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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.

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 Results indicate that this science textbook offers outdated representations of natural systems' relationships with social systems and the role of human agency in these relationships.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.

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. (Contains 5 notes.)

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.

The Social Problem Solving through Science (SPSS) project engaged middle school-aged youth in the study of local environmental challenges with implications for human health and well-being, both globally and locally. Students considered environmental risk factors in a series of structured activities to develop background knowledge on environmental health issues. Pairs of students then worked together on a relevant topic of their choosing to create and share "public service announcements" in the form of posters to educate their peers, family, and community members about one of the public health topics they had studied. The project goal was to assess the degree to which learning tasks designed to be transformative to students' understanding of their place in the world could also increase students' science knowledge despite that outcome not being a primary focus of instruction. Pre- and post-interviews of the 23 project participants indicated that participation enhanced science content knowledge while also engaging them in a process of decolonization and reinhabitation of their places as members of society. (Contains 2 tables and 1 note.)

While some students have the opportunity to engage in the kinds of structured inquiry and real-world problem solving called for in the science education reform literature, many other students receive only a daily grind of note taking, end-of-chapter questions and sample test items from state assessments. The result is an engagement gap whereby some students come to see science as personally and directly meaningful to their lives and their futures while others come to see science as yet one more subject-area test serving as an obstacle to high school graduation. English language learners (ELL students) have been especially prone to suffer from this engagement gap because of two prevailing assumptions about teaching rigorous content to English learners. First is the assumption that ELL students must develop English language proficiency before they are able to engage in meaningful content-area learning such as science. The second assumption is that the best way to prepare ELL students (and others considered to be "at risk" for test performance) to succeed on high-stakes standardized tests is through drilling and practice with test-like items. Drawing upon examples from two projects with urban middle school students, the author highlights ways that rejecting these assumptions can reduce the engagement gap for ELL students. Both projects used a model of civic engagement to promote science inquiry and academic language development.

This article reports on a 2 1/2-year collaborate project to reform the teaching and learning of science in the context of Mae Jemison Elementary, the lowest performing elementary school in the state of Louisiana. I outline a taxonomy of authentic science inquiry experiences and then use the resulting framework to focus on how project participants interpreted and enacted ideas about collaboration and authenticity. The resulting contextually authentic science inquiry model links the strengths of a canonically authentic model of science inquiry (grounded in the Western scientific canon) with the strengths of a youth-centered model of authenticity (grounded in student-generated inquiry), thus bringing together relevant content standards and topics with critical social relevance. I address the question of how such enactments may or may not promote doing science together and consider the implications of this model for urban science education.

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.

This paper reports on a 3-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. Using the theoretical lens of how a model of an educated person gets culturally produced within the school setting, I attended to: (1) the institutional construction of preferred student identity, (2) ways in which students in the school both took up and transformed this identity, and (3) how these student initiatives played a role in gradual institutional shifts in student expectations. Four constructs--learning, achievement, resistance, and success--were found to play significant roles in how the qualities of an educated person were negotiated through practice in attempts to create a culture of academic success in science and mathematics. These findings have implications for teaching and learning in other urban school settings.

In aiming to create a scientifically literate society, teachers are being asked to present science in a variety of new ways. Science is no longer to be seen primarily as a collection of facts and concepts, but rather, as a process of inquiry and discovery, similar to many of the decisions and actions all people make on a daily basis. The use of appropriate trade books is one way to accomplish this goal of showing science in the making. This article describes how evaluating trade books for good inquiry practices and scientific processed helped preservice teachers examine their future roles in the classroom. (Contains 1 figure.)

Examines the role of second-language issues as a barrier to adequate science education for underrepresented groups in science and engineering. Also explores how current educational reform initiatives provide an opportunity for widespread change in how English-language learners (ELL) learn science. Examines several model projects that attempt to provide innovative science education to linguistically diverse secondary students. Contains 60 references. (Author/PVD)

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]

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]

The article outlines key considerations for developing curriculum materials that bridge the gap between curriculum theory and practice for nonmainstream students in science education. It suggests to develop science curriculum materials and other teacher resources that portray scientists from diverse backgrounds to promote science learning to nonmainstream students. It cites the consequences of continuing to treat curriculum theory and practice as separate domains of academic research.

This study examines elementary students' abilities to conduct science inquiry through their participation in an instructional intervention over a school year. The study involved 25 third and fourth grade students from six elementary schools representing diverse linguistic and cultural groups. Prior to and at the completion of the intervention, the students participated in elicitation sessions as they conducted a semistructured inquiry task on evaporation. The results indicate that students demonstrated enhanced abilities with some aspects of the inquiry task, but continued to have difficulties with other aspects of the task even after instruction. Although students from all demographic subgroups showed substantial gains, students from non-mainstream and less privileged backgrounds in science showed greater gains in inquiry abilities than their more privileged counterparts. The results contribute to the emerging literature on designing learning environments that foster science inquiry of elementary students from diverse backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Earth and Space sciences provide opportunities for content learning in inquiry-based classrooms, emphasizing ways in which science is relevant to the lives of both students and teachers. We are successfully using an Earth Systems approach to prepare preservice elementary school teachers in understanding science content and pedagogy with emphases in technology and mathematics. Using Lake Pontchartrain as the unifying theme across four courses, students learn not only science content, but also scientific process. Students perform research projects on Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, and develop models of changes in water quality that are directly comparable to longitudinal data being collected by research laboratories, Our approach fosters students: a) understanding of science and the scientific process, b) self-confidence in teaching science, c) knowledge of state science-education standards, d) ability to accurately research and prepare lessons on science topics, and e) positive attitudes towards scientific fields of study. Accomplishing these goals required on-going collaboration between the Colleges of Sciences and Education. Surveying and field-testing results suggest that the pre-service teachers in our classes are likely to apply the approach used in our courses to science teaching in their own classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on an ethnographic study of a molecular biology research laboratory. By studying the daily practices of the laboratory members, and interpreting these observations through an anthropological lens grounded in practice theory, the author portrays the social and cultural construction of a scientific community. One persistent theme that has emerged from the current wave of science education reform has been the desirability for science educators to model our science teaching at the K-16 level more closely upon science as carried out by science practitioners. Consideration of an apprenticeship model as a framework for science teaching requires that we have a clear picture of the science practice upon which we wish to model that teaching. The author's findings point to several issues relevant to how we as science educators portray and present science as practiced by natural scientists. The practices the author observed in the laboratory at times conformed to and at other times opposed these ideals of science practice. The present study found evidence of significantly more diverse patterns of language and practice that were seen not only as acceptable, but as necessary for the healthy functioning of the laboratory.

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]