Wednesday 20 November 2013

Science and Song

So today I had the most enjoyable morning...I spent time with a fantastic group of teachers today who are looking at new ways to engage students. One of the things they wanted more resources on was about how to use music in the classroom. I have brainstormed a list of resources (which I found so much fun to compile) that I will share with them but also wanted to share more broadly. Do you have things you would add? Please let me know as I encourage music in all parts of our life.

Anyone who also wants to contribute academic references about why music is so important or personal narratives...please do so...

As I write this I'm listening to a Mr Parr's Periodic Table Song...off his Physical Science Playlist and I'm feeling like dancing around my office!

Articles/Research work

    • Dr. Emdin’s work - http://chrisemdin.com/index.php
      • Emdin, C. (2010). Affiliation and alienation: hip‐hop, rap, and urban science education. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 42(1), 1-25.
    • Science with Tom - Blog on Science rap battles - http://sciencewithtom.com/

    • Other Articles
    • Kelly, G. J., & Chen, C. (1999). The sound of music: Constructing science as sociocultural practices through oral and written discourse. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 36(8), 883-915.
    • Papastergiou, M. (2009). Digital Game-Based Learning in high school Computer Science education: Impact on educational effectiveness and student motivation. Computers & Education, 52(1), 1-12.
    • I found remarkably little in searching on science and music ....suggestions from others?

Music
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Tuesday 11 June 2013

Science Education in Higher Education

As most of my focus has been on K-12 science education and teacher education at the undergraduate and graduate level, I haven't spent much time or effort examining resources for science educators in higher education. However, after some great conversations at a wedding for one of my collaborators, I found myself exploring some great resources for higher education science educators.

Here are some of the sites I visited and some thoughts about them:

  • Science Education Resource Center (SERC) - http://serc.carleton.edu/index.html - This is a fairly vast collection of resources on a wide range of areas. It also includes active curriculum development projects, professional development workshops and other resources for faculty to become involved with.
  • UTeach Program for Teacher Education - This initiative started out at the University of Texas at Austin and links undergraduate efforts in STEM to efforts to recruit and retain STEM K-12 teachers. The replication of this program at universities across the US have implications for historically marginalized STEM undergraduates.
  • David Mogk at Montana State University and have been working throughout his career on efforts in geoscience higher education to improve science education outreach efforts and the recruitment and retention of historically marginalized students. 
  • Cathy Manduca at Carleton College has been working to improve science faculty understandings of student learning to broaden the range of experiences students get in their undergraduate education. 
  • Valerie Otero at the University of Colorado at Boulder has co-developed the Learning Assistant program to provide students with smaller, transformed undergraduate science experiences providing more opportunities for participation of historically marginalized students.

Are there other sites you know about that may bring science education in higher eduction into contact with STEM equity efforts? Please comment on this blog with the links and your thoughts about them.

Some of this work is supported by the NSF's Department of Undergraduate Education (DUE) Program. Upcoming NSF funding requests that are relevant to Higher Education equity include:

  • ADVANCE - Increasing the Participation and Advancement of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Careers.
  • REU - Research Experiences for Undergraduates

While other NFS awards might also be related I couldn't explicitly link them to an equity focus.

How do these all relate to equity? I am interested in the way the programs related to these sites change the nature of undergraduate learning experiences and support faculty in making such changes. We know from literature that participation of historically marginalized STEM populations such as women, non-English dominant speakers and people of color are often limited by lecture format learning often found in traditional undergraduate science classrooms, particularly large lectures with little community or individual contact. It is interesting to think about how we might change such spaces so that those who have been historically marginalized in STEM education and careers can make it into and through our undergraduate STEM experiences successfully. I recently had the most excellent experience of talking with four science undergraduate youth of color from the a large university. These students were concerned that they didn't belong in science classrooms, that the experiences didn't meet their needs and that they were not well prepared from their high school experiences to succeed in university. Unfortunately, their experiences are common for many youth of color, some women and others who have been historically marginalized in these spaces. I love science - the knowledge, the process and the community - and I think the involvement of bright minds like these students is critical to engaging different viewpoints in the production of future scientific knowledge. Our challenge is to find ways to support their learning, help them develop identities as part of the scientific community and ensure that we are not putting any barriers in their way to cause frustration, resistance and reduce retention. As higher educators what are we doing in each of our classes, in every course and learning experience to ensure students of color, women and other historically marginalized students are included and supported?

Thoughts? I would love to hear comments on how we can thing broadly about support for historically marginalized populations in undergraduate STEM education. This might include cool links, interesting work of faculty, student groups or institutional organizations. Please share.
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Thursday 23 May 2013

Informal Science Education Programs - How can they improve equity in the K-12 context?

A few years back I attended a poster session at the National Association of Research on Science Teaching (NARST) about informal science education programs in science education, programs organized at lunch time, after school or on weekends. I had been a skeptic about the importance of such programs in impacting educational opportunities for the most marginalized of students in science, often poor, sometimes girls and frequently youth of color. However, this session changed my mind and since that time I've kept my eye on the literature about such programs and how they might integrate more with the K-12 educational system to facilitate learning experiences in science education for students and teachers.

At the NARST session I talked with science education researchers Hosun Kang, Jessica Thompson and April Luehmann about their work with informal science education programs. These programs often selected participants based on who was not succeeding in the formal school science contexts. They were structured to have students choose topics to investigate that were important to their lived experiences and were paced for individual students or groups. Students used group organizers as facilitators and resources but saw them as collaborators not as people with more control over the project work than themselves. If teachers were involved, they were learners and collaborators. In these spaces, students were able to use their own discourses and were encouraged to learn parallel scientific discourses. They engaged in scientific inquiry on their topics and often gained deep conceptual understanding in the areas they investigated. They learned how to question, research background information, interrogate the quality of information, define experiments and conduct them, and propose claims with evidence to support them. In short they learned to be scientifically literate. The adults involved in these programs learned that the students knew more than they often expected, were capable of more than they anticipated and were more motivated as learners than they had often experienced in the K-12 classroom settings.

While the above researchers have been thinking about out-of-school programs and their influences on in-school learning, several researchers are explicitly trying to bridge these spaces. Megan Bang's work in understanding indigenous peoples interactions in STEM combined with her work in teacher education brings together knowledge gained in informal learning spaces with student experiences in conscripted classroom spaces in a way I find fundamental for improving students' daily lived experiences and future potential participation in scientific discourses and practices. Danny Birmingham is also doing some terrific work in bringing the voices and lived experiences of young African American girls to teacher learning he facilitates in professional development spaces. I'm excited to see more work emerging at these intersections.

Existing out-of-school programs to explore:
April Luehmann's Science STARS program.
Angie Barton's GET City and C2S (Hosun Kang worked on this) program.
Jessica Thompson's Lunchtime Science program.

Other equity oriented informal science educators that I am familiar with are Takumi Sato, Kristen Poppleton, Kathy Reagan, and Stacey Forsyth. Please comment with other researchers or programs you are aware of that may be of interest to teachers and researchers in thinking about science and equity in education. I know many scholars of color have been working in this space for a long time but I am not always familiar with your work and would love to know more about it.
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Tuesday 21 May 2013

A tale of communities - bringing science into conversation with equity in the service of scientific literacy

I am a scientist.
I am an educator.
I am an equity scholar and activist.

I see all as integral to the other and yet...
I realize not everyone sees things the way I do.

From this starting point I decided to write about my thinking more systematically to try to share how I see the connections forming between science, science education and equity.

Please follow me on this weekly journey to make sense of this complex intersection of spaces. You can subscribe via email at the bottom of the blog space.

I would love to hear feedback, talk back, shared thoughts in a respectful and constructive manner. Please comment as we go forward when the mood moves you as the best thoughts are collaborative in construction.

If you want to know who I am in a bit more detail, my influences, collaborators and colleagues, please visit my personal site.


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