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Preservice elementary science teachers’ beliefs and practices influence the kinds of adaptations they make to curricula and the extent to which they are able to enact science lessons in justice-oriented ways. Through this qualitative study, we explored the beliefs and practices of five focal preservice teachers through an analysis of their lesson plans, recorded enactments, and interviews about their science teaching throughout their student teaching experience. We also introduce a framework for expansive sensemaking that integrates beliefs and practices related to four key themes: (1) believing in children’s brilliance, (2) building a collaborative classroom culture, (3) expanding what counts as science, and (4) positioning children as epistemic agents. While teachers varied in their beliefs about and approaches to each of these themes, they demonstrated strengths that illustrate what may be possible for early career teachers, like working to integrate many ways of knowing and being into science lessons, connecting to embodied knowledge, or supporting children to be scientific decision-makers. We discuss implications for teacher preparation programs and for theory development related to justice-oriented teaching in general and expansive sensemaking in particular.
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Fostering expansive and connective sensemaking with preservice secondary science teachers
Abstract Preservice secondary science teachers often experience science learning in narrow and marginalizing ways in their science preparation. These experiences cause harm, particularly for preservice teachers of color. They also limit the disciplinary resources they can develop for later teaching science in ways that value and sustain their students' ways of knowing and being in the world. Our research explores possibilities for cultivating new spaces for preservice secondary science teachers to engage in science. In a content‐focused education course, we designed for and studied preservice teachers' engagement in expansive and connective sensemaking, incorporating heterogeneity, power, and historicity in pursuits of explanatory accounts of the natural world. In this article, we examined how this course design can support preservice teachers to attune to heterogeneity in ways of knowing in science and to connect to identity and historicity in scientific sensemaking. Our analysis suggests that students' final projects reflected attunements to diverse knowing, communicating, and relating in science and deep connections with their identities and future‐making, yet had fewer connections to sociohistorical narratives and structures. We developed illustrative case studies of four student projects, highlighting the personal, social, and political possibilities of creating space for future educators to imagine more expansive and connective forms of science. This study contributes a novel model for preservice science teacher education to support teacher learning to value and sustain their students' ways of knowing and being in the world.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2145260
- PAR ID:
- 10480478
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Research in Science Teaching
- Volume:
- 61
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0022-4308
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1093-1133
- Size(s):
- p. 1093-1133
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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