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Abstract Disruptions to education systems (e.g., the COVID‐19 pandemic) evoke a range of responses from teachers. Teachers are required to learn new skills, attend to students' social emotional needs, modify their instructional approaches, and discover innovative ways to engage their students in science, technology, and engineering courses, all while managing their own professional and personal needs. Although teachers of all disciplines adjust their instructional and curricular approaches in response to disruptions, the impetus for this study was to explore the unique challenges of science teachers during the COVID‐19 pandemic that affected their sense of agency (sense of control). To understand how science teachers acquired, used, and invested in capital (i.e., available resources with the potential to meet identified challenges) to achieve professional agency, we studied 113 science teachers in 2020−2021 when they experienced disruptions associated with the pandemic. An analysis of open‐ended responses from 60 teachers indicates that teachers who achieved agency shared four attributes. They (i) demonstrated an awareness of needed capital, (ii) acquired capital, (iii) used capital, and (iv) dedicated effort toward capital‐building for future use. Our findings inform science teacher educators and schools that are committed to mitigating science teacher attrition by understanding how teachers respond to personal and professional stresses.
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Teachers as Transformative Actors to Create Meaningful Learning: Agency in Practice
This international collection of papers examines the many ways teachers exercise agency in light of the challenging realities they and their students face to create caring, engaging and transformative learning environments. The teachers in these studies exercise agency in various ways — as individuals, collectives, and fluid inter-professional and personal collaborations — to construct their professional identities and contribute to social change in their schools and society. Across these papers, we also find empirical evidence about the reflexive relationship between individual agency and social structures in shaping each other.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2100784
- PAR ID:
- 10512568
- Publisher / Repository:
- ISLS Annual Meeting 2023
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1603 to 1612
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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This study explores the experiences of two teachers participating in professional development workshops focused on supporting implementation of SocioScientific Issues (SSI) and aspects of social justice into STEM classrooms. SSI are ill-defined problems, with a basis in science, but necessarily include moral and ethical decisions that cannot be resolved through science alone. These debatable issues can enhance learning of STEM by engaging students in real-world and authentic problems. The USTRIVE project was developed to foster STEM learning through integrated professional development workshops and the development of professional learning communities to support teachers in the use of SSI and incorporation of aspects of social justice in their STEM classrooms. Two research questions were investigated: (a) To what extent did teachers implement SSI into their lesson planning during the project and (b) In what ways did teachers’ designed lessons change from the beginning of the workshop?more » « less
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The manuscript shares findings from a study engaging secondary mathematics preservice teachers using Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots to design mathematics lesson plans. Phenomenology was employed to investigate how six secondary preservice teachers used AI chatbots and navigated this new resource compared to their knowledge and experience in developing culturally responsive mathematics lesson plans that included mathematics and social justice goals. Our data analysis revealed that PSTs’ confidence in their Mathematical Content Knowledge and Pedagogical Content Knowledge allowed them to be critical of using AI-generated lesson plans. This finding contrasted with previous research on elementary education preservice teachers who gave away their decision-making agency to AI chatbots, especially about mathematics. The data suggests that the secondary PSTs had confidence in their Mathematical and Pedagogical Content Knowledge, making them more critical of the AI-generated lesson plans. The findings also indicate that AI tools can help teachers learn about Technological Pedagogical Knowledge (TPK). Overall, the data stressed the need to support PSTs in using AI chatbots critically. The implications of this study provide possible ways to help PSTs overcome their overconfidence in AI chatbots and imply that more professional development tools and programs must be constructed to help inservice teachers use AI tools.more » « less
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Motivation. Teachers can play a role in disrupting social inequities that are reflected in education, such as racial disparities in who succeeds in CS. Professional learning addressing inequities causes teachers to confront difficult topics, including how their own identities impact these problems. Understanding the differing ways teachers’ identities surface can provide insights into designing better supports for their professional learning. Objectives. The goal of this paper is to examine the teaching and racial identities of two secondary CS teachers who participated in professional learning focused on combining CS content and equity pedagogy. The second goal of this paper is to demonstrate how discourse analytic methods can be used to examine interviews and other interactional data. Method. Teachers were interviewed individually about their teaching identity, racial identity, and professional learning. Drawing on Bucholtz and Hall’s identity and interaction framework, interviews were examined for linguistic and discursive features reflecting positionality (i.e., how identity surfaces through the way individuals present themselves to and are perceived by others) and indexicality (i.e., various ways of referring to an identity). Results. Participants used personal deictics, quotative markers, code choice, and affective and epistemic stances when discussing and negotiating their identities with the interviewer. The data reflected ways teachers problematized questions about teaching identity, negotiated tensions in their disciplinary identities, found the topic of race difficult to address, and highlighted other aspects of their identities relevant to understanding and discussing race. Discussion. The study provides a demonstration of how discourse analytic methods can reveal nuances of teacher identity that may be overlooked with other qualitative approaches. Findings also revealed how teachers’ ethnic identities might be used as a lever in helping teachers discuss the difficult topic of race in education. Discourse analytic methods are encouraged for future CS education research focused on interactional analyses.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.22318/icls2023.864100
