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Title: Transforming Science Teaching for Equity and Justice by Teachers and Researchers Working Together
With the urgent call for supporting science teachers to promote equity and justice through their daily work of teaching, there is a growing need for better understanding how science teachers come to engage in transformative teaching and learning that is equitably consequential. In this participatory design research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), we created a professional learning context in which high school chemistry teachers engaged in a pedagogical imagining (Gutiérrez & Calabese Barton, 2015) by leveraging their teaching experiences, knowledge about students and communities, values, and concerns to create powerful learning contexts for Latinx and multilingual students from immigrant, low-income families. Drawing upon the perspective of learning as making and sharing of the world interwoven with making and sharing of selves (Warren et al, 2020), we analyzed teachers’ participations and discourses to examine teachers’ making and sharing that were equitably consequential. The findings illustrated three critical moments of teachers’ making and sharing where: (a) the teachers collectively developed shared pedagogical goals toward transformative learning while formulating agency, (b) the teachers and the researchers came to design a creative stoichiometry unit where students use chemistry to make their community better, and (c) the teachers came to be committed to being ‘intentional’ in their relational work to create a welcoming and safe learning environment using concrete pedagogical strategies. The analyses point out three design features of the professional learning context that were associated with the teachers’ consequential makings: (a) the use of a conceptual tool (i.e., ‘design principles’), (b) the power of “what if” discourses, and (c) creating a space for collective learning. Recommendations for designing professional learning context toward transformative teaching and learning are discussed.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1846227
PAR ID:
10287048
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2021 AERA conference
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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