Volume 105 (7), November 2005

Abstract

"I Am Science and the World Is Mine": Embodied Practices as Resources for Empowerment

Rowhea Elmesky, Washington University in St. Louis

Those who are most marginalized, both culturally and economically, in society are concentrated in the nation’s largest urban centers and have the least opportunities to be successful in school science or to pursue higher education and career trajectories in science, mathematics, or engineering. This article shares the results of a study in which African American economically disadvantaged high school students living in Philadelphia were hired as student researchers and had the opportunity to develop a curriculum enhancer – a movie entitled Sound in the City. The findings reveal that the students’ capacity to act, or their sense of agency, expanded both through the process of making the movie and with the final movie product. During the production of the movie, the youth accessed multiple resources (both physical and human) to represent abstract physics facts in contextualized ways. Specifically, this article illuminates how they drew upon embodied practices that included rhythm, verbal fluency, and high energy in creating and filming the movie segments, as well as behind the scenes as they worked to understand the physics content. This study urges the science education community to consider how students’ embodied practices can connect them to science in empowering ways that expand their capacity for action in multiple spaces.

 Practicing Reform-Based Science Curriculum in an Urban Classroom: A Hispanic Elementary School Teacher's Thinking and Decisions

Bhaskar Raj Upadhyay,  University of Minnesota

This study explores the thinking and decisions of Vera (pseudonym), a Hispanic elementary teacher, while she enacted a reform-based science curriculum in an urban school in the southern United States. Vera’s thinking, decisions, experiences, and practices were documented over a 2-year period. Using the data collected from semistructured interviews, participant observations and classroom documents, a rich and complex case study of Vera is developed in this paper. This case study describes how Vera makes curricular choices from reform-based science curricula such as the LiFE curriculum; how she enacts those choices to empower poor urban minority students; how Vera believes that preparing students for the high-stakes test is empowering because it ensures continued schooling for students; how, for Vera, teaching connected science using students’ lived experiences is a risky act; and how she uses negotiation in her science teaching.

Using Prompted Praxis to Improve Teacher Professional Development in Culturally Diverse Schools

Alberto J. Rodriguez, San Diego State University

Cathy Zozakiewicz, San Diego State University

Randy Yerrick, San Diego State University

Recent science and teacher education reports continue to stress the need for radical changes in the way teachers are prepared to teach science to diverse learners. In response, a three-year intervention project was developed to help teachers in culturally diverse schools transform their science teaching practices using learning technologies. Many challenges arose that called for strategies to further manage the progress of the project. This paper describes how one of those strategies, “prompted praxis,” was used to manage two of the main challenges encountered, the teachers’ following through with their professional development goals and our own sense of urgency to effect change.

Increasing Student Access to Qualified Science and Mathematics Teachers Through an Urban School-University Partnership

Ann M.L. Cavallo, Wayne State University

Maria M. Ferreira, Wayne State University

Sally K. Roberts, Wayne State University

Urban schools across the United States face a pervasive problem in their science and mathematics programs – a disproportionate number of the teachers in these classrooms are not certified, thus making them underqualified to teach these subject areas. Furthermore, urban schools deal with teacher shortages and attrition in these critical areas. The situation was found to be particularly severe in the Detroit Public School District. In response, Wayne State University and Detroit Public Schools embarked on a school-university partnership program to prepare teachers in science and mathematics through an alternative pathway to teacher certification program. This partnership program has proven to be successful in recruiting, preparing, and retaining a significant number of qualified minority science and mathematics teachers to serve the students in Detroit schools.

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