Science learning and a Sense of Place in a Urban Middle School
by Lim, Miyoun; Barton, Angela Calabrese
This paper offers an analysis into low-income, urban middle school children’s sense of place and what and how their sense of place matters in science learning by focusing on the following questions: In what ways is students’ sense of place leveraged in a science classroom? How does the content and context of science class shape how students leverage their sense of place? What learning opportunities emerge when sense of place is leveraged in class? Drawing from an ethnographic investigation into an environmental statistics class in a mid-sized public middle school, we examined sense of place events from their source, process, and outcome perspectives. Our findings are presented from two aspects of sense of place events, (1) characterizing students’ sense of place by exploring sources of the sense of place events, and (2) examining processes of how students’ sense of place is being leveraged in the episodes. We also examine two kinds of tensions that emerge in the class when sense of place is leveraged by students and acknowledged by the teacher: epistemological tensions (related to what the students are learning) and procedural tensions (related to how they are learning).
DOI: 10.1007/s11422-005-9002-9
Online Date: 12/27/2005
Print publication date: 1/1/2006
View article on SpringerLink
In their article Science Learning and a Sense of Place in a Urban Middle School, the authors make the case that students’ sense of place impacts what and how they learn. Additionally, opportunities need to be created in the classroom that account for students’ sense of place as this will allow students to engage in the material and become successful learners. They define a sense of place as the relationship between a person and a place as fostered by their experiences with that place.
While the article is heavy in the usage of sense of place it seems very similar to the work of other researchers who instead focus on cultural responsiveness in teaching. The concepts are virtually the same in terms of what the goal for teaching is: to take into account where the students come from (their culture, SES, race, history, experiences, relationship to place) and build upon their experiences in order that they may be engaged, active and successful learners. Hart (2003) discusses some programs which have been successful with underprivileged urban youth and notes that these program took students’ knowledge base their capital), valued it and built upon it. Similarly the teacher in the article was able to take past experiences of a student as valuable and took the students’ suggestion to see a different playground than the one he teacher had picked to go to. This is a clear example of valuing the knowledge base of students and accounting for their past experiences. It is contrasted in the article with a retelling of a situation in which a students’ response on a multiple choice question was marked wrong because the students’ experience differed from those of the test creator and did not take into account the students’ background and prior knowledge. Examples such as these have been given by other researchers and highlight the need for teachers to understand the backgrounds, histories and experiences of students.
The authors explain that we make sense of new experiences by referring to past one and building on our existing frameworks. Martin (2003) speaks of centering the curriculum about the experiences of students which is another way of explaining this process of valuing students’ capital. The idea of taking into account sense of place is a slight variation on the idea of centering curriculum about students’ experiences and of culturally responsive teaching. I am not trying to downplay the importance of sense of place by linking it to other frameworks for viewing teaching that accounts for students’ experiences. Rather I am trying to link the idea of sense of place with other similar concepts as a means of providing connections and frameworks that could be beneficial in further work centered about this idea of sense of place.
Hart, Laurie E. (2003). Some directions for research on equity and justice in mathematics education. In L. Burton (Ed.), Which way social justice in mathematics education? (pp. 27-49). Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.
Martin, D. B. (2003). Hidden Assumptions and Unaddressed questions in the Mathematics for All Rhetoric. The Mathematics Educator, 13(2), 7–21.
Professors Lim and Calabrese Barton offer a detailed description and strong arguments in support of their findings concerning the significance of students’”sense of place” in the science classroom. One of their claims indicate that “leveraging a sense of place during science learning in class seems to happen when someone recognizes and identifies a student’s sense of place as relevant and/or useful to be brought into the specific context of science learning.” (p. 123). My two basic questions concerning this statement is: What unique spatial or environmental conditions, if any, need to be present for identification of a student’s “sense of place” in the science classroom? Second, although the scope of your research findings is centered on the discovery of student’s “sense of place,” to what degree can all or most teachers be orientated to develop the proper communication skills for proper identification of “sense of place” in students?
The authors successfully expand on the mounting evidence that students’ subjective experences and the social, emotional and cultural realities that situate their lives must be respected and engaged for successful teaching and learning to occur. While respecting their efforts and above all the overall purpose of their work, I find some of their evidence inconclusive and their methods of inquiry insufficient. I’ll focus my critique on one of their sources of data.
Mr. Nader’s pigeon unit KWL activity seems only to address general background knowledge and perceptions about pigeons yet the authors claim that through it the students “leveraged” their sense of place within Mr. Nader’s science classroom. Isn’t a sense of place more than a demonstration of knowledge about the world? If “[a] sense of place emerges from one’s lifeworld” then wouldn’t it be a deeply rooted sense of resonance with your environment? The KWL chart used by Mr. Nader is a stock tool used to evoke background knowledge prior to teaching new information. If his KWL allowed the students to access their sense of place then this is happening in classrooms all over America where KWLs are used commonly. This mediates against the authors’ claims that the increasingly generic (“anywhere and anytime”) nature of science education violates students’ sense of place and dilutes the quality of their science education.
Furthermore how can the contents of a chart developed from student free association in Mr. Nader’s class be considered evidence of something so complex and mysterious as an alignment between teaching and learning activities and students’ lifeworlds? It seems clear from Miyoun’s autobiographical example that the test question violated her sense of place, showing contempt and disregard for her sense of truth about her lived experience within her environment. The “bitter lesson” Miyoun learned from this violation of her sense of place must have resulted in negative emotional energy or she wouldn’t recall it so clearly now. If the authors claim a leveraging of the students’ senses of place during the KWL activity then shouldn’t they present some affective evidence of this occurring? To do this not only would they have to apply some social-emotional theoretical framework but they would have to conduct their study using different, more rigorous, methods of inquiry. Micro-level analysis of video recordings of the activity might be an appropriate method. It seems clear to me that the leveraging of students’ senses of place cannot be reduced to or measured as a simple record of their utterances.
Reconceptualizing a Sense of Place
In the article that opens this forum Lim and Barton advance the concept that learning is informed by a sense of place. Lim and Barton develop the concept of sense of place and use it as a lens to explore how students appropriate their lifewolrds in order to build an ecological relationship with their place of activity. In particular, they attempt to understand how students appropriate their lifeworlds in order to bring a sense of place to bear on their science learning (i.e., leverage their sense of place). The authors define sense of place as a living ecological relationship and view how one constitutes the identity of “place” as mediated within the triple dialectic of physical setting|human activity|human psychology. This article has many interesting ideas and reminds us that students do not come to formal learning situations as empty vessels.
Although this paper contains many interesting ideas, an alternative framework for conceptualizing a sense of place is through the socio-cultural construct of resonance structures experienced within a field (lifeworld). Fields are sites where culture is enacted and are constituted and structured by their human, material, and symbolic resources. Participants in a field use their agency to enact culture by appropriating the resources within a field to meet their needs. Additionally, the resources of a field, such as a science laboratory classroom or playground, can be accessed and appropriated by participants to produce, reproduce, and transform culture (i.e., learning science). A fundamental characteristic of fields is that they are surrounded by porous boundaries. As a result, culture from one field can be enacted in another. In other words, participant can bring capital (i.e., stocks of knowledge) to bear from one field as they participate in transactions to meet their goals in another field. When Lim and Barton state, “…that new experiences filter back into and become a part of one’s lifeworld ” (p. 11), they are referring to the porous boundaries of a field that allow the dialectical process of cultural production, reproduction, and transformation to occur across field boundaries.
Fields also create resonance structures (i.e., familiar structures and resources that create dispositions to act) that participants can access and appropriate to enact culture to meet their goals. For instance, Tobin (2006) indicates that the dynamic structure of a field continuously creates and recreates resonances for the teacher and students to support cultural fluency and successful transaction chains. Field are dynamically reconstituted within the agency|structure dialectic. That is, the field structures are also structuring the agency of the field participants and vice versa.
Fields are also historically and temporally framed and can be nested and reconfigured depending upon the structures and agency experienced by participants in the field. Therefore, structures of a field have a historical connection with prior cultural enactment aligned with dispositions to act. The disposition of a participant to act is afforded and constrained by remaining structural resonance present in a field. For example, Lim and Barton describe an episode where Jameer, a student, suggests to the teacher that the class explore an alternate playground that she was familiar with in her neighborhood. Jameer lived in the neighborhood for nearly her entire life. She was especially knowledgeable about playgrounds in her neighborhood, as she frequently babysits, taking children to neighborhood playgrounds. Lim and Barton concluded that when Jameer’s sense of place was challenged by the teacher’s decision, she leveraged her sense of place by suggesting a nicer and closer playground to conduct the science lesson.
The alternative framework proposed above also gives a productive way to think about Jameer’s actions. Jameer’s agency to influence the creation of a new field was afforded through her historical connection and participation in both existing fields- class and neighborhood. There were enough resonance structures (prior successful verbal interactions with her teacher) to allow her to suggest to the teacher that heading south was a better idea without anticipating being shut down by the teacher. Additionally, she drew on her knowledge of the physical layout of the playground on the south side of the park from prior visits outside school. Jameer used resonance structures provided in her existing stocks of knowledge at hand, in order to create and shape a new field to help learn about pigeons.
Reference
Tobin, K.: (2006), ‘ Aligning the cultures of teaching and learning science in urban high schools’, Cultural Studies of Science Education 1, 219-252.