Feature Focus Article – Volume 2 Issue 1
The first Feature Focus article to be selected from Volume 2 Issue 1 is On pigs and packers: Radically contextualizing a practice of science with Mexican immigrant students.
This paper reports on instructional practices observed in a high school English Learner (EL) Science course serving newcomer Mexican immigrant youth. The school is located in a rural Midwestern meatpacking community in which labor at the hog plant is economically- and racially-segmented; it is the town’s Mexican residents, many of them undocumented, who comprise most of the unskilled labor force. The general purpose of the paper is to document how the economic and racial context of this community influences science instruction in the EL Science course and to describe how this presents particular challenges in achieving equitable science instruction for Mexican immigrant youth in these rural, globalizing places.
The authors of this feature article are Katherine Richardson Bruna and Roberta Vann. Katherine Richardson Bruna is an Assistant Professor of Multicultural and International Curriculum Studies at Iowa State University. She is a former bilingual instructional aide and ESL teacher. She has a long-standing interest in issues related to the education of Mexican immigrant children in U.S. schools. Her most recent research on the science-learning experiences of these youth has taken her into schools, communities, and households of rural central Mexico. Roberta Vann is a Professor in the Program of Teaching English as a Second Language and Applied Linguistics at Iowa State University where she teaches sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and methods. Prior to her current position, she taught in Ethiopia and was a Fulbright lecturer in Poland. She later served as a consultant on second language learning in Syria, Slovakia, Peru, and Thailand. Her most recent research combines her interests in discourse analysis and pedagogy.
DOI: 10.1007/s11422-006-9041-x
Online Date: 01/12/2007
View article on SpringerLink
On Pigs and Packers: A Teacher’s Perspective
By Helen Creedon-O’Hurley
Perhaps it is the alliteration of Pigs and Packers, with the visual ethnography of classroom and community photographs, or the extensive analysis of the classroom activity that allows me to almost feel like I was there. I can visualize the world and lives of the students and as a teacher, identify with Linda Crabtree. She worked hard, brought her own kitchen knives for the dissection, made promises and shared confidences with her students, and even made international phone-calls. She worked diligently to acquire the fetal pigs for dissection, which is no small feat. Getting biological specimens for analysis requires planning and expense, as was inferred by Linda’s students, when they questioned from where the samples had came and how they had been attained. She succeeded in capturing her student’s attention and focusing on the task at hand.
Teaching is a multi-faceted art and science. Thousands of judgments, decisions and words go into every lesson. The complexity of the setting of this classroom within this school and community was well addressed in this article. However, I’m saddened that this paper criticized a hardworking, caring teacher. Linda is found wanting in this paper as someone who views her students from a deficit perspective and who limits her students’ agency by referring to their associations with the meatpacking industry. I feel Bruna and Vann, while documenting and analyzing the situation, may also be contributing to the social reproduction of the low socio-economic status of the immigrant Mexicans by not involving Linda and her students more fully in the research process. Students and teachers are more than lab rats, to be observed and analyzed by others. Teachers deserve the respect of being part of the conversation about education. Linda presumably invited the researchers into her classroom, but as evidenced by this paper, these issues were not discussed with her. I would like to see teachers honored, and made part of the research team.
While accepting social reproduction and the obvious cultural differences between Linda and her students, I feel that Bruna and Vann unfairly characterize Linda as an overweight, middle-aged American woman and they position her as being responsible for the low academic achievement of the Mexican immigrant youth with whom she works. I am outraged on her behalf to have her age and weight referenced, let alone having her teaching criticized without providing her an opportunity to share her own voice. As Wolff-Michael Roth (2007) has questioned, “what are the ethical dimensions of doing qualitative research with vulnerable populations.“ As a teacher involved in this research, Linda is vulnerable. I wonder what the ethical implications of this published work would be if Linda’s colleagues or administrators read this paper? Certainly they would have a different perspective, yet there is no place for their opinions or response in this work. I wonder how willing any teacher would be to invite researchers into their classroom when research is done in this manner. I would like to see the teacher honored in educational research and work as a co-researcher, rather than be criticized for reproducing society’s ills.
I would argue that Bruna and Vann have approached this classroom with a greater deficit perspective of the teacher’s ability to teach her students, and see less capital in what she brings to her students than Linda afforded her students. Linda is accused of only allowing students’ questions to shape the dialogue at times, it could also be argued that she was at least engaging the students in dialogue. Kenneth Tobin and Wolff-Michael Roth (2006) describe effective teaching as that which “involves a collective and shared responsibility for acting in ways that sustain dynamic structures that expand agency of the self and others (p. 77).“ While Linda is not an ideal example of this, she afforded Augusto a co-teaching role at different times in the lesson. He modeled Linda’s role in the classroom by giving instructions to the students and was allowed to offer explanations. I could speculate that Augusto chose this course, as he enjoyed working with Linda. He was more advanced than the other students and enjoyed increased self-esteem from his status in this group. Discussions between Bruna, Vann, Linda and Augusto might have expanded these coteaching possibilities, and with increased awareness, expanded the agency of all those involved.
In the newly published book, Bold Visions in Educational Research, Steven Ritchie (2007) invites us to “to consider ethical praxis that will lead to productive outcomes, positive emotional energy and solidarity in your current and future research collaborations (pg. 11).“ I am encouraged by this new support for collaboration in the literature. When we treat all with respect, and empower our colleagues and students, we engender trust and solidarity to affect change. Teachers are powerful agents of change at a grassroots level in their daily interactions with students. Stacy Olitsky and Jon Weathers (2007) have discussed “empowering participants to work together toward positive change.“ By working together, teachers and researchers can redefine education, changing the face of individual classrooms, and the research literature on education. Researchers, teachers and students need to work together in solidarity to effect meaningful change. In the complex world of schools, which mirrors the socio-economic-status injustices in our world, we need to work together for social justice. When researchers write about social reproduction from a deficit perspective, they contribute little in the way of affecting change. To observe and document, “what is“ is the lowest in the Brown’s taxonomy of thinking processes. We need to extrapolate and synthesize to create a new world order, together.
I encourage continued dialogue among researchers about the issue of ethics in educational research, especially in examining the responsibility of researchers to equitably involve and represent the perspectives of the participants with whom they have partnered to do research.
References
Olitsky, S., & Weathers, J. (2005, January). Working with Students as Researchers: Ethical Issues of a Participatory Process [66 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal], 6(1), Art. 38. Available at: http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/1-05/05-1-38-e.htm [Date of Access: September,12th, 2007].
Ritchie, S. (2007) Research Collaboration: Relationships and Praxis. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishing.
Roth, W-M. (2007). Debate “Qualitative Research and Ethics“ Moderation. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal]. Available at: http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-e/debate-3-e.htm [Date of Access: September,12th, 2007].
Tobin, K. & Roth, W-M. (2006). Teaching to learn: A view from the field. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishing.
On Different Terms of Enragement: A Response to Creedon-O’Hurley
By Katherine Richardson Bruna
Thank you to Creedon-O’Hurley for sharing her response to my article and, in so doing, initiating what I hope can be a stimulating dialogue for CSSE (Cultural Studies of Science Education) BLOG readers. Her comments touch on an issue critical to our work as educational researchers – the ethics of our relationships with the classroom communities that we study.
Despite Creedon-O’Hurley’s critique (which I will subsequently address), I was heartened to hear her remark on how the account in On Pigs & Packers “made her feel like she was there“ and that she felt that the “complexity of the setting of the classroom and the school within the community“ was “well-addressed.“ As an ethnographer, these are key objectives so, at least with respect to them, the article has achieved success.
I was, however, disheartened that what Creedon-O’Hurley took away most from the article was the sense that its purpose and/or outcome was a criticism of Linda (both her name and that of the school and the community are pseudonyms to protect her from the kind of repercussions that Creedon-O’Hurley fears). I tried, in using Grossberg’s (1997) notion of “radical contextuality“ to, instead, explore how the possibility of Linda’s framing of the pig dissection as preparation for the meatpacking plant was made possible by the situation beyond Linda herself – the traditional dominant perspective of “the science learner/knower,“ the larger socio-historical/political/economic context of Mexican immigration to rural Iowa, and the ethnic-and-class-based segmentation of the Captainville community. I wanted the reader to understand how Linda’s work is riddled with these forces, forces that construe the very possibility of her framing, and to see how critical discourse analysis can be a tool of unveiling language as social action.
I emphasized, as Creedon-O’Hurley herself notes, the students’ positive affective ties with Linda. I did this intentionally to affirm the enriching emotional work that she did with these students. But I felt obliged, as a critical multicultural educator, to put that work into tension with the profound, I believe, implications of her framing on conceptions of students as science learners/knowers. I wanted, the article, above all, to raise the question of what science education means in this age of globalization and demographically-transitioning classroom student populations. Not all science students in Captainville, and in other classroom communities around the nation, have the “legal“ status to take advantage of higher education and the science professionalization opportunities to which it leads and, in fact, not all of them have an interest in using their science learning in the U.S. anyway. They may, like Augusto, intend to return to Mexico and apply it to benefit their families and communities there. How does understanding this inform our approaches to teaching and learning? What does science for the new global citizen look like? I think it means something different than what we have now and I know it means something more than preparing them for their place “on the line.“
It would be wonderful if all we observed in classrooms was exemplary instruction, but clearly this is not the case. I felt this was a story that must be told in order to give voice to the science learning experiences of Mexican newcomer youth (a population we know very little about, particularly in the rural Midwest). For this reason, I situated my discussion within Harding’s (1998) standpoint epistemology perspective. I was intent on exploring what a practice of science (Barton, 2003) in this particular classroom looked like when we put the science learning of these students first, as opposed, say, to their relationships with their teacher.
Creedon-O’Hurley and I have different terms of enragement. She is enraged with what she perceives as my deficit perspective with regards to Linda’s teaching. I am enraged with what I perceive as a deficit perspective that allows Mexican immigrant students in U.S. schools to receive substandard education in substandard facilities with substandard (i.e. underprepared) teachers. Creedon-O’Hurley writes that I “accused“ Linda of limiting students’ opportunities for dialogue, instead of showing how she was “at least engaging them in dialogue.“ I find this argument troubling because it seems to imply that if Linda is not the worst teacher, then she is beyond critique. My standpoint perspective demands that Mexican immigrant youth not have their educational experiences limited simply because our expectations for what they receive are so stripped down that anything better than the worst case is regarded as sufficient. Would we want, choose, this classroom experience and this framing for the children in our lives?
Again, returning to the idea of Linda, not as “Linda alone“ but as “Linda-embedded-in-her-context,“ should we not be ashamed that students in “EL Science“ get inappropriate equipment and inadequately trained teachers? To say, “Yes, we are ashamed“ is not to say that this is Linda’s fault; these things are a fault of the system that marginalizes these youth in schools and society and it is this system that we should strive to change.
Finally, the circumstances surrounding Linda’s not being, as Creedon-O\\\\\\\’Hurley points out, “a part of the research team,“ are complex. I will not use this forum to detail them point-by-point because I believe it is the general question of researcher ethics, not the specifics of this case, that Creedon-O’Hurley, importantly, is calling into question. I will share what I think is relevant.
The data on which this article is based come from a study that was never framed as a collaborative action research project. If it were, undoubtedly, participants would have been expected to “increase awareness“ and “expand agency.“ Instead this site was included as one of many in a survey project, in Iowa, on the state of academic language instruction for English Language Learners in science. Based on what I observed in this site, I felt it important to undertake a longer-term ethnographic research project and, in fact, tried to engage teachers at this school, including Linda, in more collaborative efforts. I became increasingly disappointed by these efforts, for a variety of reasons, and more and more convinced that my work would best involve learning about these students’ experiences in their families, communities, and schools in Mexico. Understanding this transnational context is now where my focus has turned.
If lack of a collaborative impulse in the article is a disappointment to readers, it has been also to me. But all in all, I don’t think that there is, in fact, one “right way“ to always proceed in every research context. Not all teachers, for example, are inclined to take an interest in or have the time or support for the thoughtful reflection that collaboration entails. As Creedon-O’Hurley herself notes, teaching, and I am saying here research too, is “multifaceted,“ consisting of “thousands of judgments, decisions, and words.“ To explain the “thousands“ in my research journey would not be helpful, or interesting, to the readers. Continuing to take up the larger question of researcher-participant ethics, however, is essential. On this, Creedon-O’Hurley and I agree.
I certainly accept that some readers will react like Creedon-O’Hurley. But I most desperately hope that their criticism does not blind them to the crucially important questions the article raises about science education for whom, for what purposes, and by what means. As our schools, particularly in Iowa, begin anew each day with more and more students like Linda’s, we must continue to explore how the histories of the “host“ and “hosted“ communities interact to construe particular (and sometimes particularly problematic) possibilities for science teaching and learning.
Barton, A.C. (2003). Teaching science for social justice. New York: Teachers College Press.
Grossberg, L. (1997). Bringing it all back home: Essays on cultural studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Harding, S. (1998). Is science multicultural? Postcolonialisms, feminisms, and epistemologies. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Language and Hands-on Science
By Preeti Gupta
One salient issue fore grounded by this article by Bruna and Vann is that educators need to reflect on what types of environments they create to encourage science dialogue among students and what value that has in teaching science. Too often, educators believe that they are effective in science teaching because they use hands-on activities to teach concepts without paying attention to creating opportunities for conversations about science. Are educators thinking about the words they are using and how their students are interpreting these words? Are they considering how they structure the conversation that accompanies the hands-on lesson so that they assess prior knowledge and appropriately introduce big ideas? Are the student’s personal experiences used as teachable moments to enrich the nature of the discourse?
Bruna and Vann describe how Linda Crabtree, the teacher, puts herself in a positive light by saying that she is delivering on her promise of providing pig dissection opportunities for her students. According to the authors, the teacher sets up this dissection lesson because it will serve as a foundation experience for their future in meat-packing and it will be helpful for science courses in following years. In this portrayal, the teacher’s action can be considered hegemonic and biased.
I wonder if a different portrayal is worth exploring. The teacher could have taught about the pig’s anatomy through chalk and talk style lectures. Instead, she went through the trouble of securing pigs for her classroom, brought dissection instruments from home and asked kids to dissect their own pigs. Since she set up a hands-on lesson, both she and the reader have the opportunity to hear student discourse, which would not even be possible with a lecture-style setting. I assume, without actually having any proof other than knowing that Linda is not a certified science teacher and does not regularly teach science, that what she may lack is mastery and confidence in science, science pedagogy and negotiating science talk as defined by Jay Lemke. Lemke (1990) states that American classrooms have been set up so that proper science talk is void of colloquial language and human emotion. This allows science talk to be reflective of proper scientific values, objective and untainted by human emotion. However, Lemke believes that science talk situated outside of socio-cultural perspectives in not conducive to effective instruction.
Cynthia Bellenger (1997) investigated a class of Haitian students engaged in a lesson where the student’s own questions drove the science exploration and this allowed the use of their everyday words for talking about science to enter the field of the science classroom. She was interested to see if the students unfamiliar with the discourse and practice of science were able to succeed in this experience if they were able to bring their own words and ideas into the science conversation. Ballenger found that given the opportunity, students found different entry points into the science discussion based on their personal experiences.
Conversations between the students and teacher revealed negotiations of personal understandings with canonical knowledge of science. Ballenger states, “The quality of personal expressiveness, the intentions that have to do with presenting one’s self, one’s values, one’s questions and one’s outlook, are the serious intentions that children come with, with which they populate the discourse of science. I would suggest that discussions like this in which these intentions are neither denied, nor simply tolerated, but where instead they form part of a richly layered kind of talk, with multiple strands of meaning and intention, of remark and response, is of central importance to the process of entry into a new discourse?“ (p.12). Bellenger’s article is salient to my point because Linda Crabtree had a great opportunity to take advantage of student’s personal interests and words to teach science. What she lacked was what Roth and Tobin refer to as Spielraum, or room to maneuver, during dialogues with her students (Tobin & Roth, 2000).
In reality, I do not claim that educators purposefully deny personal dialogue to enter a science classroom, but they do not know how to celebrate it and take advantage of it. This may partially be because they have never allowed themselves to reflect on their own personal experiences as related to science. Both in the article and the forum, there is discussion that the teacher does not build a science identity for the students. I imagine that she is not agentic enough to have a science identity herself. How can she be expected to create science identities for her students when she may not have opportunities to develop one for herself? So I wonder if Linda Crabtree is inadvertently creating hegemonic experiences because she is not expert at science teaching?
Speilraum and Dispositions
Bruna and Vann take time to describe that Linda is a well-liked teacher by her students, and her actions imply a caring individual with a sense of humor. She generally has a positive disposition. It is hard to comment whether she knowingly is limiting the agency of the students and binding the range of hope and possibilities although Bruna and Vann’s analysis implies that this was indeed the case. I believe that her lack of practice with hands-on science teaching and inability to take advantage of student-teacher discourse as teachable moments put her at a disadvantage and lends to what seems to be an unjust experience. If educators are able to practice teaching in complex settings, they develop an infinite number of practices or strategies that they can dip into when faced with different students and settings. Their dispositions change because they can imagine possibilities for learning and teaching. Linda Crabtree lacks these very practices with science and is thus unable to deal with immigrant Mexican students who have limited English engaging in a hands-on science lesson.
In their article, Bruna & Vann write about how important linguistic choices are and how practicing techniques for talking about science and talking science is really part and parcel of learning how to teach in diverse settings. Although this research was conducted in Iowa, the dis-connect between language, discourse and activity can probably be found in classrooms all over. Teachers often go into teaching for altruistic reasons (Chan, 2005; Joseph & Green, 1986; Shipp, 1999), but do not usually have opportunities to practice how to teach before stepping in front of students in a high-stakes testing environments. With strategic opportunities to practice, can future teachers become more culturally relevant and responsive?
Developing Dispositions?
At the New York Hall of Science, Explainers (college and high school students) are paid frontline staff that engage visitors in dialogue over the exhibits. These Explainers attend schools and colleges from all over New York City and therefore are from equally diverse backgrounds themselves. They have opportunities to interact with visitors at the same exhibits each day and in doing so, get to practice “teaching\” the same concepts to different audiences.
I wonder if these students develop Spielraum by their daily praxis? Are they inherently being opened to the world of culturally relevant teaching without taking any formal classes? In the forum article written in response to the Bruna and Vann article, it was stated that
[s]cience education, whether we admit it or not, is being transformed by the very presence of difference in science classrooms. We could ignore the organic changes and shop around for professional development workshops that “train“ teachers in “universal access“ strategies, or we could attend to the organic changes and learn from what the students themselves show us about what they want and need (Barton, Grinberg, & Richardson, 2007, p. 70).
This statement can be applied to what happens when Explainers are engaging with visitors in the Hall of Science. While there is formal training on the exhibits, Explainers, through trial and error, learn which strategies, statements, and open-ended questions work to engage a visitor. They use teachable moments and modify their teaching within minutes in order to serve a visitor’s needs. Visitors, by nature of being clients of the museum, necessitate the need for Explainers to create successful interactions. Success is not defined by the “right answer“, but instead, a positive experience that creates thought and wonder. Explainers are not born with these skills, but they develop them by watching other Explainers successfully engaging in it and practicing it. Through peer training, they have opportunities to be reflective and reflexive with their techniques and strategies. However, without explicitly reflecting on the nature of discourse and language, are they truly developing a repertoire? Even with all of these experiences, will they feel agentic as first year classroom teachers?
The Bruna and Vann research encourages me to revisit our peer training protocols and investigate if current practices are enough for Explainers to reflect on their own interactions as related to science conversations with visitors? Both as supervisor for the program and an educational researcher, I am compelled to investigate if my claims that Explainers are getting practice in good science teaching and effective visitor engagement simply because of the system of training in place, is in fact true? What more has to exist to create the reflectivity in Explainers and eventually develop them into more effective teachers of science?
References
Barton, A.C., Grinberg, J. & Bruna, K. (2007). Pigs and packers. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 2, 61–71.
Ballenger, C. (1997). Social identities, moral narratives, scientific argumentation: science talk in a bilingual classroom. Language and Education, 11(1), 1-14
Chan, K.-W. (December 2005). In-service teachers’ perceptions of teaching as a career–Motives and commitment in teaching. Paper presented at the AARE International Education Research Conference 2005 at The University of Western Sydney, Parramatta Campus, Australia.
Joseph, P., & Green, N. (1986). Perspectives on reasons for becoming Teachers. Journal of Teacher Education, 37, 28–33.
Lemke, J. (1990) Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Tobin, K., & Roth, W-. M. (January 2000) Learning to teach science as praxis. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Education of Teachers of Science (AETS), Akron, OH.
Shipp, V. H. (1999). Factors influencing the career choices of African American collegians: Implications for minority teacher recruitment. The Journal of Negro Education, 68(3), 343-351
Making a Place
Katherine Richardson Bruna
Iowa State University
Giroux (1997) asks us to consider the following question: “Is there a place for cultural studies in colleges of education?” Given what he describes as the “narrow technocratic models that dominate mainstream reform efforts and structure many education programs” (p. 232), Giroux urges us to see teacher preparation as more than just the “regulation, certification, and standardization of teacher behavior” (p.232). Making place for cultural studies in college of education would open up possibilities for teachers to “undertake the sensitive political and ethical roles they might assume as public intellectuals educating students for responsible, critical citizenship” (p. 232). It would mobilize teacher thinking in the work of cultural critique.
If teachers are to be cultural critics, what would this new place in colleges of education need to provide? Giroux has a 6-point agenda in this regard. Colleges of education would have to: 1) centralize culture as a construct in classrooms and curricula; 2) emphasize language and power; 3) leverage students’ funds of knowledge; 4) teach for intertextuality; 5) problematize history; and 6) situate the pedagogical as culturally (re)productive. On this last point, Giroux writes, “pedagogy represents a form of cultural production implicated in and critically attentive to how power and meaning help construct and organize knowledge, desires, values, and identities. Pedagogy in this sense is not reduced to the mastering of skills or techniques. Rather, it is defined as a cultural practice that must be accountable ethically and politically for the stories it produces, the claims it makes on social memories, and the images of the future it deems legitimate” (p. 242).
In terms of reproduction theory, Giroux weighs in for a dialectical understanding of the structure-agency relationship. Unlike the more strict determinism of his predecessors, Bowles & Gintis (1976) and Bourdieu & Passeron (1977), Giroux acknowledges a role for human agency in experience and history. What matters, to him, is “to understand more thoroughly the complex ways in which people mediate and respond to the interface between their own lived experiences and structures of domination and constraint” (1983. p. 108).
In writing On Pigs & Packers, it is precisely this act of mediation and response to the interface between lived experience and structural constraint that I tried to capture. Because, as I made clear, I was writing from the standpoint of the Mexican newcomer youth who are the focus of my teaching, research, and outreach, I attended primarily to the complexity of their (particularly Augusto’s) navigations between individual agency and structural domination. My intention, however, was to acknowledge how the teacher herself, Linda Crabtree, was also participating in these navigations with respect to her own role and identity. My intention was not to malign Linda by attributing to her actions some kind of conscious origin; this reading, glimpsed again in Gupta’s posted remarks, is not just unfortunate, but, I argue, theoretically unhelpful (“It is hard to comment whether she [Linda Crabtree] knowingly is limiting the agency of the students and binding the range of hope and possibilities although Bruna and Vann’s analysis implies that this was indeed the case”).
In fact, my use of Grossberg’s (1997) notion of “radical contextuality” to name and frame the paper, as I indicate on page 25, was meant to focus the reader’s attention on how that particular classroom context was brought into being through a configuration of events, identities, and structures, not all within the Linda’s control. Additionally, in taking up, on page 28, Slack’s (1996) theory and method of articulation and its objective, not of discovering the “reality” of a phenomenon, but, instead, of its construal as a result of complex social relations, I was explicitly working against single source (ie., “it’s Linda’s fault”) interpretations. In my discussion, I tried to remind the reader of this framing. On page 51, I describe the pig dissection lesson as a “conflicted and competing space” in which, as I continue, there was a tension between her “conscious investment in nurturing affective relationships with her students and her unconscious privilege-based investment, as a white, middle-class individual in that community, in the current social and economic situation (emphasis added).” Further still, I write, about Linda’s framing of the pig dissection as preparation for work at the plant, that “[t]he possibility of her saying what she said does not begin entirely at the saying, but in the status quo of her community that reflects, in turn, the larger economic and social forces of global capitalism” (p. 52). This is reiterated, on page 55, when I say that “what a teacher says in the classroom reflects and reproduces the larger context in which her or his teaching is actualized.” Because of this, as I explain in my concluding discussion on page 57, using Lefebvre (1991), that every social space, to some extent, is already in place before its actors arrive.
In the events, identities, and structures at the heart of the social practice of science (Barton, 2003) in the On Pigs & Packers classroom I see a prime opportunity to explore Giroux’s 6-point agenda. I see how culture operates in classrooms and interacts with curricula and the role played in this interaction by language and power – a role which Gupta’s remarks highlight well. I see students’ attempts to legitimate their funds of knowledge and the intertextual connections they make between curriculum and their own lives. I see the interpellation of history in schooling. I see the pedagogical as personal and political. For colleges of education and, more specifically, programs of science teacher preparation, the work is to ready teachers to attend to the events, identities, and structures that will not absolutely determine, but gently force into shape their own social practice of science. This work entails an uncomfortable shifting away from individualistic understandings of teaching and learning, orientations normalized through the current “narrow technocratic model.” But only in this way, returning to Giroux’s question, will we begin to make a place.
Barton, A.C. (2003). Teaching science for social justice. New York: Teachers College Press.
Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J-C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society, and culture. London: Sage.
Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America. New York: Basic Books.
Giroux, H.A. (1983). Theories of reproduction and resistance in the new sociology of education. Harvard Educational Review 53, pp. 257-293.
Giroux, H.A. (1997). Is there a place for cultural studies in colleges of education? In H.A. Giroux & P. Shannon (Eds.), Education and cultural studies: Toward a performative practice (pp. 231-248). New York: Routledge.
Grossberg, L. (1997). Bringing it all back home: Essays on cultural studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Oxford: Blackwell. (Translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith).
Slack, J.D. (1996). The theory and method of articulation in cultural studies. In D. Morely & K-H Chen (Eds.), Critical dialogues in cultural studies (pp. 112-127). London: Routledge.