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Building upon a Freirean notion of dialogic education, the purpose of this multi-case study was to explore what happened when secondary science teachers came together with Latinx parents for their children's science learning in the context of a community-based science learning program. Constant comparative analysis of data revealed similarities and differences among the cases that were analyzed in three categories: recognition, adaptation, and pro-action. Implications are that in-depth exposure to content-based cultural immersion programs with parents can be beneficial for teachers to cultivate a broader vision of science (and other content area) teaching linked to students' lives and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case of two middle school science teachers engaged in a long-term professional learning project is used to complicate the story of teacher change and agency and the presumed relationships between teacher knowledge and practice. Becky and Kelly were highly participatory in all aspects of a multi-year professional learning project, yet, when observed in their classrooms, they did not seem to enact project practices in robust ways during their instruction. Framed through the dominant professional development literature, our project would seem to be a 'failure' at promoting teacher change. However, using a post-qualitative framing of our ethnographic fieldwork, an alternative storyline emerges, involving the intricate negotiations of power dynamics, competing discourses, assemblages of multiple entities and relations that Becky and Kelly navigated. These complex assemblages shaped the teachers' understandings of their multilingual Latinx students as science learners in ways that often ran contrary to what they learned during the project professional development. In this retelling, drawing on the notion of agential realism, we show how teachers' knowledge and subjectivities were dynamically reconfigured in relation to local sociopolitical, material, and discursive assemblages shaping their practices in what we have framed elsewhere as multiplicities of enactment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for students to exhibit an in-depth understanding of scientific inquiry practices, including direct observation, creative design thinking, and argumentation based on evidential learning. To support academic equity for multilingual learners, these new expectations require reconceptualization of science teacher education and classroom instruction, whereby emphasis is placed on incorporating the linguistic and cultural repertoires of learners through multimodal and open-ended learning activities. To support this shift in practices, this paper presents a culturally sustaining systemic functional linguistics (CS SFL) framework for science teachers and multilingual classrooms. CS SFL praxis emphasizes three intersecting areas: language development, knowledge development, and cultural sustenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using findings from a 4‐year research and development effort, we propose an updated model of sheltered instruction for science classrooms that leverages the opportunities provided by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to better support multilingual learners in middle and high school science. Using data from teacher implementation logs and interviews, we examine how secondary grades science teachers' participation in our professional learning framework and subsequent enactments of an initial set of project instructional practices led these teachers to articulate nuanced and strategic adaptations to the initial practices to better meet the needs of the multilingual learners in their classrooms. We found that teachers moved away from implementing sheltered instruction practices based on general principles or formal classifications, such as students' English language proficiency level, instead taking a more nuanced approach to adopting, adapting and rejecting practices based on perceived needs, assets, and personal knowledge about individual multilingual students in the specific disciplinary context of science. Based on this analysis, we conceptualize and refine what we now see as a new and exploratory set of Next Generation Sheltered Instruction practices for integrating science and language to support multilingual learners in secondary science classrooms in the age of the NGSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using three constructs taken from Latour's 2005 book,Reassembling the Social, we consider our work in 2 contexts that were part of a project to support science teachers working with English learners: an 8th-grade physical science class in a summer science enrichment academy, and a 6th-grade Earth science class in a public middle school. We utilize Latour's constructs of (a) group formation, (b) mediators and intermediaries, and (c) traces of intentionality to interpret the interactions that occur in these spaces. We analyze these interactions to make a broader argument about the limitations ofimprovement scienceperspectives that are increasingly influential in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education research in the U.S. context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many teachers collaborated with and spoke up for multilingual families during the pandemic. Yet, little is known about how and why teachers' understanding of multilingual family engagement changed during remote teaching. This study gives six teachers from a school district with a small proportion of multilingual students a voice to tell their stories. Figured worlds theory and discourse analysis were used to interpret in-depth data to uncover how the figured world of multilingual family engagement developed for this group of teachers during COVID-19. Findings showed that even if these teachers dealt with the same challenges of remote teaching as other educators, they quickly began to realize how important partnerships with the families are. This new understanding resulted in a realignment of their actions. Moreover, these teachers became agents of change as they started to address inequities on behalf of their students which were increasingly made visible by the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Science education has a central role to play in preparing a scientifically literate citizenry that is capable of understanding complex environmental challenges facing human societies and making well-informed and evidence-based decisions that help resolve these challenges. However, evidence suggests that most Americans are poorly equipped with the knowledge necessary for informed environmental action. In this study, we attempted to understand how the language of science textbooks works to represent the world for students in distinct ways that have serious implications for their ecological literacy. Using a methodological framework based on critical discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics, we focused on clarifying the textual representations of the relationships between natural and social systems as portrayed in a seventh-grade science textbook that is widely adopted in middle schools in Georgia, United States. Results indicate that this science textbook offers outdated representations of natural systems' relationships with social systems and the role of human agency in these relationships. We discuss implications of these textual representations and call for reformed science textbooks that underscore the ecological embeddedness of the social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In exploring how emergent bilingual learners' prior knowledge from home and play contexts might influence their scientific reasoning, this study drew upon two distinct research traditions: (a) experimental research from the developmental and cognitive psychology tradition, and (b) research on culturally and linguistically diverse learners from the sociocultural tradition. Purpose: As part of a larger research project to improve science teaching and learning in culturally and linguistically diverse elementary schools, we explored the knowledge that fourthgrade emergent bilingual learners brought to the classroom from home and play contexts, as well as the knowledge that was developed in the classroom. We considered how this out of- school and in-school knowledge related to students' academic abilities to reason scientifically, to follow controlled experiment practices, and to demonstrate knowledge of core science concepts in school. Setting: The research was conducted in elementary schools in a large urban school district in the southeastern United States w ith a linguistically and culturally diverse student population. Participants: A total of 81 fourth-grade students from 27 teachers' classes across six schools were interviewed during a three-year period. These students were selected fa r equal distribution across four ESOL levels, two home languages (Spanish and Haitian Creole), and two genders. Intervention: After being taught by their classroom teacher using a project-developed curriculum unit on the topic of energy that was developed to specifically support bilingual learners, selected students participated in an interactive interview with a member of the research team. Research Design: The design can be described as analytic interview, in which (a) neither control group norpre/post comparisons were used, (b) students were selected purposefully from classrooms based on demographic criteria, (c) student responses were coded both qualitatively and quantitatively, an d (d) a sufficiently large sample size was used to allow for statistical analysis of student responses. Findings: Students' English proficiency level correlated with their ability to express scientific reasoning (in English), but not their ability to engage in controlled experiment practices. The home, school, or play context of the interview questions correlated with students' ability to express science content knowledge about energy. Conclusions: The uneasy tension of applying both cognitive and sociocultural theoretical traditions enriches and also complicates our understanding of how students learn to reason scientifically, how they engage in controlled experiment practices, and how they express science content knowledge. Curriculum materials, student assessments, and teacher professional development can all benefit from a better understanding of how emergent bilingual learners leverage their prior knowledge and epistemologies from both home and school contexts, as they engage in science learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a larger investigation into the educational experiences of Haitians in South Florida, this study explores factors that influence the identity development and academic success of Haitian students. Individual and focus group interviews with Haitian students, parents, and teachers provide the context for studying how pressures from both home and school shape the identity development of Haitian youth. Using a conceptual framework grounded in both structural and cultural analysis of identity formation, we describe three themes that emerged from our analysis: (a) learning as recitation or inquiry, (b) teacher as strict parent or lenient spectator, and (c) peers like me or Americanization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recently, harsh immigration policies have made the lives of the new immigrant Diaspora in the southeastern United States extremely challenging. Disturbed by the impact of these sociopolitical changes on students, their families, and their teachers, as multicultural educators, we have turned for help to recent research and praxis from the U.S. and Europe that overtly challenges anti-immigration discourse. We examine two theoretical perspectives that can support educators in talking back and acting against anti-immigration discourses and practices in schools and communities. We provide cases of our own work in the southeastern United States to test the value of these theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded in teacher professional development addressing the intersection of student diversity and content area instruction, this study examined school teachers'' pedagogical reasoning complexity as they reflected on their second language learners'' science problem solving abilities using both home and school contexts. Teachers responded to interview questions after watching a video of one of their students engaged in a science problem solving task. Over a 5-year period, 206 teacher interviews were conducted with a total of 133 teachers. Results indicated significant differences across the dimensions of pedagogical reasoning complexity as teachers expressed both deficit and resource oriented thinking. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

How to engage culturally and linguistically diverse students in learning science is a relatively new field of study. Researchers have begun to address this question using a range of theoretical perspectives, including: (a) a cognitively based perspective, (b) a cross-cultural perspective, and (c) a sociopolitical perspective. Although proponents of these perspectives share the belief that connecting students' cultural and linguistic experiences to the practices of science is central to student engagement, the specific approaches proposed to best achieve this goal differ. The authors explain each perspective using examples from representative research programs and discuss the unique ways that each perspective addresses the challenge of providing engaging and equitable learning opportunities for culturally and linguistically diverse students in science classrooms. They offer implications for instructional strategies that teachers can use to make their classrooms more engaging and equitable science learning environments for diverse student groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Science curriculum and instruction in K-12 settings in the United States is currently dominated by an emphasis on the science standards movement of the 1990s and the resulting standards-based high-stakes assessment and accountability movement of the 2000s. We argue that this focus has moved the field away from important philosophical understandings of science teaching and learning that have their roots in the history of both learning theory and scientific discovery. We offer a philosophical argument, as well as a model for implementation, grounded in the 19th century notion of 'natural philosophy,' as well as Dewean progressivism and Piaget's notion of reconstruction through rediscovery, for the important place of the history of science in modern science education. We provide curricular examples of this model, as well as a discussion of how it might be implemented as part of teacher education. We focus our discussion on the elementary and middle school grades, because teachers at these levels tend to have more limited science content knowledge than their secondary school peers, making them more dependent upon curricular materials and thus more heavily influenced by curricular reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address issues of science curriculum for nonmainstream students—students of color, students learning English as a new language, and students from low-income families—who are often concentrated in urban schools. First, we describe a theoretical framework for equitable learning opportunities with nonmainstream students. Building on this framework, we then discuss challenges in designing and implementing science curriculum materials for these students. Although some of these challenges affect nonmainstream students more broadly, other challenges are more directly related to specific student groups. Next, we provide examples of curriculum development and research programs to illustrate key components in the theoretical framework and to highlight how these programs address challenges in curriculum design and implementation. Finally, we offer an agenda to guide future research and development efforts. We discuss how alternative, sometimes competing, theoretical views of curriculum development in the literature can be brought together in the context of high-stakes testing and accountability policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the role that language plays in the academic and social transition of Haitian children and parents to urban U.S. schools across multiple school settings, demographic groups, and languages. Semistructured individual interviews and focus groups were conducted with groups of 12 Haitian American teachers, 12 Haitian parents of grade school children, and 12 Haitian students who had gone to school both in Haiti and in the US. Using the theoretical constructs of linguistic identity and actor networks, we describe three themes that emerged from our analysis of language use: (1) an affinity for multiple languages, (2) a desire to be multicultural, and (3) a responsibility to help others in the community. These themes point to potent bridges for aiding Haitian students as they adapt to urban U.S. schools, as well as indicating sources of potential linguistic and cultural conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key to improving urban science and mathematics education is to facilitate the mutual understanding of the participants involved and then look for strategies to bridge differences. Educators need new theoretical tools to do so. In this paper the argument is made that the concept of "boundary spanner" is such a tool. Boundary spanners are individuals, objects, media, and other experiences that link an organization to its environment. They serve critical communicative roles, such as bridges for bringing distinct discourses together, cultural guides to make discourses of the "other" more explicit, and change agents for potentially reshaping participants' discourses. This ethnographic study provides three examples of boundary spanners found in the context of an urban public high school of science, mathematics, and technology: boundary media, boundary objects, and boundary experiences. The analysis brings to the foreground students' and teachers' distinct discourses about 'good student identity," "good student work," and "good summer experience" and demonstrates how boundary spanners shaped, were shaped by. and sometimes brought together participants' distinct discourses. An argument is made for boundary spanners' practical and theoretical utility: practically, as a tool for enhancing meaning-making between diverse groups, and theoretically, as a heuristic tool for understanding the reproductive and transformative aspects of urban science education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on a three-year study of a half-day urban magnet high school founded upon a desire to provide rigorous science, math and technology experiences to students who would not otherwise have access to such educational opportunities. Construction of the institution of a preferred student identity; Transformation of the identity by the students in the school; Role of student initiatives in gradual institutional shifts in student expectations; Implications of the findings for teaching and learning in other urban school settings.

This study reports on findings from the "Science Theater/Teatro de Ciencias" (sTc) project. The goal of sTc was to explore the potential of using student-generated computer models as a medium for elementary school students to develop richer and more meaningful explanations of science content. A secondary goal was to effectively engage culturally and linguistically diverse students in science learning. This paper reports on findings from a second/third grade two-way bilingual classroom. Conceptually, I rely upon a sociocultural perspective that differs from previous work that has been done using computer models in science classrooms. Specifically, I explore two issues that expand upon this prior work: 1) the potential value of using computer modeling for science learning in the primary elementary grades; and 2) the role that clarifying one's personal understanding of how science is practiced plays in students' academic success in school science. My assertion is that model- based science instruction can provide an effective strategy for mediating the barriers to success in school science that CLD students (as well as many other students) often encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in parents' roles in promoting students' academic success and career aspirations, especially in STEM areas, has grown as educators and world leaders set goals for expanding and diversifying the STEM workforce and extending science literacy across the globe. Responding to a call for research on fathers' roles, and considering the rise in immigrant populations in many regions of the world, the study reported here investigates the experiences of Latino immigrant fathers and their adolescent sons and daughters who participated in Steps to College through science bilingual family workshops. Findings, informed by figured worlds theory, illustrate the ways in which fathers and their children figured identities together that included engaging with science learning in pursuit of college and career pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on a pedagogical model designed to support the teaching and learning of the language of science investigation practices with middle school emergent bilingual learners, we developed a series of soccer and science investigations to promote interest and engagement in science learning. We used assemblage theory to study how students engaged in and acted within this bilingual curriculum situated in an afterschool soccer practice context. We found that soccer, a passion for several Latino students, can be used as a cultural tool for science teachers to support the emerging bilingual students’ learning process. Implications for educators and researchers considering ways of integrating diverse students’ cultural practices and passions with culturally sustaining pedagogies for science teaching and learning are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: While different instructional approaches have been proposed to integrate academic content and English proficiency for English language learning (ELL) students, studies examining the magnitude of the relationship are non-existent. This study examined the relationship between the "form" (i.e., conventions, organization, and style/voice) and "content" (i.e., specific knowledge and understanding of science) of expository science writing among third grade ELL students in the beginning and at the end of each year during the three-year implementation of the intervention. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The study is part of a larger five-year research and development project aimed at improving science and literacy achievement of ELL students in urban elementary schools in a large school district. Research Design: The intervention was comprised of curriculum units for students and teachers and professional development workshops for teachers throughout the school year. As a school-wide initiative, all third grade teachers and their students from six treatment schools participated. The study involved 683 third graders during the first year, 661 third graders during the second year, and 676 third grad~ during the third year. Approximately half of the students were Hispanic and the other half were Black, including Haitians and Caribbean Islanders. A writing sample was used as a measure of English proficiency and ability to explain science concepts in writing. At the beginning and end of each school year, teachers administered the writing prompt to their students. Data were analyzed using a hierarchical linear modeling approach. Findings/Results: The results indicated significant relationships between writing form and content at both pretest and posttest, with a stronger relationship at posttest. The effect of English proficiency on the magnitude of the relationship was significant only at posttest, for which the relationship was stronger for non-ELL students. The results suggest that through our intervention over the course of the school year, students with greater English proficiency learned science content and developed English literacy simultaneously, whereas students with lower English proficiency did not show this simultaneous growth to the same degree. Conclusions: Thus, interventions such as ours, which primarily present science curriculum and instruction in English, might be expected to have limited positive effects for ELL students at the beginning and intermediate levels of English proficiency. The results point out potential conflicts in current educational policies, including high-stakes testing and accountability and English-only policies, which affect ELL students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]