Designing for expansive science learning and identification across settings

In this study, we present a case for designing expansive science learning environments in relation to neoliberal instantiations of standards-based implementation projects in education. Using ethnographic and design-based research methods, we examine how the design of coordinated learning across settings can engage youth from non-dominant communities in scientific and engineering practices, resulting in learning experiences that are more relevant to youth and their communities. Analyses highlight: (a) transformative moments of identification for one fifth-grade student across school and non-school settings; (b) the disruption of societal, racial stereotypes on the capabilities of and expectations for marginalized youth; and (c) how youth recognized themselves as members of their community and agents of social change by engaging in personally consequential science investigations and learning.     

Learning in Equity-Oriented Scale-Making Projects

This article examines how new forms of learning and expertise are made to become consequential in changing communities of practice. We build on notions of scale making to understand how particular relations between practices, technologies, and people become meaningful across spatial and temporal trajectories of social action. A key assumption of our perspective is that the scale relations that give meaning to our actions are not natural but are contested in social, cultural, and political projects. Studying these contentious activities can help us understand the nature of changing participation in dynamic and historically developed practices. Using case materials from 3 groups engaged in the local food justice movement in the western United States, we illustrate their engagement in equity-oriented scale making. Defining features of this work included identifying leverage points within inequitable systems; developing strategies for remediating scale relations to include the perspectives of historically marginalized groups; and coordinating trajectories of practice across settings, activities, and time so that these interventions became increasingly consequential. We conclude with a discussion of the significance of equity-oriented scale making as a lens for organizing design efforts and for studying their implications for nondominant communities.     

Reframing Service-Learning as Learning and Participation With Urban Youth

This article describes a critical service-learning project that resulted from an educational partnership among a national teachers' union, a local teachers' union, and a major research university. The partnership—funded by a grant from the Corporation for National and Community Service, Learn and Serve program—focused on professional development opportunities for K–12 educators across subject areas throughout an urban school district. Teachers enrolled in a university-level graduate course where they learned about critical service-learning, engaged in community-based activities, developed partnerships with local organizations, and facilitated critical service-learning projects in local schools and communities. Here, we highlight one of the many projects that emerged from this partnership as we attempt to connect theory with practice by reframing service-learning as learning and participation. We ask: How can a reframing of service-learning as learning and participation impact how we understand the educative and social engagements of four urban youth?     

Ethnicity and Community Context as Moderators of the Relations between Family Decision Making and Adolescent Adjustment

This study investigated whether the impact of 3 types of family decision making on the adjustment of 14–16-year-old youth was moderated by ethnicity, community context, or both. For joint and unilateral youth decision making, community context interacted with ethnicity in 3 patterns of influence: for Hispanic-American youth, variations in decision making had a stronger impact in ethnically mixed than in predominantly white communities; for African-American youth, the negative impact of unilateral youth decision making was stronger in predominantly white communities; and for Asian- and European-American youth, community context did not make a difference. For unilateral parental decision making, the popular hypothesis that apparent ethnic differences in the influence of parental strictness on adolescent adjustment are primarily due to differences in community context was not supported. Rather, the positive impact of unilateral parental decision making was similar among African-American youth living in predominantly white, and more affluent, communities or in more disadvantaged, ethnically mixed neighborhoods. The negative impact of authoritarian parenting was similar among European-American youth living in less advantaged communities as well as more affluent ones. There was no relation between unilateral parental control and adolescent adjustment of Asian- or Hispanic-American youth in either type of community.     

“Who are your Friends?” Complexities in Multicultural Education

In this paper, I explore the experiences of fourth and fifth grade students engaged in Beyond Today, an urban after school program, that aimed to enact a social reconstructionist multicultural curriculum. The program gathered White, Black, and Latino/a youth to explore issues of discrimination and social justice and develop leadership towards social change. This paper focuses on the complex nature of students’ responses to a multicultural curriculum that foregrounded conversations about race and inequity. Students were seen to build ties of friendship across racial lines and develop activist skills of social critique. On other occasions, they maintained borders, distancing themselves from students of different races. After an overall review of the students’ varied reactions to the Beyond Today curriculum, I highlight specific vignettes that show how these tensions can simultaneously emerge within particular incidents. This research can be of use to teachers and teacher educators when envisioning and planning for student responses to multicultural curriculum.     

Recasting Border Crossing Politics and Pedagogies to Combat Educational Inequity: Experiences,Identities, and Perceptions of Latino/a Immigrant Youth

Educational borderlands are the physical and/or conceptual landscapes where one must negotiate notions of cultural difference as she or he lives and learns—landscapes that envelop an array of pedagogical and cultural spaces, yet are typically guarded by exclusionary tactics. In this article, we examine how US immigrant youth navigate three educational borderlands: the geopolitical, institutional, and home community. We also discuss how educators’ biased ideologies and actions towards these youth solidify borders and increase inequity. Data from studies of California and North Carolina school communities allow us to extend border crossing theories and address how many immigrant youth confront and resist inequities, negotiate their cultural identities, and enact agency. While emphasizing that borderlands are sites of risk and transformation, we also suggest how educators can draw upon their relative power and privilege to cross borders too, advocate for immigrant youth, and ultimately improve education.     

Off the Record: Police Surveillance,Muslim Youth,and an Ethnographer’s Tools of Research

Surveillance practices are becoming increasingly insidious, finding their way into nearly every aspect of public and private life in the United States. Surveillance by state policing agencies have particularly targeted and criminalized communities of color. Such practices are not simply a new context, but are part of a broader carceral state, structuring all aspects of social life. Drawing upon a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork with Muslim youth in New York City, I attempt to engage in a practice of “uncomfortable reflexivity” to ask how living within a carceral state that actively surveils Muslim communities affected the ways in which Muslim youth engaged me, a social researcher, and the tools I used to collect data. This research recognizes that youth are not simply there for researchers to take knowledge from, even if “insider” researchers have meaningful relationships with them. Rather, this research depicts that young people are carefully engaged in thoughtful and creative ways to ensure their own safety is protected. Ultimately, this study points to the necessity of research that is both self-reflective in its design as well as in its ability to make claims about youth experiences.     

Middle Grade Teachers’ Learning through Students’ Engagement with Modeling Tasks*

We report on how two middle-grade teachers supported their students’ mathematical reasoning within the context of a novel modeling task in data analysis. We examine how the task features supported the development of teachers’ knowledge as their students engaged with the task. Analyses of the teachers’ practices suggest that the task features enabled teachers: (a) to develop new understandings of the mathematical content and the ways in which student ideas develop and are represented; (b) to adopt new roles in their interactions with the students, including a focus on listening and observing, and on asking questions for understanding and clarification; and (c) to engage in forms of interpretative listening that shifted the role of evaluation from the teacher to the student. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 9722235 and by the Australian Research Council (ARC).     

A social semiotic mapping of voice in youth media: the pitch in youth video production†

An ethics of youth media production is the interplay of identities, media literacy, and modality that shape the environment within which young people produce media, yet how ‘voice’ is fostered and/or constrained in these environments could still be explored more fully. This paper stems from a larger qualitative study of how youth created films about their lives and communities in four non-school spaces that strove to give voice to underrepresented youth across the USA. This detailed semiotic analysis illustrates the nuances in the discussion between young people and youth media arts educators in two of these organizations during the pitch, the key moment in the filmmaking process in which the youth presented their ideas for their videos for adult approval before they moved on to the next stages, for example, filming. This analysis illustrates how young people negotiated their voice, tracing the negotiation and the inherent power dynamics that occurred.     

Teacher enquiry as a tool for professional development: Investigating pupils’ effective Talk While Learning

The Learning to Learn in Schools Phase 3 Evaluation was a four year project across England exploring the concept of Learning to Learn in 33 primary and secondary schools. The project was funded through the UK based Campaign for Learning. One of the key aims of the project was to ensure that the locus of control in terms of development remains with the schools, who decided on the focus of innovation relevant to them under the umbrella heading of Learning to Learn. A team from the Research Centre for Learning and Teaching at Newcastle University then supported and facilitated the teachers in the systematic evaluation of their experiences. As a result we believe that this process supported meaningful professional development about teaching and learning. This paper exemplifies this process through two professional enquiries into pupil talk in the classroom and how it supported learning. The projects were carried out by teachers in two schools, one secondary (11–18 years) and one primary (4–11 years). Both schools decided that encouraging pupil talk about learning best fit with their priorities and the project aims of exploring Learning to Learn. The paper describes the different research methods and findings of the teachers’ research, focusing on the decision making which occurred and how the process of the research has impacted on their professional development. Conclusions are drawn about how the philosophy of Learning to Learn can be as easily applied to the process of professional enquiry through action research and teachers’ learning, as to the more traditional domain of students’ learning and how this might contribute to the development of a successful Learning to Learn school culture.     

Exploring the role of migrants in transnational occupational learning processes in Estonia-Finland space

The aim of the study was to examine the role of migrants in cross-border learning in occupational contexts. The research data included 78 semi-structured and 20 life-course interviews with people who had migrated from Estonia to Finland or who were transmigrating between these countries. The interview data were analysed qualitatively through a combination of data-based and theory-guided content analysis. The results showed how the migrants had engaged in transnational brokering and boundary encounters between work communities across national borders. Transnational brokering had involved introducing new work techniques, clarifying organizational cultures, conveying best practices and explaining local work requirements and communication styles. These transnational brokers had supported the processes of perspective making and perspective taking by explaining local work practices and, more broadly, mind-sets to non-migrants both in the host society and in their country of origin. Theoretical concepts from situated learning theory and transnational migration studies were applied in the analysis. The study provides a new perspective through which to examine international and multicultural work environments and the transformation processes related to the increasing cross-border mobility of labour.     

Effective practices for creating transformative informal science education programs grounded in Native ways of knowing

There are a growing number of informal science education (ISE) programs in Native communities that engage youth in science education and that are grounded in Native ways of knowing. There is also a growing body of research focusing on the relationship between culture, traditional knowledge, and science education. However, there is little research documenting how these programs are being developed and the ways in which culture and Western science are incorporated into the activities. This study outlines effective practices for using Native ways of knowing to strengthen ISE programs. These effective practices may also be used to promote change in formal education. The authors combine an overview of current research in informal science education with personal interviews with educators engaged in ISE programs offered to youth both on and off tribal reservations as well as experts in Indigenous education. Participating individuals and programs included Native communities across the United States, including Alaska and Hawai??i. Keeping in mind that each community is unique, ISE programs that are grounded in Native ways of knowing will benefit by utilizing the effective practices outlined here as a guide for starting or strengthening existing ISE programs relevant to the needs of their communities.     

Evaluation of a University‐Based Mentoring Program: Mentors’ Perspectives on a Service‐Learning Experience

Researchers in the educational field have investigated how a caring adult can best provide mentoring support to youth placed at risk and what functions a mentoring program should serve to promote healthy mentoring relationships. However, the perspective of mentors rarely has been sought to elicit their evaluation of a mentoring program or recommendations for programmatic change. The purpose of this article was to investigate the views of university students serving as mentors in high‐need high schools or community centers. We asked 49 students, primarily undergraduates across a range of liberal arts disciplines, who were participating in a university‐based service‐learning mentoring program for youth attending high‐poverty high schools: (a) what activities they engaged in with mentees, (b) how they benefited from the mentoring program, and (c) how they perceived the program and what recommendations they had for change. Findings revealed specific suggestions that mentoring program coordinators can adopt to address mentors’ concerns and promote sustained, durable mentoring relationships for youth.     

Finding Nexus: connecting youth work and research practices

Participation in educational and social research helps to develop understanding of how young people learn and to consider wider aspects of their lives to enable their voices to be heard and acted upon. Research also facilitates the articulation and sharing of methodologies across a range of professional practices. We assert that theory and practice in educational youth work offers a position of strength from which to undertake research. In making this assertion, we suggest cross‐disciplinarity between youth work and research practices in order to build research mindedness among youth workers who, through this nexus, are well‐placed to engage in practice based research. Drawing on discourses about young people, youth work and youth participation, we identify five elements of youth work practice that can be aligned with research processes: reflexivity; positionality and bias; insider cultural competence; rapport and trust; power relationships. The article examines how these elements are present in youth work and a range of research settings. We identify youth work methods and dispositions as enhancing research capacity which could also be useful in building participatory research methods in disciplinary areas beyond education. Yet, in making these connections, we also identify a range of factors that show this nexus as complex and contestable. Reflecting on the lessons learned from our experiences as youth work practitioners and academic researchers, we propose that finding nexus, which in this instance is between youth work and research paradigms, could inform educational research practices and contributes to developing a meaningful praxis.     

Arab Americans: Into the Multicultural Mainstream

As the percentage of youth of color in the nation's public schools continues to increase, so, too, does the urgency of preparing a predominantly white, female, middle class teaching force to work with racially and culturally diverse youth. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of an urban, youth-serving HIV/AIDS prevention and supports center, this article describes how two white women staffers engaged culturally responsive modes of care, support, and advocacy in order to address young people's emotional, developmental, and educational needs. Since both women performed motherly personas as they cared for and supported youth at the center, this article builds upon their experiences to develop “further mothering”—an adaptation of the “other mothering” tradition of black women—as a possible heuristic for analyzing white women educators’ culturally responsive work with black youth.     

Supporting children’s outdoor science learning with mobile computers: integrating learning on-the-move strategies with context-sensitive computing

ABSTRACT

Two cases of context-sensitive mobile computing curricula for children are shown to develop analytical understandings of how science-related sense-making talk can be supported through physical and digital environment interaction, which supports play and learning through movement. Our work investigates how proximity-based computing mediates children’s engagement in scientific sense-making conversations in a botanical garden. We draw upon sociocultural perspectives on sense-making talk as well as learning on-the-move to inform our study design. Data are from children in summer camp, including field notes, photographs, and video records (26 children in Case A, 24 in Case B) in an Arboretum. Our findings illustrate that children engaged in both playful and scientific sense-making talk in two distinct curricular tasks. We provide insights into science sense-making talk patterns and pedagogical practices of integrating learning on-the-move strategies into informal education with design principles related to augmenting gardens with digital content. Our results suggest that learning on-the-move strategies influence sense-making talk and that embodied interactions within the gardens support science sense-making and role-play. We posit that designs for learner-centered mobile computing can create digital-physical hybrid spaces where learners engage each other and natural objects as they walk through community spaces.     

Learning environments at the margin: Case studies of disenfranchised youth doing science in an aquarium and an after-school program

In this article, we explore how two informal educational contexts—an aquarium and an after-school science program—enabled disenfranchised learners to adopt an identity as insiders to the world of science. We tell the stories of four youth, relating what doing science meant to them and how they positioned themselves in relation to science. We contribute to the extensive literature on the value of learning beyond the school walls, yet focus on ethnically and linguistically diverse youth from low-income backgrounds who have often been excluded from such settings. We suggest that such out-of-school settings are particularly important to youth who have few other opportunities to interact with and relate to science in positive ways.     

高职院校“六位一体”青春健康教育方案的构建与实践

通过组建青春健康教育研究团队,制定教育方案加强青春健康教育师资培训,成立青春健康同伴社,打造青春健康俱乐部,明确青春健康教育内容,实施“六位一体”青春健康教育实践策略等,使“六位一体”的青春健康教育方案以学生需求为中心,以学校为实施主体,充分依托家庭、社会的协同教育功能有效推进青春健康教育活动的深入开展。