by Seiler, Gale; Abraham, Anjali

Conscientization involves a recursive process of reflection and action toward individual and social transformation. Often this process takes shape through encounters in/with diverse and often conflicting discourses. The study of student and teacher discourses, or scripts and counterscripts, in science classrooms can reveal asymmetrical power relations and the ways in which dominant scripts of marginalization are often enacted. Decoding the dominant structures in these discourses is a complex and political act that might offer some possibilities for transformative practice. But for this to take place teachers, students, and researchers need to collaborate to conduct classroom research that embraces the political dimension of conscientization.

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-009-9192-7
Online Date: 4/3/2009
Print publication date: 9/1/2009
View article on SpringerLink

by Gallard Martinez, Alejandro J.

Teaching is a very complex endeavor. Embedded within this complex environment are issues of power, culture, ethnicity, and race. When teachers and students come together, in the classroom, some of these issues become visible and others remain invisible. Attempting to make influences on teaching and learning visible is one of the steps toward developing a practice framed by conscientização. Ms. Cook, the teacher of this story, is empowering herself and her students; through critical reflection that serves to deneutralize educational acts by recognizing they are embedded in issues of culture, ethnicity, politics, power, and, race. Classroom based research must be more inclusive and indeed cognizant of the mediating macrostructures that teachers deal with everyday. For example, Goldberg and Muir Welsh describe some of the students as being Latinos. In doing so, they adopts a third person as opposed to a first person view of these students. A first person view can acknowledge a dialectical relationship between race and ethnicity.

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-009-9191-8
Online Date: 3/28/2009
Print publication date: 9/1/2009
View article on SpringerLink

by Chinn, Pauline W. U.

This response draws from the literature on adaptive learning, traditional ecological knowledge, and social–ecological systems to show that Brad’s choice is not a simple decision between traditional ecological knowledge and authentic science. This perspective recognizes knowledge systems as dynamic, cultural and historical activities characterized by diverse worldviews and ways of constructing and legitimizing knowledge. Brad’s decision is seen as an example of adaptive learning, identity development and personal/collective agency oriented to increasing tribal influence in resource management decisions and policies. I will conclude that science literacy for all is not served by a transcendent, universal, Western modern view of science.

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-009-9185-6
Online Date: 3/25/2009
Print publication date: 9/1/2009
View article on SpringerLink

by Sammel, Ali

This paper provides another way to gaze upon Brad’s story as presented by van Eijck and Roth (2010). It raises questions about infrastructural racism in contemporary science education by exploring its association with Whiteness and White privilege. To explore the racial positioning inherent in Western science education specific attention is given to the positions of power that accompany Western ways of knowing the world (i.e., science education) in comparison to Other ways of knowing the world (i.e., First Nations Ways of Knowing). The paper suggests the power relationships inherent within this dualism are asymmetrical due to the implications of Whiteness within colonial societies. Even though power relations were not discussed in Brad’s story, the paper suggests the implications were visible. The paper concludes by advocating for a re-imagining in science education where the traditional ontological and epistemological foundations are deconstructed and spaces are created for enacting practical ways of resisting oppression.

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-009-9184-7
Online Date: 3/24/2009
Print publication date: 9/1/2009
View article on SpringerLink

by Eijck, Michiel; Roth, Wolff-Michael

Bringing a greater number of students into science is one of, if not the most fundamental goals of science education for all, especially for heretofore-neglected groups of society such as women and Aboriginal students. Providing students with opportunities to experience how science really is enacted—i.e., authentic science—has been advocated as an important means to allow students to know and learn about science. The purpose of this paper is to problematize how “authentic” science experiences may mediate students’ orientations towards science and scientific career choices. Based on a larger ethnographic study, we present the case of an Aboriginal student who engaged in a scientific internship program. We draw on cultural–historical activity theory to understand the intersection between science as practice and the mundane practices in which students participate as part of their daily lives. Following Brad, we articulate our understanding of the ways in which he hybridized the various mundane and scientific practices that intersected in and through his participation and by which he realized his cultural identity as an Aboriginal. Mediated by this hybridization, we observe changes in his orientation towards science and his career choices. We use this case study to revisit methodological implications for understanding the role of “authentic science experiences” in science education.

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-009-9183-8
Online Date: 3/24/2009
Print publication date: 9/1/2009
View article on SpringerLink

by Kincheloe, Joe L.; Tobin, Kenneth

Approaches to research in the social sciences often embrace schema that are consistent with positivism, even though it is widely held that positivism is discredited and essentially dead. Accordingly, many of the methods used in present day scholarship are supported by the tenets of positivism, and are sources of hegemony. We exhort researchers to employ reflexive methods to identify the epistemologies, ontologies and axiologies that are salient in their scholarship and, when necessary, transform practices such that forms of oppression associated with crypto-positivism are identified and extinguished.

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-009-9178-5
Online Date: 2/20/2009
Print publication date: 9/1/2009
View article on SpringerLink

by Goldberg, Jennifer; Welsh, Kate Muir

In this case study, we examine a teacher’s journey, including reflections on teaching science, everyday classroom interaction, and their intertwined relationship. The teacher’s reflections include an awareness of being “a White middle-class born and raised teacher teaching other peoples’ children.” This awareness was enacted in the science classroom and emerges through approaches to inquiry. Our interest in Ms. Cook’s journey grew out of discussions, including both informal and semi-structured interviews, in two research projects over a three-year period. Our interest was further piqued as we analyzed videotaped classroom interaction during science lessons and discovered connections between Ms. Cook’s reflections and classroom interaction. In this article, we illustrate ways that her journey emerges as a conscientization. This, at least in part, shapes classroom interaction, which then again shapes her conscientization in a recursive, dynamic relationship. We examine her reflections on her “hegemonic (cultural and socio–economic) practices” and consider how these reflections help her reconsider such practices through analysis of classroom interaction. Analyses lead us to considering the importance of inquiry within this classroom community.

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-009-9176-7
Online Date: 2/19/2009
Print publication date: 9/1/2009
View article on SpringerLink

by Goulart, Maria Inês Mafra; Soares, Eduardo Sarquis

Elementary science teaching has been considered by recent researchers as a process in which students should be engaged in a variety of activities to develop science concepts, science process skills and scientific attitudes. From this perspective, hands-on activities are prominent in this approach because it leads the students to both reflect on the natural and physical world, and understand the social role of science in society. In Upadhyay’s article we follow an elementary teacher who struggles to implement a participatory method of science teaching in an environment that prioritizes high-stakes tests as the benchmarks for teachers’ and students’ success. In so doing, the teacher negotiates her identities in order to engage the students in the process of learning science even though the environment requires a teaching methodology that is against her beliefs. In our commentary on Upadhyay’s article we argue that (a) the tensions experienced by teachers create the core of the process of fluidity identity; (b) the different forms of external control over the teaching are inherent in educational systems and also a demand of parents and society; and (c) the possibility for social mobility of minority students is a complex process that goes beyond the dichotomy identified in Upadhyay’s article, namely that either the students learn to think scientifically, or the students learn tricks that enable them to succeed in the tests.

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-008-9171-4
Online Date: 1/30/2009
Print publication date: 9/1/2009
View article on SpringerLink

by Roth, Wolff-Michael

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-009-9173-x
Online Date: 1/28/2009
Print publication date: 3/1/2009
View article on SpringerLink

by Ritchie, Stephen M.

Research on teacher identities is both important and increasing. In this forum contribution I re-interpret assertions about an African American science teacher’s identities in terms of Jonathon Turner’s (2002) constructs of role identity and sub-identity. I contest the notion of renegotiation of identities, suggesting that particular role identities can be brought to the foreground and then backgrounded depending on the situation and the need to confirm a sub-identity. Finally, I recommend the inclusion of teachers’ voices in identity research through greater use of co-authoring roles for teachers.

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-008-9172-3
Online Date: 1/16/2009
Print publication date: 9/1/2009
View article on SpringerLink