Carrie Tzou

Learning in Diversities of Structures of Social Practice: Accounting for How, Why and Where People Learn Science

This paper outlines a theoretical framework intended to provide a more ecological and holistic accounting of how, why and where people learn in relation to constructs of human difference – race, class, disability designation, etc. – as learners circulate across places and associated operating value systems over multiple timescales. The framework for cultural learning pathways is an application and elaboration of Ole Dreier’s theory of persons in diversities of structures of social practice with a focus on the learning of disciplinary practices and the development of discipline-related identities. We summarize relevant learning phenomena along extended cultural pathways from three team ethnographies of science learning. We outline how power-related issues associated with privilege and marginalization are attended to in relation to the social, cultural, and material circumstances of learning within and across environments and discuss future research opportunities.

The Role of Environmental Narratives and Social Positioning in How Place Gets Constructed for and by Youth

A growing set of research projects in science education are working from the assumption that science literacy can be constituted as being centrally focused on issues of social justice for the youth and for communities involved in such work (Calabrese Barton, 2003). Despite well-established links among race, class, and exposure to environmental health risks, environmental education is failing to take into account the environmental issues pertinent to youth who are most impacted by the most pressing modern environmental issues (Lewis & James, 1995). We therefore need to better understand how the places where environmental education occurs are themselves sites of cultural conflict that position youth in ways that limit access to certain learning pathways. Here, we ask the following questions: (a) How are places constructed for and by youth in traditional environmental education? and (b) What are implications of this construction of place for the design of instruction that connects youths’ sense of place with environmental learning? Through ethnographic analysis we have identified two social processes in how place gets constructed for and by youth: through multifaceted and juxtaposed narratives and through the social positioning of youth, by themselves and other social actors, in places where environmental education occurs.

Discovering and Supporting Successful Learning Pathways of Youth In and Out of School: Accounting for the Development of Everyday Expertise Across Settings

A fifth-grade girl, born in Haiti and adopted into a Seattle family, talked at home about how she wanted to be a chemist or a paleontologist when she grew up. For 6 months, she spent portions of her Saturdays mixing perfumes, as a chemist might, with her mother. But her public schoolteacher, who is a seasoned professional with sophisticated teaching expertise, thought the girl was lazy and was surprised to see her become highly excited and engaged about a science curriculum unit at the end of the year. A fourth-grade boy in the same school got moved to the back of the classroom because he was frequently “off task” and “resistant” to the school curriculum. He spent significant periods of his time in the back of the room mentally deconstructing the physical environment around him, “thinking in structures” as he put it. Unbeknownst to his teachers, the boy had been deepening his participation in a hobby—an elective vocation—since attending a summer design program at a local university in the third grade. Outside of school he engaged in sophisticated design, construction, and building projects with all manner of physical and technological objects. It would be 3 more years before he came to understand that there is such a field as engineering and that it might be a good match for his interests. By that point it would be much more difficult to make his way along the typical academic path. To simply say that these youth may be “at risk” for making their way along academic pathways ignores the depth of their academic-related interests and developing expertise. It skirts the evaluation and positioning of them that occurred in different contexts based on a partial understanding of who they were at the time and who they wanted to become, and it severely discounts the complexities associated with them productively pursuing and becoming who they might wish to become. We argue that we need to discover and then support the successful learning pathways of youth across social settings over developmental time so that we can promote the development of interests and expertise that may lead to both academic and personal success.

The role of borders in environmental education: positioning, power and marginality

In this study, we argue that in order to understand the underlying causes of inequities in education, we need to look outside specific educational settings to the larger social, historical and political structures behind those inequities. Therefore, in this work we take a social justice perspective to look at the relationship between environmental science education, dominant environmental narratives and how places and youth are constructed and positioned through environmental education. To this end, we examine how borders – and their corresponding margins – construct place in environmental education and to discuss implications of this construction of place for issues of environmental justice and equity. Borders both demarcate categories and serve to reify existing social and political relationships. Therefore, we ask the following questions: (1) What is the role of borders in constructing place in environmental education? (2) How do youth position themselves with respect to these borders? and (3) What are implications for the design of environmental education learning environments that work towards goals of social and environmental justice? We found that prevailing environmental education narratives construct borders using what we call discourses of fear and privilege, and that these boundaries position communities and youth in ways that reify existing social and political power relationships. We also found that youth resist these constructions both through counter-script and performance of identity.