Exploring science teachers' efforts to frame phenomena in the community

Abstract

This article examines two teachers' efforts to re-organize their science teaching around issues of environmental and food justice in the urban community where they teach through the pedagogical approach of community-oriented framing. We introduce this approach to teachers' framing of phenomena in community as supporting students' framing of phenomena as personally and locally relevant. Drawing on classroom observations of remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, we took an analytic approach that characterized features of classroom discourse to rate community-oriented framing at the lesson level. Results show that teachers framed phenomena as both social and scientific, and as rooted in students' lived experiences, with classroom activities designed to gather localized and personalized evidence needed to explain or model phenomena. We also share examples of how Black and Latinx students took up this framing of phenomena in their classroom work. By providing a detailed description of the launch and implementation of activities, findings illustrate how community-oriented framing supported teachers in posing local questions of equity and justice as simultaneously social and scientific, and helping students perceive science learning as meaningful to their everyday lives. Community-oriented framing offers a practical means of designing locally and socially relevant instruction. We contribute to justice-centered science pedagogies by conceptualizing transformative science learning environments as those in which students understand their goal in science class as understanding, and later addressing, inequities in how socioscientific issues manifest in their community.