Teaching Science/Learning Gender: Preservice Elementary Teachers Write about Science, Gender, and Identity.

Using data collected from an undergraduate science methods class, this paper interrogates a variety of ways that preservice teachers construct their identities as both students of science and prospective teachers of science. Data sources included writings about an issue of "difference" in science class, a science autobiography, student-generated metaphors for teaching, a counternarrative to a personal experience, and a philosophy about teaching elementary school science. Drawing on these autobiographical writings about past experiences with science and the ways these inform visions of their future practice as teachers, this paper links the theoretical literature about science, gender, and schooling with the personal experiences of these students. Results from an analysis of the students' writings illustrate the incredible range of ways that school science was experienced in a gendered manner, and the ways in which these experiences shape these preservice teachers' orientations toward school science as they contemplate teaching. Their writings suggest the powerful effects that past science experiences have on their on-going construction of science teaching identities. Further, their writings recognize the complex ways in which the construct of schooling, gender, and science interact, hybridize, and experience synergy or attrition as they collide with one another. (Contains 42 references.) (Author/YDS)