1st Edition
Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Science Teaching Teacher Research and Investigation from Today's Classrooms
How can research into culturally responsive and sustaining education (CRSE) inform and transform science teaching and learning? What approaches might teachers use to study CRSE in their classrooms? What are teachers learning from their research that might be transferable to other classrooms and schools?
In this practical resource, teacher researchers from the Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education Professional Learning Group based in New York City provide insights for educators on how to address complex educational and sociocultural issues in the science classroom. Highlighting wide-ranging and complex problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic and racial injustice and how they affect individual science instruction settings, with a particular focus on urban and high-need school environments, chapters examine and describe what CRSE is and means for science teaching.
Through individual and collaborative research studies, chapters help readers understand various approaches to developing and implementing CRSE strategies in their classrooms and promote students’ identification with and affinity for science. Teachers describe the questions driving their investigations, data, and findings, and reflect on their roles as agents of change. Chapters also feature discussion and reflection questions, and include examples of assignments, protocols, and student work that teachers have piloted in their classes.
This book is ideal for pre-service and in-service science teachers and teacher educators across grade levels. It provides support for professional learning activities, as well as undergraduate and graduate teacher education courses. It may be particularly useful in science methods, multicultural education; and diversity, equity, and inclusion courses with a focus on CRSE. This book not only defines one group’s approach to CRSE in science education, but also takes the next step to show how CRSE can be applied directly to the science classroom.
Introduction: The Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Professional Learning Group
Elaine Howes and Jamie Wallace
Chapter 1. What Do We Mean by Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Science Education?: Grounding Our Professional Learning Group in Theory and Research
Jamie Wallace and Elaine Howes
Part 1: Exploring Instructional Strategies for CRSE
Chapter 2. Dear Dante, Science IS for You: Investigating Student-Driven Discussions in the Science Classroom
Maya Pincus
Chapter 3. Pop Culturally Responsive Education: Incorporating Students’ Interests Into a Scripted Curriculum
Samantha Swift
Chapter 4. Helping Students Foster Emotional Connections: Connecting Students’ Lives and Communities with the Natural World
Sean Krepski
Part 2: CRSE and the Science Classroom Learning Environment
Chapter 5. Behaviors Without Behaviorism: Knowing the Students in Room 124
Raghida Nweiran
Chapter 6: Humanizing Science Teaching Through Building Relationships
Kin Tsoi
Chapter 7. Building Relationships to Support Relevance: Reflecting on Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Science Teaching
Susan Bullock Sylvester
Part 3: School-based Teacher Collaboration for Curriculum and Instruction Reflecting CRSE
Chapter 8. Before CRSE: Trauma-Informed and Healing-Centered Strategies
Caity Tully Monahan
Chapter 9: Crisis Precipitates Change: An Approach to Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Teaching Using a Modified Flipped Classroom
Arthur W. Funk
Part 4: Collaborative Chapters
Chapter 10: When the World Tilted Differently: Exploring Science Teachers’ Pandemic Stories Through a Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Science Lens
Jamie Wallace, Elaine V. Howes, Maya Pincus, Kin Tsoi, Raghida Nweiran, Susan Bullock Sylvester, Arthur W. Funk, Caity Tully Monahan, Samantha Swift, Sean Krepski
Chapter 11. Reflections: Learning In, From, and With the CRSE PLG
Kin Tsoi, Maya Pincus, Susan Bullock Sylvester, Raghida Nweiran, Sean Krepski, Samantha Swift, Arthur W. Funk, Caity Tully Monahan, Elaine V. Howes, and Jamie Wallace
Chapter 12. The Ties that Bind
Jamie Wallace, Elaine Howes, and the CRSE PLG
Appendix: Components of Culturally Responsive Education in the STEM Classroom
Biography
Elaine V. Howes teaches curriculum and instruction and educational foundations in the American Museum of Natural History’s Master of Arts in Teaching Earth Science Residency Program. She also works with residents and mentors in the program’s partner schools.
Jamie Wallace, an educational researcher and evaluator at the American Museum of Natural History, works on the Master of Arts in Teaching Earth Science Residency Program research and evaluation team.
“If you are wondering what culturally responsive and sustaining education (CRSE) could look like in science classrooms, then you've grabbed the right book! The examples highlighted and unpacked in this book emerged from research undertaken by eight science teachers who set out to explore what CRSE could look like in science classrooms. From their pivotal research coupled with the book's organization, it is clear that culturally responsive and sustaining education is not just a list of strategies but a way of being that requires deliberate and intentional critical thought and action.”
- Dr. Vanessa Dodo Seriki, Associate Professor of Science Education, Morgan State University
“Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Science Teaching is a breath of fresh air—and a compelling ‘must-read’— for everybody interested in science education in today’s culturally complex world. Featuring the questions and reflections of a unique science teacher learning community in NYC, this incredibly thoughtful book reinvents what it means to teach science in today’s urban schools.”
- Dr. Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Cawthorne Professor of Urban Teacher Education, Emerita, Boston College
