Cultural Studies of Science Education最新文献

Increased globalization of the world economy, growth in human migration, and rapid developments in science and technology have required people to develop intercultural communication skills. Teachers play a crucial role in developing intercultural competence among students in our globalized, multilingual classrooms. The need for fostering collaborative discourse among students with diverse cultural and linguistic repertoires and building intercultural competence among students is a common blind spot in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics teacher praxis. This can inhibit efforts to cultivate safe and supportive learning environments for all students and can ultimately threaten multilingual student success. As part of a larger study, this narrative inquiry explores the phenomenon of intercultural competence development through the lived experiences of a Midwestern secondary science teacher. Time series data were collected from the participant (11 semi-structured, in-depth, online interviews over 8 months). Field notes and artifacts served as secondary data. Informed by Michael Byram’s Multidimensional Model of Intercultural Competence, interviews were designed, conducted, transcribed, and member checked. Then, transcripts, field notes, and artifacts were coded and analyzed using Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly’s three-dimensional narrative inquiry framework to arrive at synthesized stories of experience around coalescing themes. The findings revealed the participant utilized several strategies aimed at developing intercultural communicative competence, particularly in support of multilingual students. This paper focuses on the four themes that relate most directly to intercultural communicative competence development. The findings and implications are discussed within the context of Byram’s model and conclusions are drawn to inform current and future work in this area.

This FORUM article is written in response to ‘Evolutionary Stasis: creationism, evolution and climate change in the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum’ by Jenna Scaramanga and Michael J. Reiss published in CSSE in 2023. Starting from a sociological rather than pedagogical standpoint, the article aims to situate Accelerated Christian Education’s curriculum in relation to evolution and climate change in its broader context. This broader context comprises a national situation of Culture Wars where views on science and religion are politically polarized and morally inflected. Creationism and climate change denial/skepticism occur together and connect to right-wing politics. Climate change denial also clearly connects to corporate interests. Struggles for political, economic, ideological, and epistemic power all pertain. Reference is then made to recently collected focus group data to illustrate how non-creationist publics may also define science narrowly and inaccurately and yet still support it. The influence of evolution and climate change denialists must not be overstated. However, the harm of inaccurate, pseudoscientific education also requires examination. Nothing less than the Earth’s future is at stake, and education is a key battlefield. Science educators have an important role to play, working with patience, empathy, and awareness.

In this forum paper, I grapple with critical questions about our understanding of science as a discipline and the education standards formulated within that framing. My exploration is contextualized in our current socio-political climate and is presented in discourse with Charity Winburn’s Meeting the needs of the individual student in the post-pandemic era: an analysis of the next generation science standards. I draw on Winburn’s astute observations about the narratives and epistemologies that shape our current science standards as a springboard for diving deeper into questions about the ways of knowing and types of knowledge traditions that are uplifted in US science education. Through a dialogic process, I outline a critical analysis of the myth of neutrality, the prioritization of epistemologies, and the standardization of learning ingrained in traditional science curricula. I conclude by building on Winburn’s hopes for science education with my own aspirations for bringing joy into our collective science learning experiences.

This Forum article extends themes and critical observations within Jenna Scaramanga and Michael Reiss’s article ‘Evolutionary stasis: creationism, evolution and climate change in the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum,’ published in CSSE. The Accelerated Christian Education curriculum is a package of homeschool units and lesson designed to underscore and support conservative Christian students, teachers, and/or parents in their mission to align their students unfolding understanding of the world within the strict cognitive bounds of fundamentalist Christianity. Within this curriculum, both evolution and climate change are presented as unreasonable and/or silly against the purported superior evidence of the inerrant ontology of (their extremely narrow interpretation of the) the Bible. Scaramanga and Reiss’s analysis frame this kind of understanding within fundamentalist Christianity as indicative of a conspiracy theory. This article extends, questions, and suggests reframing these rhetorical moves toward a more robust and straightforward question of conservative Christianity as a player within a political economy. I suggest we take such groups more seriously for their highly effective if to some perspectives silly interpretation of Biblical text. For many, this movement is simply the maintenance of white male patriarchal power via religious identity. Implications, given the ease of movement of such texts in our digital age, are drawn for the use of such curricula in many other sites around the world.

Instructional practices in science education often create dichotomies of “expert” and “outsider” that produce distinct power differences in classrooms. Building upon the idea of “making present practice” to disrupt these binaries, this paper presents select findings from a year-long study investigating two urban teachers' use of community-based science (CBS) instructional practices to create relational shifts that reframe expert and expertise in science instruction. By examining how CBS instructional practices reframe power through co-learning experiences, our findings demonstrated that teachers positioned youth as knowledge constructors through three instructional practices: (a) creating space for students to share their knowledge and experiences, (b) positioning students’ lives and experiences as assets to/within science, and (c) being responsive to assets in future lessons. We use these findings to demonstrate how CBS instructional practices support shifts in relational dynamics by creating spaces of rightful presence, where students are viewed as legitimate classroom members who contribute scientific knowledge in practice and have power in the classroom space. By relinquishing traditional boundaries in science teaching to deconstruct ideas of who holds power, we position CBS instructional practices as a means to expand educational equity by legitimizing students’ diverse sensemaking and re-mediating hierarchical structures in classroom spaces.

A growing body of research demonstrates the value of asking students to write about science for authentic purposes. But which purposes–and, just as importantly, whose purposes–count as authentic? In this theoretical article, we review several conceptions of authentic purpose drawn from science education and literacy education and use these to question the meaning and significance of authenticity in student science writing. Next, we examine the framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) and ask how it might be used to define authentic purposes for science writing. We offer an additional conception of authentic purpose, one focused on situations where students’ purposes for writing about science directly overlap with teachers’ purposes for asking students to write. We share an illustrative example from our work as teacher educators that demonstrates how CRP can focus our attention on the types of classrooms and interactions that might create conditions where students becoming increasingly likely to pursue their own purposes through writing. Finally, using CRP as a framework, we offer seven strategies that might help create such situations, and discuss their implications for science educators and science education researchers. We argue that using CRP to operationalize science writing for authentic purposes can push the field forward by suggesting new directions for research and practice.

This paper delves deeply into the creative pedagogies which support cutting edge digital STEAM practice across primary and secondary school settings. It contextualises the research within current STEAM agendas including transdisciplinarity, and STEAM and technology and goes on to offer insight from the novel context of ocean learning to develop and extend a theorisation of creative pedagogies as entwining both creative teaching and teaching for creativity as embodied, democratic, dialogic and material processes. Intra-action between theory, praxis, nature, culture, the digital and humans enables an emergent perspective about changing the dynamics of power to develop ocean or environmental learning and related activism. Derived from research into an ocean education project, which aimed to develop students’ ocean literacy through the combined educative principles of creative pedagogies and digital technologies (Augmented and Virtual Realities), the research draws on data from six projects across primary and secondary school settings in Denmark, Spain and England. It used a ‘diffractive’ analytic technique, inspired by new materialist theory, to explore the messy mixtures of natural, cultural and technological environments that were being learned through. This involved the development of four material-dialogic assemblages each including diffractive switches. Each is presented first through a ‘piece’ which demonstrates each assemblage’s connection to the core question, followed by ‘ripples’, which briefly articulate the new learning and questions arising from that assemblage. The four assemblages cover the irresistibility of making kin, the relationships between lively bodies and virtual environments, the importance of spacetimematter in environmental edu-activism and trajectories between transience, stability and dialogic space. The paper leaves the reader/engager with a selection of prompts to highlight the research’s contribution to current STEAM agendas related to changing power dynamics, and to provoke reader/engagers’ own practices. These can include new pedagogies and activisms, as well as theoretical developments to the combined educative principles of creative pedagogies and digital technologies within STEAM education.

When secondary school students were asked about the socioscientific issue of using sodium fluoroacetate (1080) poison to control New Zealand’s possum pests, they provided a wide range of responses. Their responses showed that they considered this method of control to be risky and contentious. Such contentious issues are an example of the complexity involved in using a socioscientific approach to investigate an aspect of post-normal science. This paper provides the background to and development of a new risk perceptions analysis framework that was employed to qualitatively interpret these diverse viewpoints. Four Cultural Types (Nature Benign, Nature Tolerant, Nature Ephemeral and Nature Capricious) are accommodated within this framework. Each Cultural Type has a particular view of risk that is defined using common characteristics and is differentiated by unique individual attributes. It is proposed that this framework has the potential to analyse students’ responses to this contentious issue of 1080 use. The framework could be used as an educative tool in classrooms to investigate the range of views within society about issues that involve risk. Additionally, it could be used to assist students to gain awareness of their own view as well as develop an appreciation about the differing views of risk held by other people when discussing contentious issues.