Language experience narratives and the role of autobiographical reasoning in becoming an urban science teacher

One of the central challenges globalization and immigration present to education is how to construct school language policies, procedures, and curricula to support academic success of immigrant youth. This case-study compares and contrasts language experience narratives along Elena’s developmental trajectory of becoming an urban science teacher. Elena reflects upon her early language experiences and her more recent experiences as a preservice science teacher in elementary dual language classrooms. The findings from Elena’s early schooling experiences provide an analysis of the linkages between Elena’s developing English proficiency, her Spanish proficiency, and her autobiographical reasoning. Elena’s experiences as a preservice teacher in two elementary dual language classrooms indicates ways in which those experiences helped to reframe her views about the intersections between language learning and science learning. I propose the language experience narrative, as a subset of the life story, as a way to understand how preservice teachers reconstruct past language experiences, connect to the present, and anticipate future language practices.     

Children’s Narrating as a Way of Learning About Other People’s Beliefs in Interaction with Teachers

As a genre of talk, narratives represent important building blocks in children’s learning in many fields. The purpose of the study presented in this article is to examine how teachers can encourage children’s learning about people’s beliefs through narrating. Narratives play an important part in children’s learning to understand other people and how they will act according to what they believe, think or know. This study is based on video observations of six children, 3 and 4 years old, and their spontaneous personal narratives told to teachers over a period of 8 months. The narrative analysis revealed that in most of the narratives the teachers were passive listeners or were concerned about the structure of events. The teachers seldom asked questions about the children’s mental state or disagreed with the child in ways that revealed their different beliefs. Suggestions about implications of this study are that early childhood teacher education should focus on talking with children about what they may think or believe concerning narrated events, and also reveal what they think and believe themselves.     

Navigating role forces and the aesthetic|authentic caring dialectic: a novice urban science teacher’s developmental trajectory

Examining role forces and resources available to new teachers is crucial to understanding how teachers use and expand cultural, social, and symbolic resources and how they engage teaching for social justice and caring in urban science education. This critical narrative inquiry explores three levels of story. First, the narratives explore my role as a district science staff developer and my efforts to leverage district resources to improve students’ opportunities to learn science. Second, the narratives explore the ways in which a novice science teacher, Tina, navigated role forces and the aesthetic|authentic caring dialectic in a high poverty, urban school. A third level of narrative draws on sociological theories of human interaction to explore role forces and how they shaped Tina’s developmental trajectory. I describe how Tina expanded cultural, social, and symbolic resources to enact her teaching role.     

Tempered radicals: elementary teachers’ narratives of teaching science within and against prevailing meanings of schooling

Science educators and researchers have bemoaned the lack of reform-based science in elementary schools and focused on teachers’ difficulties (i.e., lack of knowledge, interest, experience) in enacting quality science pedagogy. We present compelling evidence that challenges assumptions about science education reform and draw on a practice theory perspective to examine the stories, commitments and identities of thirteen teachers, whose beliefs and practices aligned with those promoted by science education reform documents. Through ethnographic interviews, we learned about these teachers’ critical science experiences, perceived science teacher identities, and their goals and commitments. Their stories highlight institutional and sociohistorical difficulties of enacting reform-based science, the many biases, contradictions, and unintended consequences prevalent in educational policy and practice today, and emphasize how easily the status quo can get reproduced. These teachers had to work as ‘tempered radicals’, ‘working the system’ to teach in ways that were consistent with reform-based science.     

Reflective Teachers and Teacher Educators in the Pacific Region: Conversations with us not about us

This article reports on a study of Pacific primary school teachers’ and university lecturers’ reflections on their involvement in the in-service Bachelor of Education degree programme offered at the regional University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji. Two rich sets of data have emerged from this study. Firstly, there are a number of critical reflections by ourselves as teacher educators concerning levels of equitable student access and participation in our degree as it is reconceptualised for distance and flexible delivery to increase levels of teacher professionalism across the Pacific region. Secondly, there has emerged a set of statements from teachers themselves about: teaching and learning; professional development opportunities; and what it means to be a professional educator in the Pacific region. This later data suggests an alternative set of voices in what has largely been a “conversation between us about them” conducted by Ministries of Education, Curriculum Development Units, USP, other educational bodies and the media in the Pacific, but particularly Fiji, about teachers and teachers’ work. Critical reflection upon our own practice as teacher educators and the voices of experienced teachers are particularly pertinent not only as we seek to reshape a degree programme to suit the needs of the region’s primary school teachers but also as “rethinking” debates about the purposes of education in the Pacific region are on-going yet exclusive.     

Facilitating critical reflection on practice through collaborative research

This paper emanates from a study that analysed the critical reflection of teacher researchers as they talked about their investigations of the home cultures and literacies of a small group of children from socioculturally diverse family contexts. The collaborative research enterprise was undertaken by university and teacher researchers. The important role that collaborative teacher research and social interaction played in the critical reflection and co-construction of professional understandings in the project is the focus of this paper. The teacher researchers’ theorising about the complexity of their work as a result of the collaborative enterprise is discussed. Through the voiced research and critical reflection of the teachers, it has become obvious that their life’s experiences and resources are powerful in their pedagogical theorising. Teachers comment on the way in which they are positioned by ‘the system’ as technicians and how they experience tension between their own professional and primary discourses and that of the system. It is suggested that teachers be given opportunity within their work sites to enter the conversations about curriculum, pedagogy and change in knowledgeable and meaningful ways that are grounded in collaborative reflection and research. This paper explores the critical reflection and the social construction of new understandings about the complexity of teachers’ work that occurred in a collaborative research project carried out by a university-based researcher and four school-based early years teacher researchers. It will show how the collaborative research process facilitated critical reflection on previously unquestioned or unconsidered issues about the teachers’ work. The paper has been written by the university researcher under the watchful eye of the teacher researchers who want to remain anonymous. Their pseudonyms have been used. When the terms of this project were negotiated among the group, it was agreed that the voices of the teachers would always be reported authentically and anonymously. It was also agreed that any theorising, integrated language analysis (Freeman, 1996) or reporting that might be carried out, would be done by the university researcher That is not to say that the teacher researchers have not spoken about their involvement in the project to colleagues in professional development forums and conferences. Nor is to say that the teachers were not privy to the analysis process. It is to say that written reports for publication are to be done by the university researcher.     

Voices of Identity in a Chicana Teacher’s Occupational Narratives of the Self

The research area of teacher narrative inquiry has identified links between the personal and professional identities of teachers. Although teacher narrative inquiry takes narrative texts as its data, insufficient attention has been given to the functions of narratives as forms of discourse that are utilized in the construction of identity. In the present study, the concept of narrative identity guided the analysis of a Chicana teacher’s personal experience narratives. The analysis of six narratives told during interviews conducted across a year’s time examined how the voices in the narratives, communicated through reported speech, represented the relational, discursive, and ideological social worlds within which the Chicana teacher’s occupational identity was shaped. The reported speech in the Chicana teacher’s narratives quoted the voices of significant Others, such as her family members and the parents of her students. The Chicana teacher’s narratives crafted her response to the tensions and challenges that these voices represented to her emerging occupational identity as a bilingual education teacher. In her narratives, the Chicana teacher also constructed continuity across the distinct phases of her occupational identity as a bilingual teacher that included transitions from college student, to novice bilingual teacher, to experienced bilingual teacher. René Galindo is an Associate Professor in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado at Denver and has a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. His recent publications on language policy, bilingual education, and immigration politics have appeared in the Harvard Latino Law Review, The Journal of Latinos and Education, and Latino Studies.     

Addressing Equity and Diversity with Teachers Though Informal Science Institutions and Teacher Professional Development

This study explores how activities developed by science experts in partnership with middle school teachers were employed and interpreted. The goals of this partnership were to (a) help the science teacher meet earth science content standards in new ways, (b) expose students to ‘real world’ experiences outside their school setting, and (c) positively impact teacher practice by providing a program to be used as a catalyst for future learning. Over 300 sixth graders mostly underrepresented science students attended activities at an aquarium serving an urban West Coast urban context. Science teachers, non-science teachers, scientists, and volunteers were all engaged in pre-trip instruction, professional development opportunities, and follow-up activities as this partnership effort explored ways to enhance local literacy initiatives across the curriculum. Results suggest that teacher beliefs about informal education impacted their view and participation in the program and the level of submersion of teachers in collaboration strongly affects the ability to serve underrepresented students on informal excursions. Implications for teacher education and outreach are discussed.     

Looking in a science classroom: exploring possibilities of creative cultural divergence in science teaching and learning

Worldwide proliferation of pedagogical innovations creates expanding potential in the field of science education. While some teachers effectively improve students’ scientific learning, others struggle to achieve desirable student outcomes. This study explores a Taiwanese science teacher’s ability to effectively enhance her students’ science learning. The authors visited a Taipei city primary school class taught by an experienced science teacher during a 4-week unit on astronomy, with a total of eight, 90-minute periods. Research methods employed in this study included video capture of each class as well as reflective interviews with the instructor, eliciting the teacher’s reflection upon both her pedagogical choices and the perceived results of these choices. We report that the teacher successfully teaches science by creatively diverging from culturally generated educational expectations. Although the pedagogical techniques and ideas enumerated in the study are relevant specifically to Taiwan, creative cultural divergence might be replicated to improve science teaching worldwide.     

Counter-storying the grand narrative of science (teacher) education: towards culturally responsive teaching

John Settlage’s article—Counterstories from White Mainstream Preservice Teachers: Resisting the Master Narrative of Deficit by Default—outlines his endeavour to enable pre-service teachers to develop culturally responsive science teaching identities for resisting the master narrative of deficit thinking when confronted by the culturally different ‘other.’ Case study results are presented of the role of counterstories in enabling five pre-service teachers to overcome deficit thinking. In this forum, Philip Moore, a cultural anthropologist and university professor, deepens our understanding of the power and significance of counterstories as an educational tool for enabling students to deconstruct oppressive master narratives. Jill Slay, dean of a science faculty, examines her own master narrative about the compatibility of culturally similar academics and graduate students, and finds it lacking. But first, I introduce this scholarship with background notes on the critical paradigm and its adversary, the grand narrative of science education, following which I give an appreciative understanding of John’s pedagogical use of counterstories as a transformative strategy for multi-worldview science teacher education.     

Individuals and Leadership in an Australian Secondary Science Department: A Qualitative Study

In this article, we consider the complex and dynamic inter-relationships between individual science teachers, the social space of their work and their dispositions towards teacher leadership. Research into the representation of school science departments through individual science teachers is scarce. We explore the representations of four individual teachers to the assertions of teacher leadership proposed by Silva et al. (Teach Coll Rec, 102(4):779–804, 2000). These representations, expressed during regular science department meetings, occur in the social space of Bourdieu’s “field” and are a reflection of the “game” of science education being played within the department. This departmentally centred space suggests an important implication when considering the relationship between subject departments and their schools. The development of an individual’s representation of teacher leadership and the wider “field” of science education appears to shape the individual towards promoting their own sense of identity as a teacher of science, rather than as a teacher within a school. Our work suggests that for these individuals, the important “game” is science education, not school improvement. Consequently, the subject department may be a missing link between efforts to improve schools and current organizational practices.     

A Study of Teacher Candidates’ Experiences Investigating Global Climate Change Within an Elementary Science Methods Course

We investigated the inclusion of a curricular module on global climate change in an Elementary Science Methods course. Using complementary research methods, we analyzed findings from 63 teacher candidates’ drawings, questionnaires, and journal entries collected throughout their participation in the module. We highlighted three focal cases to illustrate the diversity of participants’ experiences. Findings suggest potential positive impacts on teacher candidates’ content understanding related to global climate change, confidence to teach, and awareness of resources to support their future science instruction. Recommendations for science teacher education underscore the importance of providing opportunities for teacher candidates to increase their relevant content understanding, helping teacher candidates become familiar with appropriate curricular resources, and engaging in ongoing conversation and evaluation of developing views and understandings related to global climate change.     

A “Toolkit” for developing critically reflective science teachers

The purpose of this paper is to describe various “tools” we use to facilitate critical reflection as we teach prospective science teachers. The notion of “tools” refers to materials and experiences used to facilitate prospective teachers’ critical reflection on science teaching and learning. Reflective tools are not intrusive devices used by instructors to analyse mechanically what prospective teachers are learning; rather, these tools are intended to provide prospective teachers with the means to generate and critique their own views of science teaching and learning. Each tool is described herein with respect to its potential use and the way in which it is introduced to prospective science teachers. We conclude with discussion of the potential for reflective tools to contribute to research on reform of science teacher education, with particular attention to primary teacher preparation.     

Elementary Teachers’ Teaching for Conceptual Understanding: Learning From Action Research

This study reports teachers’ learning through action research on students’ conceptual understanding. The study examined (a) the teachers’ views about science teaching and learning, (b) the teachers’ learning about their teaching practices and (c) the conditions that supported the teachers’ learning through action research. A total of 14 elementary in-service teachers’ course discussion, self-video reflection, action research reports, and learning reflection were analyzed. Findings revealed that (a) the teachers in this study commonly espoused the importance of probing and utilizing students’ preconceptions in science teaching, but they demonstrated various levels of epistemological understanding of student learning and teaching, (b) the teachers experienced the action research as a means to evaluate science teaching methods and changing their teaching practices, and (c) the teachers identified sharing goals, problems, and solutions as an essential supporting condition for their learning through action research. Implications for professional development and further research are discussed.     

The Interactions of Conceptions of Teaching Science and Environmental Factors to Produce Praxis in Three Novice Teachers of Science

One strategy for implementing learner-centered teaching is through the preparation of teachers and their induction into the profession. This article presents case studies of three secondary science teachers that follow them from their science teacher education program that advocated teaching for conceptual change as one approach to learner-centered teaching into their first years of teaching. The article’s purpose is to describe the teachers’ initial conceptions of teaching science carried over from their teacher preparation program, and how they integrated those conceptions with the environmental influences of their classrooms and schools to produce praxis. Data were collected from the participants in several different ways during the participants’ pre-service year and during their first year or two of teaching: Observation of the participants’ teaching; related interviews with participants; and their action research journals. As they approached the end of their first or second year of teaching, all three teachers demonstrated increased levels of confidence in their teaching competence, both in their classroom performance and their places in their departments and schools. None of them had, however, fully implemented conceptual change teaching approach that was the specific goal of their teacher preparation program.     

The influence of theoretical tools on teachers’ orientation to notice and classroom practice: a case study

Assumptions about the construction and the transmission of knowledge and about the nature of mathematics always underlie any teaching practice, even if often unconsciously. I examine the conjecture that theoretical tools suitably chosen can help the teacher to make such assumptions explicit and to support the teacher’s reflection on his/her previous as well as future educational practice. In particular, I show how an epistemological vision of mathematics in resonance with a model of cognitive dynamics can work as a powerful tool to support a teacher’s stable and autonomous attitude of noticing. To support this argumentation, I present some experimental data concerning a case study of one teacher. Through a methodological frame suitably arranged I try to describe how the teacher’s ability to rely on this particular theoretical frame affects: the choice of the global goals in mathematics education; the design of educational interventions; the interpretation of learners’ cognitive behaviours; and the assessment.     

Teacher perceptions of professional development needs and the implementation of the K-6 science and technology syllabus

This study examines teacher perceptions regarding professional development practices used in a region of the NSW Department of School Education to support the implementation of the K-6 Science and Technology Syllabus. The findings from a survey of 97 teachers indicate that teachers have a preference for ‘traditional’ models of in-service which may not bring about significant changes. Teachers also perceive that change is brought about through the influence of external factors such as in-service and resources which are not directly the responsibillity of individual teachers. This contrasts with the perception that the inability to change is due to internal personal qualities. Specializations; K-6 teacher education in science and technology education, children's learning in science and technology.     

Hip-hop as a resource for understanding the urban context A review of Christopher Edmin’s: Science education for the hip-hop generation, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2010

This review explores Edmin’s “Science education for the hip-hop generation” by documenting how he frames hip-hop as a means to access urban student culture. He argues that hip-hop is more than a mere music genre, but rather a culture that provides young people with ways of connecting to the world. Two primary ideas emerged as central to his work. First, he contends that students develop communal relationships and collective identities based on the common experiences expressed in hip-hop. Second, he identifies how the conscious recognition of institutional oppression serves a central feature in urban schools. Emdin’s rich, and personal call for a greater understanding of hip-hop culture provides the text with an unmatched strength. He skillfully uses personal narratives from his own experience as well as quotes and references from hip-hop songs to make the nuances of hip hop transparent to science educators. Conversely, the limitation of this text is found in its unfulfilled promise to provide pragmatic examples of how to engage in a hip-hop based science education. Emdin’s work is ultimately valuable as it extends our current knowledge about urban students and hip-hop in meaningful ways.     

How Do Pre-Service Science Teachers’ Views on Science, Scientists, and Science Teaching Change Over Time in a Science Teacher Training Program?

Every aspect of teaching, including the instructional method, the course content, and the types of assessments, is influenced by teachers’ attitudes and beliefs. Teacher education programs play an important role in the development of beliefs regarding teaching and learning. The purpose of the study was to document pre-service teachers’ views on science, scientists, and science teaching as well as the relations between these views and the offered courses over several years spent in an elementary science teacher training program. The sample consisted of 145 pre-service elementary science teachers who were being trained to teach general science to students in the 6th through 8th grades. The research design was a cross-sectional study. Three different instruments were used to collect the data, namely, the “Draw a Scientist Test”, “Draw a Science Teacher Test”, and “Students’ Views about Science” tests. The elementary science teacher training program influenced pre-service science teachers’ views about science, scientists and science teaching to different degrees. The most pronounced impact of the program was on views about science teaching. Participants’ impressions of science teaching changed from teacher-centered views to student-centered ones. In contrast, participants’ views about scientists and science did not change much. This result could be interpreted as indicating that science teacher training programs do not change views about science and scientists but do change beliefs regarding teaching science.