ABSTRACT

Addressing student conceptions is crucial in science education. Therefore, teachers should be able to notice and interpret situations, in which student conceptions are part of the complex classroom interactions. This study analyzes the skills known as professional vision using an interpretivist research paradigm and a sociocultural perspective. The central concern of this article is to describe the tacit knowledge about teaching and learning that frames and guides the professional vision of preservice and in-service biology teachers. To collect data, a video clip was used as a stimulus for 31 group discussions and 9 individual interviews with a total of 115 preservice and in-service biology teachers. The video clip showed classroom interactions between the teacher and students, specifically addressing student conceptions in evolution classes. From 40 available cases, a subsample of 15 contrasting ones was used for in-depth interpretation and typification. The comparative analyses reveal that these cases share a common feature: professional vision is carried out in an evaluative mode, with participants assessing the teacher's actions and the students' learning outcomes. In their evaluations, the four reconstructed types expressed type-specific tacit knowledge about teaching and learning. For example, they differ in their conceptualizations of teaching, which form the basis of the evaluation: (1) direct transmission of scientific norms, (2) establishing and facilitating access to scientific norms, (3) interaction that considers individual learners' point of view, and (4) contingent mediation between student conceptions and scientific norms. In the discussion, the results are related to learning theories and strategies for teaching the theory of evolution to develop suggestions for teacher education and professional development.

ABSTRACT

Examining the contextual nature of teacher professional learning is important for teachers of multilingual learners. Drawing on interview, classroom observation, and informal communication data for two focal dual language elementary science teachers, this qualitative comparative case study examines the situated nature of multilingual science teacher learning and practice processes: (1) What are the intersecting contexts that shape teachers' science learning-practice in multilingual classrooms? (2) In what ways do these contextual dimensions intersect to create opportunities and tensions in teacher learning-practice? Data come from a multiyear, multisite project that examines teacher learning and student discourse in science, language, and literacy instruction in dual language and multilingual classrooms. Drawing on the concept of “teacher learning-practice,” findings show how teachers engaged the contextual challenges of the pandemic, online teaching, and existing programmatic, school, and district structures, as a part of their own teacher learning, through a process of recontextualization. Findings show how the teachers' contexts served as catalysts and moderators in recontextualization, and that generalized district-based professional development was not meeting the needs of the teachers nor their multilingual students. This study provides empirical evidence for context as a key constituent of teacher learning-practice, showing how teacher learning cannot exist outside of teachers' instructional practice nor the contexts with(in) which teachers teach. This study adds to the literature calling for teacher professional learning opportunities to be localized to their teaching and learning contexts versus a “one-size-fits-all” approach that is typically used when planning and implementing professional development by illuminating the experiences of elementary science teachers working with multilingual students. This paper is part of the special issue on Teacher Learning and Practice within Organizational Contexts.

ABSTRACT

In instructional settings involving social interactions, emotions such as discomfort, embarrassment, and shame can be induced by social comparison of competence, judgment from peers, and conflict with other students. As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, this paper presents a case study of how four university engineering students in an introductory physics course addressed the emotional discomfort that arose when a hierarchy of competence emerged among group members, to demonstrate two points. First, local hierarchical positionings of who is more or less competent can create vulnerabilities and discomfort, which students can cope with by sharing and relating to each other's negative emotional experiences as engineering majors. This “emotional resonance” can be a resource for helping students locally reposition to find common ground and resist hierarchical positionings. Second, the local construction of hierarchical positioning among students, and the resulting emotional discomfort, can be supported by larger institutional structures and hierarchies within STEM culture. Although emotional resonance can locally alleviate discomfort and help students avoid hierarchical positionings, the legitimacy of positioning some students as “smarter” than others based on institutional labels and other markers of success can be left unchallenged. Therefore, efforts to support student emotions in STEM education should look beyond local interventions and critically examine pathways through which institutional structures and STEM culture can create hierarchical and competitive relations between students, generate feelings of not being “smart” enough, and increase the socioemotional risks of learning.

ABSTRACT

There is a growing body of scholarship in science education that attends to the role of affect as shaping youths' negotiation of and experiences with disciplinary science practices. As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, in this paper we examine how power and affect shape epistemic negotiations as youth and adults designed a community survey during a 7th grade biology unit on stress. We used interaction analysis methods to examine how care for the survey takers co-operatively emerged as an epistemic ideal when creating a community ethnography. The epistemic ideal was shaped by disrupting disciplinary practices, negotiating multidirectional powered adult-youth relations in the classroom, and youths' positionings in relation with macro-sociopolitical worlds. How youth characterized care was not neutral but involved youth experiencing politicized empathy towards survey takers coupled with them taking action against survey takers potentially experiencing harm through a tool of Eurocentric science (i.e., the survey). Overall, this work contributes to a critically nuanced understanding of how affect is entangled with and visible through the complex powered dynamics that youth and adults negotiate when engaging in sociopolitical allyship towards more just ways of knowing, examined through the emergence of epistemic ideals within an explicitly justice-oriented middle school science curriculum.

ABSTRACT

Recent research has focused on innovative instructional shifts that aim to expand what constitutes science and engineering practices, exploring also how they can build on students' diverse language resources in science learning. However, few studies explore the intersections of elementary teacher preparation and the implementation of science and engineering practices through expansive and asset-based approaches to language use. Through a qualitative case study conducted within a science methods course at a research university in the southeastern part of the United States, elementary preservice science teachers were positioned as agentive learners, engaging in modeling practices while leveraging their diverse language resources. Using multimodal interaction analysis (MIA), our study examined the meaning-making processes of elementary preservice science teachers in the practice of modeling. Findings revealed three themes related to how the preservice science teachers engaged with diverse semiotic resources: (1) their use of physical manipulatives and other multimodal resources to develop meanings during the initial stages of model development, where they experimented with different ways to represent their understanding; (2) their ongoing reliance on multimodal and linguistic resources for refining and solidifying meanings as the model became more complex and comprehensive throughout the modeling process; and (3) their use of these meanings to interpret and engage with science texts. Implications include the importance of providing elementary preservice science teachers with professional learning opportunities that align with the envisioned science learning experiences of their future students, thus fostering equitable science teaching and learning with models and modeling.

ABSTRACT

Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) programs are a burgeoning approach to engage teachers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) research that they can translate into their K-12 classrooms. Despite an increase in studies of RETs, there is a need for comparison of RET and non-RET teachers' student outcomes. This mixed methods, quasi-experimental comparison study, using a revised third-generation activity theory framework, investigates how an RET program for preservice and early career STEM teachers impacted participating teachers and their students up to 8 years after RET participation. Specifically, we conducted a matched comparison of student achievement data from students of nine RET teachers versus many non-RET comparison teachers within the same districts (n = 830–1132 students). We also investigated student and teacher perceptions of classroom practices through surveys (n = 576 students) and interviews (15 teacher interviews). Omnibus tests revealed no statistically significant differences by treatment in math or science achievement. However, students of the RET teachers reported stronger perceptions of STEM career awareness, greater value for learning STEM subjects, and a greater propensity to persist in STEM course tasks (three of the five constructs measured). This was consistent with teacher interview responses in which RET teachers spoke about STEM career awareness in a broader context for understanding the value of STEM in society, and also discussed struggles in research and attempts to bring this mindset to their students, which may have resulted in greater student engagement in their courses. Implications for teacher education and for supporting science and engineering practices in STEM classrooms are discussed along with recommendations for further research on the impacts of RET programs guided by a revised third-generation activity theory framework informed by this work.

Science Education, Volume 109, Issue 1, Page 1-2, January 2025.