Search for: All records

Reform efforts in science and mathematics education highlight students’ experiences and sensemaking repertoires as valuable resources for instruction. Yet, there is much to learn about how to cultivate teachers’ capacity for eliciting, understanding, and responding to students’ contributions. We argue that the first step of this cultivation is teachers’ learning to listen: to attune and attend to the novel ways that students make sense of scientific phenomena and the natural world. While this notion of listening as critical to teaching is intuitive, the work behind it can be challenging. As such, this study explores promises and tensions of learning to listen through the journey of one pre-service teacher and examines her shifting views on teaching as related to her reflective practice around the work of listening. Focusing on listening as a core tenet of teaching, we discuss implications for teacher education to center listening as an instructional target for teacher learning in science and mathematics education. 

To support students’ sense of belonging in science classrooms, K-12 teachers should recognize and appreciate learners’ diverse experiential, cultural, and linguistic repertoires as valuable resources for sensemaking in science. This approach to teaching necessarily entails expanding what has been traditionally considered as ontologically and epistemologically valid and valued in disciplinary learning spaces so that students’ diverse ways of thinking, talking, and feeling are honored and built upon, rather than dismissed. This study explores the emergence of such expansiveness in the context of STEM preservice teacher education. Using preservice teachers (PSTs)’ written reflections and in-class discussions, we identified different ways in which such expansiveness manifested in PSTs’ discourse. We end with some implications for supporting teachers’ expanding conceptions of science teaching and learning. 

Studies in science and mathematics education have shown that teachers’ responsiveness to students’ ideas, feelings, and experiences is critical for promoting epistemic agency, disciplinary engagement, and equity. Such responsiveness is particularly important for students whose cultures, backgrounds, and funds of knowledge have been traditionally marginalized in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classrooms. Yet, what allows teachers to enact responsive teaching is less clear. We argue that epistemic empathy—the capacity for tuning into and appreciating learners’ intellectual and emotional experiences in constructing, communicating, and critiquing knowledge—is an essential driver of teacher responsiveness. In this work, we examine how epistemic empathy can serve to support teachers’ attention and responsiveness to students’ sensemaking experiences in the classroom and discuss emergent tensions that arise in this work. We end with implications for research and for teacher education to cultivate epistemic empathy as a resource for responsive teaching and a target for teacher learning.