Science

School science continues to alienate students identifying with nondominant, non-western cultures, and learners of color, and considers science as an enterprise where success necessitates divorcing the self and corporeal body from ideas and the mind. Resisting the colonizing pedagogy of the mind–body divide, we aimed at creating pedagogical spaces and places in science classes that sustain equitable opportunities for engagement and meaning making where body and mind are enmeshed. In the context of a partnership between school- and university-based educators and researchers, we explored how multimodal literacies cultivated through the performing arts, provide students from minoritized communities opportunities to both create knowledge and to position themselves as science experts and brilliant and creative meaning makers.

Science involves changing the scale of objects—particularly scales of size, time, and intensity—from what is experienced in the world. Similar to investigations conducted in science laboratories, classroom investigations involve re-representing and re-scaling entities, manipulating them, and observing effects in new locations and timescales. However, this aspect of investigation is under-studied and under-utilized as a resource for learning. We argue that, from elementary school, children can experience quantification, or identifying, developing, and working with variables, as consequential and can take up differences in representation and scale in empirical investigations as opportunities for sense-making and conceptual progress.

Socially relevant and controversial topics, such as the climate crisis, are subject to differences in the explanations that scientists and the public find plausible. Scaffolds can help students be evaluative of the validity of explanations based on evidence when addressing such topics and support knowledge gains. This study compared two scaffolds in which students weighed connections between lines of evidence and explanations for the topics of climate change and extreme weather events.

This paper introduces an approach for designing NGSS-aligned assessments that measure young learners’ science progress while also attending to the scientific language and literacy practices that are integral parts of the NGSS Performance Expectations.

This paper introduces an approach for designing NGSS-aligned assessments that measure young learners’ science progress while also attending to the scientific language and literacy practices that are integral parts of the NGSS Performance Expectations.

This paper introduces an approach for designing NGSS-aligned assessments that measure young learners’ science progress while also attending to the scientific language and literacy practices that are integral parts of the NGSS Performance Expectations.

This poster describes the work of the Bridging Science Teaching and Learning in Title 1 Schools project. Historically, the public education community has struggled with providing all children with
equitable access to quality science education; particularly in urban communities. Teachers play a vital role in addressing this challenge. By equipping them with the pedagogical knowledge
needed to employ culturally relevant/responsive practices, teachers will be better prepared to address the challenges related to broadening participation in science. SCI-Bridge is a teacher
development project that seeks to address inequities in access to quality science instruction in urban elementary schools. The project will test a professional learning model that (1) integrates
the theoretical principles of culturally relevant/responsive pedagogy with best practices in science education and (2) prepares teachers to use three evidence-based practices: culturally
responsive classroom management (CRCM), facilitated discourse, and anchoring.