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This essay takes up a question that was left unanswered in the paper by Parsons and Morton, namely, why the African American students interviewed in the study described their best teachers as they did. The theoretical perspectives of Rogoff and Boykin are applied to show the importance of culturally resonant science classrooms that hum with the repertoires and dimensions of African American students. Examples are provided to illustrate the need for science teaching that emerges from, is situated in and relevant to the lives of African American students, as well as approaches that lead to critical, socially transformative science teaching. These examples are also used to illustrate that a small space exists within NGSS for this kind of teaching to be done in science classrooms. Lastly, although student voice is important, surveying African American students to understand how they might best be taught science must be considered in the context of the racialized nature of the students' experiences in the oppressive educational system that they have endured.

A gap has existed between the tools and processes of scientists working on anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC) and the technologies and curricula available to educators teaching the subject through student inquiry. Designing realistic scientific inquiry into AGCC poses a challenge because research on it relies on complex computer models, globally distributed data sets, and complex laboratory and data collection procedures. Here we examine efforts by the scientific community and educational researchers to design new curricula and technology that close this gap and impart robust AGCC and Earth Science understanding. We find technology-based teaching shows promise in promoting robust AGCC understandings if associated curricula address mitigating factors such as time constraints in incorporating technology and the need to support teachers implementing AGCC and Earth Science inquiry. We recommend the scientific community continue to collaborate with educational researchers to focus on developing those inquiry technologies and curricula that use realistic scientific processes from AGCC research and/or the methods for determining how human society should respond to global change.

The authors draw on their own experiences as practitioners, one as a Biology and Agriculture teacher in Kenya, and the other as an educator in a summer science program serving African American youth in a city in the Midwestern United States. They document and analyze moments of language contestation and explore the use of the construct of neoindigenous to see in what ways it illuminates new understandings of continued colonization through language silencing in relation to science teaching and learning. A self-study methodology is used, which includes memory work, narrative, and conversation, and allows the researchers to fuse personal narrative and sociocultural exploration. What emerges are glimpses of what is lost and rendered valueless when English and the language of science are positioned as elite and correct. The research also shows the difficulty for educators of diminishing the power of science that is sustained by access to its language, even when they intentionally try to create hybrid spaces that value non-dominant student language.

Latecomers to science are students who take non-traditional routes into postsecondary science because they are initially missing prerequisites. Latecomers have a lower rate of persistence than traditional science students. This critical discourse analysis of an online forum thread uses Gee's toolkit to explore how latecomers, who have histories of not being recognized as smart enough to do science, find new ways to identify with science. Applying a theoretical lens in which identity is viewed as a process of continual negotiation, which is constrained and afforded by the resources of the relevant figured worlds, it is shown how four latecomers shared reinterpreted histories of being recognized as not smart enough to do science and in doing so, formed solidarity. As part of this process they co-produced a new cultural model in which the ability or inability to ask questions led respectively to success (good grades) or failure (low grades) in science. Used in conjunction with their solidarity, they were not only able to successfully position themselves in the elite figured world of science, but also to reify the result in a form that could potentially support future identification with science. Aspects of the online forum that supported the co-production are explored, including its ability to help students draw on resources from outside of the science program. The importance of encouraging students to discuss their struggles with science and the accompanying construction of solidarity is also discussed. This research is of particular interest to practitioners and researchers interested in supporting non-traditional science students such as latecomers, especially those wishing to move away from deficit views of these students and towards a more complex and agentic understanding of persistence and identity in science.

New forms of classroom participation, envisioned as contributing to democracy, are advocated by the South African national curriculum. This paper investigates what form participatory science teaching can and should take in South Africa where the legacy of colonialism and apartheid remains and considers this question through the efforts of two pre-service teachers who created new norms and forms of classroom participation. Findings demonstrate that extant and resonant cultural practices hold promise in promoting classroom engagement.

This study with 79 students in Montreal, Quebec, compared the educational use of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) global climate model (GCM) to climate education technologies developed for classroom use that included simpler interfaces and processes. The goal was to show how differing climate education technologies succeed and fail at getting students to evolve in their understanding of anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC). Many available climate education technologies aim to convey key AGCC concepts or Earth systems processes; the educational GCM used here aims to teach students the methods and processes of global climate modeling. We hypothesized that challenges to learning about AGCC make authentic technology-enabled inquiry important in developing accurate understandings of not just the issue but how scientists research it. The goal was to determine if student learning trajectories differed between the comparison and treatment groups based on whether each climate education technology allowed authentic scientific research. We trace learning trajectories using pre/post exams, practice quizzes, and written student reflections. To examine the reasons for differing learning trajectories, we discuss student pre/post questionnaires, student exit interviews, and 535 min of recorded classroom video. Students who worked with a GCM demonstrated learning trajectories with larger gains, higher levels of engagement, and a better idea of how climate scientists conduct research. Students who worked with simpler climate education technologies scored lower in the course because of lower levels of engagement with inquiry processes that were perceived to not actually resemble the work of climate scientists.

In this study, we present the cases of two latecomers to college science who, unlike most latecomers in their program, successfully persisted to graduation. An analytic framework of figured worlds, cultural models, and identity work is employed to understand the challenges they faced. The dominant cultural models of learning that were reproduced in their science courses are explored through data drawn from lecture and laboratory observations, teacher and student interviews, and student journals. The analysis shows that the dominant teacher-centered and sink-or-swim cultural models of learning severely limited the available resources for latecomers' identity work. The resources that were available tended to afford recognition as good students, rather than as being good at, or interested in, science. However, by improvising with the available resources, including some acquired outside of the science program, the two latecomers were sometimes able to reposition themselves in more powerful subject positions, which had far-reaching consequences for their science trajectories. We also demonstrate how using a sociocultural framework and methodological approaches that focus on student-teacher interactions yields insights into the persistence of nontraditional students that are not possible when the focus of research is solely on learning and cognitive gains.

This paper reviews university-level efforts to improve understanding of anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC) through curricula that enable student scientific inquiry. We examined 152 refereed publications and proceedings from academic conferences and selected 26 cases of inquiry learning that overcome specific challenges to AGCC teaching. This review identifies both the strengths and weaknesses of each of these case studies. It is the first to go beyond examining the impact of specific inquiry instructional approaches to offer a synthesis of cases. We find that inquiry teaching can succeed by concretising scientific processes, providing access to global data and evidence, imparting critical and higher order thinking about AGCC science/policy and contextualising learning with places and scientific facts. We recommend educational researchers and scientists collaborate to create and refine curricula that utilise geospatial technologies, climate models and communication technologies to bring students into contact with scientists, climate data and authentic AGCC research processes. Many available science education technologies and curricula also require further research to maximise trade-offs between implementation and training costs and their educational value.

This study introduces a new group of students to the postsecondary science agenda: "latecomers to science." Latecomers, who enter postsecondary science through alternative routes because they are missing prerequisites, are less likely to graduate than traditional science students. Challenges to latecomers' persistence are explored through two questions: (1) What trends in science identity trajectories are latecomers to science able to construct during their first year in a college science program? (2) How are latecomers' identity trajectories constrained by or improvised with the cultural models and associated resources available in the figured world of a college science program? These questions are investigated through an analysis of educational activities, reflective writings, and interviews of nine latecomers. We view identification as analogous to velocity and demonstrate how recurring forces exerted by figured worlds and cultural models within them create patterns of acceleration towards or away from science, thus supporting or hindering persistence as identity trajectories gain or lose momentum. Findings show that latecomers' persistence was greatly constrained by two cultural models from the science program: good science students follow a paradigmatic sequence of courses and consistently earn good grades. Occasionally, latecomers improvised to resist these constraints. We illustrate our findings through three cases exemplifying inbound, outbound, and peripheral trends, offering a method of representing trajectories that may lead to new understandings of persistence. We also suggest implications for better supporting latecomers and connect this research to recent developments in the theoretical and methodological use of identity trajectories in understanding access to science.

How can teachers enact a curriculum that is responsive to students and emergent from them when teachers are under enormous constraints to cover specific course content and to prepare students for standardized tests? Rather than an either/or perspective, this article embraces a both/and approach based on the belief that teachers can do both. Drawing upon qualitative classroom data gleaned from 3 years of research in an inner-city high school, four "best practices" inform a science curriculum model based on student voice and choice. In a recursive fashion, both the evidence and aspects of the curriculum that instantiate these practices are described. The end result is a new way of thinking about high school curricula that is situated in the students' lives and experiences and has room for their voices and choices while addressing content standards and the development of critical thinking skills. It also demonstrates how research can inform curriculum development in overt and significant ways, when empirically identified best practices are made visible in a curriculum's organization and implementation. (Contains 3 tables and 9 notes.)

Culture has been commonly used in science education research, in particular to examine issues of equity for students from low-income, racial, and ethnic minority communities. It has provided a lens with which to appreciate science classrooms as cultural places and to recognize the importance of students' cultural ways of being as resources for science learning. Scanning the ways that "culture" has been used in recent publications shows that much science education research continues to draw from an older view of culture(s) as a bounded and coherent set of beliefs and practices associated with a distinct social world, referred to as a pluralizable or discontinuous view of culture. This view of culture has been critiqued on the basis of its assumptions of homogeneity of groups and as masking the role of systemic inequity in the marginalization of people from certain communities. This view of culture is often associated with a particular set of metaphors, such as cultural borders, gaps, mismatch, conflict, and tension. Despite increasing attention in science education research to an alternative view of culture as porous and emergent, these newer ways of thinking about culture do not yet seem to have been taken up in research around science teacher preparation. Recognizing the usefulness as well as the limits of the older view of culture as bounded and coherent social worlds, this paper points to other metaphors about culture--such as funds of knowledge, third space, and figured world--that might be more helpful in preparing science teachers. By exploring the metaphors we use to think about culture and how they structure the inferences and actions of teachers and researchers alike, we can envision new avenues of research and practice that will inform the preparation of science teachers for the complexity of our schools and classrooms. (Contains 1 table and 8 notes.)

This review explores Alfred Schademan's "What does playing cards have to do with science? A resource-rich view of African American young men" by examining how he uses two key concepts--hybridity and resources--to propose an approach to science education that counters enduring deficit notions associated with this population. Our response to Schademan's work expands upon his definition of hybridity and its purpose in the science classroom and highlights the tensions inherent in the appropriation of student resources in classroom spaces. This conversation points also to the need for research analyses and pedagogical approaches that simultaneously valorize student resources, allow student opportunities to learn the dominant codes, and provide teacher and student opportunities to transform them. Carol Lee's notion of "cultural modeling" is discussed as a possible framing device to facilitate this kind of research.

Although communities and schools in North America are increasingly diverse and positioned in a global web, schools continue to adhere to Western norms and the teacher workforce remains largely White, continuing an ideology of collective sameness and conformity. Hybridization of teacher identity and of science teaching are suggested as ways to advance an ethic of solidarity through difference (cosmopolitanism) with science teaching as its vehicle. In this paper, I explore identity hybridization among non-dominant science teachers as they merge identity narratives, or who they are around science and science teaching, with who they are out-of-school. Our attention is focused on their experiences of dis-identification with science in terms of diaspora, or the sense of being taken away from what one knows and values. By generating a creolized approach to science teaching, teachers create possibilities for greater student identification with science in school, which in turn has potential for changing the face of who does science and of science itself.

A liberatory pedagogy, from a Freirean perspective, seeks to transform the classroom into a dialogic and student-powered learning environment by restructuring the student-teacher dichotomy. The purpose is change--not only to individual students' lives and opportunities but also to the wider social reality. While these are the goals of many science educators, we rarely see Freirean perspectives specifically applied to science teaching. This article considers liberatory pedagogy applied to science teaching where it is perhaps needed most--in a classroom with racially and economically marginalized youth--and explores the challenges that both the structures of urban science classrooms and traditional views about science education pose to the application of Freirean pedagogy. (Contains 2 tables and 10 notes.)

Conscientization involves a recursive process of reflection and action toward individual and social transformation. Often this process takes shape through encounters in/with diverse and often conflicting discourses. The study of student and teacher discourses, or scripts and counterscripts, in science classrooms can reveal asymmetrical power relations and the ways in which dominant scripts of marginalization are often enacted. Decoding the dominant structures in these discourses is a complex and political act that might offer some possibilities for transformative practice. But for this to take place teachers, students, and researchers need to collaborate to conduct classroom research that embraces the political dimension of conscientization.

One of the intractable aspects of the so-called achievement gap between Black and White students lies in our failure to identify viable ways to increase science achievement and participation among African American students living in our inner cities. However, there has been little research that attempts to understand how the social and cultural experiences of these African American students affect what happens in science classrooms. Using lenses from cultural sociology, the research presented in this paper begins to describe the nature of communalism as a cultural disposition and a component of their repertoires of practice. While recognizing the complex and contradictory nature of culture, we argue that communalism is common among African American experiences and has particular significance in interactions among urban teens, and that it permeates urban classrooms as well. By focusing on a pair of African American male students, we answer important questions of how communal practices afford the generation of social and symbolic capital along with positive emotional energy, as shared goals are addressed and science participation and understanding are enhanced. In addition, we offer suggestions on how teachers can employ an understanding of the role of communalism, capital, and emotional energy in improving science teaching and learning in their classrooms.

Presents a study that took place in an inner-city neighborhood school populated mainly by African American students characterized by poverty. Explores the discourse and practices of students and three co-teachers as a curriculum was enacted to provide opportunities for students to learn about the physics of motion through designing, building, and testing a model car. (Contains 46 references.) (Author/YDS)

Recognizes the persistent science achievement gap between inner-city African American students and students from the mainstream and suggests that the imposition of external standards on inner-city schools will do little to ameliorate this gap because such an approach fails to address the significance of the social and cultural lives of the students. (Contains 35 references.) (Author/YDS)

Examines the difficulties of engaging students who lack motivation to learn and attend sporadically in an urban high school science class. Contains 17 references. (Author/WRM)

Advocates co-teaching as an essential component of teacher education programs. Describes the co-teaching efforts of a university professor, doctoral student, and student-teacher as they taught science to African-American students placed in a low-track program of study in an urban high school. Presents theoretical frameworks associated with resistance, habitus, and learning to teach by co-teaching. Contains 48 references. (Author/WRM)

Discusses resistance in teaching from two perspectives as strategies of action associated with science activities that are not aligned with learning, and the labeling and responses of teachers to student behaviors. Focuses on cultural miscues and resources effective in the classroom environment. (Author/YDS)

In this article, we explore how Indigenous knowledges can be used to inform science education and the development of school science curricula and pedagogy. Specifically, we explore how the concept of animating Indigenous knowledges (performing Indigenous identities, languages, and cultures and values) can be used for constructing pluralistic science classrooms. Finally, we present the notion of critical thinking in science education and discuss the issues surrounding criticality and possibilities for incorporating Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies into teaching and learning practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]