- Year 2019
- NSF Noyce Award # 1340006
- First Name Arthur
- Last Name Funk
- Institution American Museum of Natural History
- Role/Position Noyce Scholar
- Workshop Category Track 2: Teaching Fellowships
- Workshop Disciplines Audience Geosciences
- Target Audience Noyce Master Teachers, Noyce Teaching Fellows, Project PIs / Co-PIs / Other Faculty/Staff, School and District Administrators, Undergraduate and/or Graduate Noyce Scholars
- Topics Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
- Session Length 45 minutes
- Additional Presenter(s)
Sean Krepski/krepskis@gmail.com/American Museum of Natural History/Noyce Scholar;
Maya Pincus/maya.pincus@gmail.com/American Museum of Natural History/Noyce Scholar;
Susan Sylvester/susan.sylvester@innovationdp.org/American Museum of Natural History/Noyce Scholar;
Kin Tsoi/kinytsoi@gmail.com/American Museum of Natural History/Noyce Scholar;
Caity Tully/caity.h.tully@gmail.com/American Museum of Natural History/Noyce Scholar
Goals
1. Participants will reflect on their own cultures in order to consider their own cultural lens, as well as explore the literature on culturally responsive education and what this might mean in their individual contexts in the STEM classroom.
2. Participants will practice strategies designed to incorporate student voice into their science teaching.
3. Participants will use a tool to help parents, teachers, students, and community members determine the extent to which their schools’ STEM curricula are culturally responsive.
Evidence
Comprised of Noyce Scholars currently teaching science in New York City, the Culturally Responsive Education Professional Learning Group (CRE PLG) focuses on generating video cases of core science teaching practices in culturally responsive instructional contexts. Research demonstrates that culturally responsive education is an effective means of fostering students’ academic success, self-empowerment and agency, and ability to oppose oppressive societal structures (Byrd, 2016; Johnston, et al., 2017). The group engages in ongoing literature review on culturally responsive education (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris, 2012; Gay, 2010; Zaretta-Hammond, 2015) and designing a framework applying theory to their science teaching practices. This presentation will provide a use case exploring strategies and tools for classrooms that Scholars have collaboratively developed, implemented, and analyzed.
Proposal
Resources pertaining to culturally responsive education in the science classroom are virtually non-existent. In this workshop, we will share and model readily adaptable culturally responsive activities that we have used in our own science classrooms. First, participants will consider their own cultural perspectives using the metaphor of a culture tree. They will then share ideas through a research-based classroom discussion strategy that supports students in thinking critically and speaking openly, maximizing learning while minimizing threats (Zaretta-Hammond, 2015; Aguilar, 2018). Next, participants will engage in an idea exchange protocol to support sharing, comparing and building their thinking on culturally responsive education. Workshop leaders will describe how they modified this protocol for use in their classrooms, and what they learned from their collaborative analysis through the lens of culturally responsive education. The workshop leaders will then introduce terms and definitions commonly used in the literature around culturally responsive education. Workshop leaders will offer their own definitions, including what they consider to be the most important components for their own science teaching. Finally, participants will be introduced to a tool (modified from Bryan-Gooden, Hester, & Peoples, 2019) for evaluating the cultural responsiveness of a science curriculum. Participants will consider ways in which they can modify their own curricula to be more culturally responsive, and network with other participants to share and refine their newly developed strategies. To model supporting metacognition in the culturally responsive classroom, participants will engage in reflection on the ways in which the activities they participated in were culturally responsive.
