CAREER: Identifying, Enabling, and Supporting Racial Justice in Science Teaching

Despite years of research and interventions to address inequities that are largely related to race, science education continues to perpetuate these inequities in both participation and outcomes in science. This CAREER project will address the need to provide science teachers with a framework for considering race and racial dynamics in science teaching as well as exemplars in science teaching and professional development to support teachers’ teaching identities and praxis. One way to address the ongoing exclusion of people of color from science is through approaches to science teaching that explicitly seek to meaningfully engage students from all backgorunds. While antiracism and antiracist pedagogy have been studied extensively in education generally, they are rarely explored in depth in science education. Significant challenges in supporting more equitable science instruction, identified by both teachers and researchers, include the lack of a clear teaching framework that details antiracist approaches to science education and aligned models of science teaching enacted in classrooms. As a result, even science teachers who are explicitly interested in addressing racism in and through their teaching often struggle to find ways to do so.

Using theoretical frameworks that explicitly address the impacts of race and identity, this project will: 1) develop a Framework for Antiracist Science Teaching; 2) develop and offer professional development to support the use of the framework; and 3) evaluate the impact of the professional development on teachers’ identities and praxis. In the first phase of this project, a critical ethnographic method will be used to investigate and describe science teaching that attends to race and racism. Using classroom observations and interviews of teachers, administrators, students, and families, data will be collected from up to twenty teachers and analyzed iteratively using a developmental research sequence methodology for ethnography in combination with discourse analysis. In the second phase of this project, the framework will be used to develop an observation protocol as well as professional development for in-service science teachers. Over three years, the professional development will be offered to up to sixty science teachers and the impact of the professional development on their teaching identities and praxis will be evaluated. The results of this project will build on existing research in equity in science education to explicitly address: 1) how teachers enact and gain recognition for science teaching identities that embrace antiracism; 2) the experiences and/or structures that support or constrain the development such science teaching identities; 3) how teacher educators can support those science teaching identities; and 4) how those identities develop over time.