NGSS instructional materials on:
Engage students in making sense of a range of phenomena across the school year, including contemporary scientific, everyday, culturally meaningful, globally significant, and justice-centered phenomena.
Position students as developing experts learning to take meaningful action in their world now—not as individuals preparing for a distant future. A key equity practice is to focus current learning on understanding phenomena & taking informed action for desired, collective futures.
These "early" NGSS resources provide guidance for how to approach #SciEd through PHENOMENA-GUIDED INSTRUCTION.
One of the challenges with phenomena-based instruction involves resisting instructional uniformity that leads to engaging students in one kind of anchor phenomena. This narrowing influence might come from instructional models, curriculum developers, or implementation efforts.
In response to this concern, @SciEdHenry & I developed a framework for selecting different kinds of #NGSS phenomena…
⚡️ Anchor phenomena can also be selected to support social justice goals ⚡️
This issue of @NSTA Next Gen Navigator @educatordeb & I edited includes elementary, middle & high school examples of #SciEd justice-centered investigations (by the authors shown). nsta.org/blog/social-ju…
There's a growing focus on JUSTICE-CENTERED #SciEd PEDAGOGY that connects learning to broader struggles for social justice. Explore:
Powerful learning experiences typically bring multiple histories, life experiences & values into coordination. Multi-generational groupings are a key strategy to accomplish this. How do we do this in #SciEd?
How can we continue to work to transcend the age-segregated approach to schooling?
In #SciEd, I've seen powerful…
🌿cross-grade collaborative investigations
🌿community science efforts
🌿experts visiting classrooms
🌿class fieldtrips
🌿family science learning
Other examples??
Our colleagues from the Family Learning Design Collaborative—@prof_ishimaru@meganbang3 & the FLDC network—have troubled our understanding of traditional ways in which people working in schools have engaged families & communities. familydesigncollab.org
The @LearnInPlaces project is a stelar example of family-centered #SciEd engagement & instruction. Definitely explore their Family & Community Engagement Framework, other frameworks & lessons engaging families & classes in learning. learninginplaces.org
⚡️ Individuals only ever develop scientific literacy as they participate in learning across a broad variety of contexts. ⚡️
Various models of COMMUNITY & CITIZEN SCIENCE engage multiple generations in shared, authentic inquiry across different settings. nap.edu/read/25183/cha…
Here's a fabulous INTERGENERATIONAL PARTNERSHIP approach in #SciEd. This state-level effort forms and supports collaborative teams as they work on place-based conservation science projects. It is a powerful way for youth to develop a science identity!
REFLECTION: Based on our surveys of ed leaders, the MULTI-GENERATIONAL EQUITY PROJECT is the LEAST likely to be taken up by formal education. Likely, this is because the colonial, age-segregated model is just so deeply entrenched structurally & systemically. It is unquestionable.
This has me profoundly worried because we must mobilize to decarbonize & transform human-nature relations at a societal level. We need to be educating across generations—centered in historicity & toward just futures—such that necessary actions are politically & locally possible.
I just presented on the 7 #SciEd equity projects at the @NSTA Engage Conference. Here are my slides. The PowerPoint has slides to open up 5 of the 7 projects & a smaller PDF version has a subset. tinyurl.com/Bell-NSTA-21
⚖️ EQUITY PROJECT: CULTURAL PEDAGOGIES ⚖️
All deep learning happens in ways that are culturally significant to learners and their communities. Diversify learning by rooting instruction in the cultural knowledge, worldviews, and ways of knowing of students’ communities.
⚡️ All Science Learning is Cultural ⚡️
The cultural diversities connected to your classroom learning community are key assets for focusing instruction and learning goals. Form partnerships with community to revitalize and sustain their cultural practices and assets.
One instructional practice that powerfully supports cultural pedagogy in #SciEd is called SELF-DOCUMENTATION. It allows students to capture local, dynamic dimensions of lived cultural practice, knowledge & values that are then related to instruction. stemteachingtools.org/pd/sessionc
⚡️ Multiple forms of CULTURAL PEDAGOGY have been developed—& continue to be created. ⚡️
Research on cultural dimensions of learning has expanded greatly over the past 20 years. This @theNASEM report section highlights some of the key work and variations. nap.edu/read/25603/cha…
⚡️ CULTURAL PEDAGOGY is multifaceted ⚡️
In our cultural pedagogies workshops, we engage groups with this @STEMTeachTools after we've made our way in. It tends to open up powerful reflections on practice—even with teachers years into cultural teaching. stemteachingtools.org/brief/53
⚖️ EQUITY PROJECT: SUPPORTING DIVERSE SENSE-MAKING ⚖️
Elicit and leverage multiple ways students make sense of science phenomena (e.g., multiple languages, everyday talk, perspective-taking, gesture, ethical reasoning, drawing, poetry). #MultiModalForTheWin
How do you support cultures of diverse sense-making of #SciEd phenomena?
These equity principles continue to guide our work promoting DIVERSE SENSE-MAKING. It is fabulous that @NSTA has made the chapter that describes & opens them up a free download!
The teacher expertise beneath those 3 equity principles has been theorized as INTERPRETIVE POWER.
Our @AcesseProject PD Resource G opens up a multi-faceted learning experience to help teachers learn to see diversities of students' INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES. stemteachingtools.org/pd/sessiong
In the new @NSF program on Racial Justice in STEM Ed, check out this purpose…
🔥proposals funded by this Program Description will…expand the array of epistemologies, perspectives & experiences in STEM🔥
The concept of RIGHTFUL PRESENCE from @CalabreseBarton & Edna Tan moves us beyond access & inclusion approaches to equitable instruction that fail to frame needed actions as tied to disrupting dominant power structures & connecting to political movements. invincibility.us/wp-content/upl…
⚡️To support DIVERSE SENSE-MAKING & all equity projects, it is key to create IDENTITY SAFE & AFFIRMING #SciEd learning communities through the work of rightful presence.⚡️
Leverage students’ intellectual strengths & contributions regardless of their school-recognized disability status. Work towards ability justice by disrupting narrow views of ability & prejudices against those perceived to have disabilities.
Intentionally use strategies to meaningfully include students receiving disability services.
As with all of our @STEMTeachTools practice briefs, you can get to the more polished PDF formatted version from the landing page of the resource. #NGSSchat#NGSS#SciEd
Excited to share the web site for the CLIMATE & ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE IN EDUCATION grad seminar I'm teaching with @jnprezzo this term. We'll share readings, resources & ideas based on our inquiry. #UWClimateEd sites.google.com/uw.edu/climate…
The approach we are taking with the course is that of an interdisciplinary research group focused on education. We will collectively inquire, learn, imagine, design & share our thinking over the course of the term.
We invite you to follow along & join in through #UWClimateEd
The driving question of our shared inquiry will be:
How can we promote learning in order to create more just, thriving, and regenerative conditions for all Earthly beings, human and otherwise?
Together we will think across timescales, contexts for learning, and worldviews.
@drloriandersen Great wonderings! My take: (1) Given a PRACTICE TURN perspective on 3D learning, multiple ways of knowing directly relate to culturally diverse forms of SEPs in ways that overlap & extend beyond those of the Euro-Western sciences.
@drloriandersen (1 cont) But cultural perspectives go beyond epistemic practices—and open up into worldviews involving knowledge (concepts, models, etc), ethics, morals & values. Ontologies & axiologies all get enacted in activity—since there is only praxis as a result of the Practice Turn.
@drloriandersen (2) I think AAAS did us a great service by historically putting the so-framed natural & social sciences inside the frame of science. It helps disrupt the colonial separation between people and nature & opens up space to consider intersections, relationality & entanglement.
If we played the (somewhat serious) game of nominating important science & engineering practices missing from the carefully chosen 8 in #NGSS / Framework, one I would quickly nominate is NOTICING.
NOTICING is an embodied & multi-sensorial practice. It is foundational to making sense of & shaping the natural-cultural world.
It supports wondering, pattern-seeking, systems theorizing, seeking relevancies, tending to relations, identifying political connections & the 8 SEPs.
NOTICING involves careful & often collaborative sensing in context — through looking, smelling, feeling, hearing & tasting. It is learned in embodied ways.
NOTICING feeds directly into the other science & engineering practices.