“Tjaa,I Do Have Ears,But I Do Not Hear”: New Literacy Studies and the Awakening of a Hearing Teacher

To address the low literacy achievement of minority students, the sociocultural movement of the New Literacy Studies (NLS) encourages us to expand on current understandings of literacy. Instead of thinking of literacy as a neutral set of skills transferable from one setting to another, NLS researchers encourage us to contextualize literacy within individuals’ social and cultural realms. In this view, there are multiple literacies. As a literacy teacher of students who are deaf, I have witnessed students struggling with school-based literacy learning. As I began to examine what I was doing within the classroom, I realized that my assumptions about literacy instruction were the main source of students' struggles. In this study I explore how I used the theoretical perspective of the NLS to expand my understanding of literacy. The findings suggest that, in order to base literacy instruction on students' resources, teachers need to learn to negotiate conflicting educational Discourses on reading and writing, to create a space within the classroom for students to bring in their literacy practices, and to recognize and preserve students' agency and identity in their learning. Findings also indicate the vital role of writing in deaf students' learning of Icelandic.     

Negotiating cultural differences in urban science education: an overview of teacher’s first-hand experience reflection of cogen journey

Classrooms across the United States increasingly find immigrant science teachers paired with urban minority students, but few of these teachers are prepared for the challenges such cultural assimilation presents. This is particularly true in secondary science education. Identifying potential prospects for culturally adaptive pedagogy in science education is important for students and teachers alike because it provides means for increasing marginalized students’ access to science fields. In this autoethnography, I document my experience as an immigrant science teacher in an urban intermediate school in New York City. Although I possessed the content knowledge highly valued by the current neoliberal agenda, I lacked the cultural adaptivity necessary to foster a successful learning environment. I utilized cogenerative dialogue (cogen) as a tool to ameliorate instances of cultural misalignments and improve teaching and learning in my classroom. The results of the study show that the interstitial culture produced through the implementation of the different forms of cogen became a reference point to draw upon in improving the overall learning environment.     

Learning to Think of Learning to Teach as Situated: A self-study

Teacher educators are expected to help their student teachers learn how to teach. How teacher educators do this depends on their beliefs, particularly on how they think about teacher learning. Earlier in my work as a teacher educator I thought of teacher learning as a psychological process or phenomenon and this view guided my work with my student teachers. Subsequently, I have been drawn to pragmatist and sociocultural views that portray human thinking and acting as intimately linked to the physical, social and cultural environment. Adopting such views helped me to see teacher learning in a new light, less as a mental issue and more as a social and cultural issue. Here I reconstruct my transformation of coming to see learning to teach as situated.     

Gender,identity and culture in learning physics

Student engagement in science, as defined by Iva Gurgel, Mauricio Pietrocola, and Graciella Watanabe, is of great importance because a student’s perceived compatibility with science learning is highly influenced by personal identities, or how students see themselves in relations to the world. This can greatly impact their learning experiences. In this forum, I build on the work of Gurgel, Pietrocola, and Watanabe by exploring the relationships between engagement in physics and gender, and by looking at the expansive nature of the concept of culture. I expand the conversation by investigating ways in which learning science has impacted my own identity/worldview, particularly how it affects my personal teaching and learning experiences. I focus the conversation around the relationship between gender and the experience of learning science to further the dialogue concerning identity and how it impacts engagement in science. I also look at the role of didactic transposition in the perceived disconnect with science. I reveal my experiences and analysis through a personal narrative.     

Reframing Teacher Education for Learning Equity

The current models of teacher education in the Western world are still largely based upon the building of students' knowledge and skills using approaches similar to those designed for the assembly lines of the past. The prevailing model of schooling is still centered around the notion that schools are places young people go to watch their teacher work. In the advent of the innovation age, teacher education requires reinvention around the emerging knowledge base about learning and the key role teachers play in addressing issues of equity and student success in this rapidly changing and complex world.

A panel of eminent international scholars, from a range of fields, formulated evidence-based frameworks to guide future teacher education models globally. The frameworks focus on “learning equity.” In addition, the team launched a cloud-based Learning Equity Research and Resource Center, hosting some of the planet's best scholarly and applied research on learning sciences and equity-based practices. The team's research agenda is grounded in learning theory, cognitive science, technology, social justice, and an equity mission to provide learning environments and quality teachers that enable the potential of all children.

The Global Learning Equity Network (GLEN) challenges the preparation of a new kind of teacher for a new kind of school, one built on a learning center rather than a testing center model. GLEN's research, resources, and frameworks are designed to assist new teachers to enable all children to discover their passion(s), grow their talents, and be inspired to lead healthy, happy, and productive lives.     

Using the Nuthall lens on learning to sharpen perceptions of teacher education practice

In this article I consider what teacher educators might learn about our own teaching practice from Nuthall's work on learning in elementary school classrooms. Using key ideas from Nuthall's theory of student learning applied to data from two prior studies of my own teacher education practice, I illustrate how his work might provide a productive way for teacher educators to analyze and critique the tasks they use to promote the learning of prospective teachers.     

Excavating silences and tensions of agency|passivity in science education reform

I reflect on studies by Rodriguez and Carlone, Haun-Frank, and Kimmel to emphasize the ways in which they excavate silences in the science education literature related to linguistic and cultural diversity and situating the problem of reform in teachers rather than contextual factors, such as traditional schooling discourses and forces that serve to marginalize science. I propose that the current push for top-down reform and accountability diminishes opportunities for receptivity, learning with and from students in order to transform teachers’ practices and promote equity in science education. I discuss tensions of agency and passivity in science education reform and argue that attention to authentic caring constitutes another silence in the science education literature. I conclude that the current policy context positions teachers and science education researchers as tempered radicals struggling against opp(reg)ressive reforms and that there is a need for more studies to excavate these and other silences.     

A STEM extended learning project to raise awareness of social justice in a Year 3 primary classroom

Governments worldwide are advocating for STEM curricula as essential to economic viability but the opportunity for STEM to create a re-envisioned world where there is equal access to wealth, opportunities, and privileges is less prominent. The literature has also not clearly articulated how the combination of the individual disciplines areas: science, technology, engineering and maths should be structured to form a cohesive paradigm within a contextual real-world problem. This paper details one example of a STEM unit had with an equity and social justice agenda. The teacher orchestrated a range of learning experiences to develop student intellectual and emotional engagement with the learning experience sequence, which was to design a pair of shoes for students in a refugee camp using resources that might be available there. Her teaching approach involved the choreography of student attention to the different dimensions of STEM. While all were in play particular disciplinary concepts and practices were foregrounded at different times. We propose that teaching STEM involves a choreography of focus on the different disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths, with the relative weight at any one time and overall depending on the nature of the task that is to be accomplished.     

Tracing the Discourses of Accountability and Equity: The Case of the Grade 4 Literacy Test in Jamaica

In an attempt to understand how a narrowed version of accountability in the form of high-stakes assessment deepens inequity rather than improves educational equity, we examine three education documents in Jamaica using critical discourse analysis. Our two research questions were: How did each government document position the Grade Four Literacy Test? What did that positioning signify in terms of accountability and equity? Our analyses reveal that the discourse of equity becomes silenced or overpowered in the presence of powerful discourses of accountability. It is to this extent, we contend, that a narrower version of accountability in the form of high-stakes testing serves to compound and complicate inequities in education. We offer the view that a more comprehensive framework for accountability in which teachers are supported and literacy projects are comprehensive and sustained moves closer to achieving, over the long run, the equity that is needed in literacy at the primary level in Jamaica.     

Horse Riding 101: The role of experience in reframing teacher education practices

For this self-study of my teacher education practice, I positioned myself as a novice in the unfamiliar context of learning to ride a horse. This gave me an opportunity to re-experience being an authentic learner and thereby to deepen my understanding of how an individual learns to teach. I recorded my experiences in an electronic journal and analysed what happened over many months of weekly horse-riding lessons. Central to my learning process was feeding key ideas, insights and tentative analyses into discussions with my students and critical friends. As I analysed their responses further, two themes emerged through pattern analysis. First, being a neophyte in horse riding allowed me to empathise strongly with my students' novice status. Second, permitting them to see the development of my expertise through horse riding was helpful to my students. Re-positioning myself as a learner challenged my view of myself as a teacher educator and transformed my teacher education practice.     

Disrupting hegemonic writing practices in school science: Contesting the right way to write

I challenge the ways a positivist view of science has led to the hegemonic discourse on writing to learn science and highlight contradictions in this discourse. I argue for an enabling pedagogy that draws on critical, feminist, and hegemonic pedagogies, and incorporates the affective, the creative, the critical, the cognitive, and diverse language practices set within sociocultural contexts. I advocate hybrid imaginative genres in secondary school science as one vehicle to disrupt hegemonic pedagogy. I describe the interactions between four teachers' beliefs about science and pedagogy and their use of imaginative writing within an enabling pedagogy. I also challenge the rules of scientific writing by using poetry and the first person, amplifying teachers' voices, and foregrounding my personal history. J Res Sci Teach 35: 345–362, 1998.     

Reviews

The authors' experiences of observing teaching and learning in schools have led them to become concerned at the dominant paradigm of a ‘pedagogy of poverty' at the expense of a ‘pedagogy of plenty’. Bernstein's theory of power and control of education knowledge is overtly practised in classrooms globally. This is evidenced in the narrowing of the curriculum in response to the ‘No Child Left Behind’ initiative in the USA and the centrally imposed National Strategies and Standards agenda in the UK. Bernstein's theory is still a means of clarifying the relationships between social class, family income and the education process. It introduced the concept of ‘restricted and elaborated codes’, which has been labelled by its critics as a deficit model for the working-class population. The authors contest that expectations for this new meritocracy have failed to materialise and the expectations for equity have been reduced by the prevailing metric. This ‘pedagogy of poverty’ is now practised in the current ‘one size fits all’ model of teaching and learning operating within narrow accountability based on a ‘testocracy’. This case study demonstrates one teacher using guided group work as a potential strategy for a ‘pedagogy of plenty’.     

Conceptualizing and Exemplifying Science Teachers' Assessment Expertise

Although research in science education has led to new assessment forms and functions, the reality is that little work has been done to unpack and capture what it means for a teacher to develop expertise at assessing science. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, I suggest a conceptualization of assessment expertise that is organized around three dimensions: (a) designing aligned and theoretically cohesive assessment (Design), (b) using assessment to support students' science learning (Use), and (c) equitably assessing language minorities (Equity). The second purpose is to suggest and exemplify various levels of teaching expertise across the three conceptual dimensions using written assessment plans gathered from a study on secondary science pre-service teachers' assessment growth. The contribution of this paper lies in its further conceptual development of assessment expertise, instantiated in a rubric, which can spark discussion about how to capture the range of assessment practices that might be found in science classrooms as well as move toward a potential learning progression of assessment expertise.     

Change,Changing, and Being Changed: A study of self in the throes of multiple accountability demands

Using the narrative inquiry research method, this self-study of my teacher education practices examines the influence of four simultaneous accountability reviews – a national accreditation review, a regional accreditation review, a university system review, and local campus review – on my personal experiences and identity within academia. The inquiry offers a public view of private practice, explores the hidden curriculum of the accountability phenomenon, reveals cover stories individually and collectively lived, and illuminates how my knowledge of accountability increased. Drawing on evidence excerpted from journal entries, work samples, historical documents and meeting notes, I reconstruct a series of changes concerning human subjects reviews, course syllabi requirements, student assignments, grading procedures and personal productivity. The self inquiry reveals individual and institutional compromises that were made to achieve acceptable measures of success as determined by external agencies. Most of all, hard lessons learned amid multiple accountability agendas are brought to the forefront for discussion and analysis. The accumulation of self-studies such as this helps to show the nature of the accountability phenomenon and its pernicious impact on teacher educators' work and personal images of teaching. Such studies demonstrate how desperately productive change is needed in the fields of teaching and teacher education.     

Reconstructing educational theory from the authority of personal experience: how can I best help people learn to teach?

This paper reports data from a three‐year self‐study of teaching two types of students: science method students in theBEd program at Queen's University (Canada), and grade 12 physics students in a secondary school. By returning to the secondary school classroom after many years, I had the opportunity to revisit personally some of the challenges and dilemmas awaiting those beginning their careers as physics teachers. By listening closely to my students, I studied their experiences of learning as I experienced my own ‘re‐learning. One goal of my return to the secondary classroom was to explore ways in which I could model in my own teaching the processes of learning from experience that I wanted to convey to those learning to teach.

From this self‐study has emerged the construct of'authority of experience’ (Munby and Russell, 1994) as a term that can inform reflective practice by suggesting to teachers that they give attention to their own voices and to those of their students, and generally consider the ways in which experience has authority in relation to other sources of authority about teaching and learning to teach. The paper provides data to illustrate this construct and its potential value to those learning to teach. It also considers ways in which this stance toward teacher education represents a reconstruction of educational theory.     

Becoming an urban science educator

This autobiography examines research in which I was involved while learning to teach science in an inner city high school. As an experienced science educator I had mainly experienced schools associated with students from the middle class. When I came to a university in an inner city environment I had to learn first how to be streetwise in the city and then, when I began to teach, I had to negotiate with students my right to teach them. Most students were very resistant to my efforts to teach them science. The paper describes many of the difficulties I experienced as I endeavoured to teach science to students who were ethnically, curriculum to the interests and extant knowledge of students is emphasised. Implications of my experiences are described for three aspects of urban high schools: teaching science, identifying and enacting appropriae science curricula, and educating prospective science teachers.     

Ten Years After the Spellings Commission: From Accountability to Internal Improvement

Student learning outcomes assessment has been increasingly used in U.S. higher education institutions over the last 10 years, partly fueled by the recommendation from the Spellings Commission that institutions need to demonstrate more direct evidence of student learning. To respond to the Commission's call, various accountability initiatives have been launched, profoundly reshaping how assessment has been viewed, implemented, and used in higher education. This article reviews the conceptual and methodological challenges of the assessment agenda for one of the landmark accountability initiatives, the Voluntary System of Accountability, and also documents the notable shift from a strong focus on accountability to an increasing emphasis on internal improvement. This article then discusses the most recent developments in assessment approaches and tools, and proposes a four‐element, one‐enabler assessment cycle for institutions to maximally benefit from their assessment efforts.     

Professional development for university scientists around issues of equity and diversity: Investigating dissent within community

We investigated the role of dissent in a community of university scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and social scientists engaged in a 2‐year professional development project around issues of equity and diversity. Members of this teacher learning community explored issues related to gender and ethnicity in science education, and attempted to develop course materials and instructional strategies inclusive of students from underrepresented groups. We focused our attention on those professional development sessions (6 of the 19) devoted to a contentious yet integral topic in science education: the gendered and multicultural nature of science. We examined conversations initiated by a member's concerns to learn how dissent led (or failed to lead) to new insights into feminist science studies scholarship or to greater understanding of ways to address equity issues in undergraduate science education. We also explored how teacher learners' resulting views of feminist science studies scholarship informed (or failed to inform) changes in their own educational practices. From our qualitative analyses, we highlight the challenges in balancing respect for members' individual voices with collective progress toward project goals, and in structuring conversations initiated by dissent to provide adequate space for deliberation and movement toward deeper understanding of equity and excellence. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 39: 738–771, 2002     

Literacy assessment that counts: mediating,interpreting and contesting translocal policy in a primary school

In Australia, as in many western education systems over the last two decades, discourses of accountability and performativity have reshaped education policy that has in turn reorganised the work of school leaders and teachers. One of the effects of this reorganisation is increased attention to the production, analysis and display of student achievement data. In this paper we examine in detail a sequence of the production and reading of literacy assessment data in a small Catholic school. Our analysis uses institutional ethnography's concept of the ‘active text’, the text as occurring in a specific place and time even as it is articulated to social relations beyond its immediate context. Through this process we learn from those involved how their everyday work brings into being formalised, textually authorised processes in a local site that ensure the school meets accountability requirements, while enabling teachers to resist standardisation of literacy teaching and assessment.