Bang, M., Warren, B., Rosebery, A. S., & Medin, D. (2012). Desettling expectations in science education. Human Development, 55, 302-318.
Penuel & Fishman (2011) advance the conversation of what is needed know that we have NGSS standards to guide the way for teaching and learning. They highlight the need for alignment among standards, curriculums, and assessments, as well as, focuses on making curriculum meaningful for students for an effective implementation of standards, identity and experiences of science shape current and future selves in the STEM field. A great reminder to researchers is to be mindful of “conditions in education that are presumed in effectiveness studies themselves help to reproduce inequity, by requiring access to resources or support that are not achieveable in many settings, especially lower-SES school setting.” In other words, policy, limitations, selection criteria act as containers and bound the kind of knowledge production that can be achieved and act as reinforces of borders. The authors remind us to ask: “what works when, for whom, and under what conditions.” If NGSS is meant to inform state and local science education policy, curriculum development, and science teaching - does this policy serve ALL students? The idea of diversity does not simply refers to demographics but… “diversity encompasses the ideas, experiences, and histories that enliven and enrich fixed view of what science learning can and should be?” come from a privilege perspective of what cultural diversity. I would like to explore this further, as Babbha (?) emphasizes the distinction between diversity and differences; where diversity attends to acknowledging variation among a community – differences works to highlight the historical and political power among communities (demographics). Demographics highlights an ability to examine differences from a deeper critical view of variation inter communities; ie class, gender, socio-economic status.
One of the reasons why I brought Penuel & Fishman (2011) into the discussion is because it attempts to highlight the direction of what should and can be done – there is separation between theory and practice. How does this actually look like in a classroom? Megan and colleauges (2013) provide an example of how to – with an expansive was of knowing – breaking dichotomies up/down and left/right ( or inward to outward and vice-versa). I welcome pushback as I am attempting to make sense of this myself. :)
Bang and colleagues (2013) discuss how teachers can “create robust, meaningful forms of science education” to work against maintaining or recreating borders. The authors “argue for the importance in fostering a more transformative science education experience for nondominant youth, one that can generate new forms of knowledge, new modes of engagement, and new networks of responsibility.” The author examines science learning episodes, making meaning of water, the classroom’s culture of learning works to form understanding stemming from different forms of cultural representations and recognizing deep tensions between them. Engaging in such expansive learning “they mapped a considerably more complex, multivoiced network of locally and globally consequential relationships involving movement in and across history and place of water, land, people, and practices of many kinds at varied scales” (Bang, 2013). In doing so, navigating among and across one another’s speech spheres they have “blurred settle relations that are imposed by curricula between nature and culture” (Bang, 2013). This new network of discourse creates a more comprehensible and heterogeneous way to examine the world around us, making a crossing from a single story to a multivoiced matrix.
The question that I would like to work towards answering is/are: whom is responsible for PD for teachers with NGSS standards? I wonder if NGSS were formed from a co-collaboration among respected researchers and teachers and curriculum developers… has a systems level analysis examine the level of alignment of standards, curriculums, and assessments been done to investigate contradictions which yield formation of new knowledge? Or was it a rebirth of new standards?
When we, research community, claim to serve ALL to we mean to say a subset of a community that was bounded by – policy, funding, selection criteria… What unintended consequences can arise from claiming to serve ALL?
These are some of the things that I wonder about.
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