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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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Making Space for Expansive Thinking in Socio-Technical Small-Group Undergraduate Discussions
In this qualitative case study, we explore how first- and second year undergraduate students make space for expansive thinking in their engineering modeling work. We focus on the ways in which one group of five women negotiated the inclusion of different social, political, and economic factors in their design model, particularly energy distribution and transboundary equity. Drawing on discourse analysis methods, we analyzed a small-group in-class discussion and identified five expansive moves that helped the students to make space for rethinking what they could include in their model. These included being explicit about their assumptions and uncertainties and acknowledging task difficulties.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2110727
- PAR ID:
- 10629784
- Publisher / Repository:
- International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS)
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1319 to 1322
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.22318/icls2024.389027
