Edna Tan

Creating Hybrid Spaces for Engaging School Science Among Urban Middle School Girls

The middle grades are a crucial time for girls in making decisions about how or if they want to follow science trajectories. In this article, the authors report on how urban middle school girls enact meaningful strategies of engagement in science class in their efforts to merge their social worlds with the worlds of school science and on the unsanctioned resources and identities they take up to do so. The authors argue that such merging science practices are generative both in terms of how they develop over time and in how they impact the science learning community of practice. They discuss the implications these findings have for current policy and practice surrounding gender equity in science education.

We Be Burnin'! Agency, Identity, and Science Learning

This article investigates the development of agency in science among low-income urban youth aged 10 to 14 as they participated in a voluntary year-round program on green energy technologies conducted at a local community club in a midwestern city. Focusing on how youth engaged a summer unit on understanding and modeling the relationship between energy use and the health of the urban environment, we use ethnographic data to discuss how the youth asserted themselves as community science experts in ways that took up and broke down the contradictory roles of being a producer and a critic of science/education. Our findings suggest that youth actively appropriate project activities and tools in order to challenge the types of roles and student voice traditionally available to students in the classroom.

Crafting a Future in Science Tracing Middle School Girls’ Identity Work Over Time and Space

The underrepresentation of girls from nondominant backgrounds in the sciences and engineering continues despite recent gains in achievement. This longitudinal ethnographic study traces the identity work that girls from nondominant backgrounds do as they engage in science-related activities across school, club, and home during the middle school years. Building a conceptual argument for identity trajectories, the authors discuss the ongoing, cumulative, and contentious nature of identity work and the mechanisms that foster critical shifts in trajectories. The authors argue that the girls view possible future selves in science when their identity work is recognized, supported, and leveraged toward expanded opportunities for engagement in science. This process yields layered meanings of (possible) selves and of science and reconfigures meaningful participation in science.

Transforming Science Learning and Student Participation in Sixth Grade Science: A Case Study of a Low-Income, Urban, Racial Minority Classroom

Recent criticisms of the goal of “science for all” with regard to minority students have alluded to the onerous culture of school science characterized by white, middle-class values that eschew personal everyday science experiences and nontraditional funds of knowledge, in addition to alienating science instruction. Using critically-oriented, sociocultural perspectives, this article explores the sixth grade classroom of a male, white, science teacher in an urban school that serves only minority students. Using Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cains (2001) notion of figured worlds, we look at what learning science looks like in Mr. Ms classroom and how he provides the structural support to increase student participation by creating different figured worlds of sixth grade science. In these different figured worlds, we discuss the pedagogical strategies Mr. M uses to purposefully recruit nontraditional funds of knowledge of racial minority and low-income students, thereby positioning them with more authority for participation. Through this case study of Mr. M and the racial minority and low-income students he teaches, we discuss the role science teachers play in urban school science education and the agency and achievement racial minority and low-income students are capable of with appropriate support.

It Changed Our Lives: Activism, Science, and Greening the Community

Drawing upon critically oriented studies of science literacy and environmental justice, we posit a framework for activism in science education. To make our case, we share a set of narratives on how the River City Youth Club acquired a new green roof. Using these narratives we argue that the ways in which youth describe their accomplishments with respect to the roof reflects a range of subject positions that they carve out and take up over time. These subject positions reveal how activism is a generative process linked to “knowing” and “being” in ways that juxtapose everyday practices with those of science.RésuméFondant notre approche sur des études critiques dans le domaine de l’alphabétisation scientifique et de l’équité environnementale, nous postulons un cadre visant à promouvoir l’activisme en enseignement des sciences. Comme arguments, nous présentons une série de récits qui racontent comment la Maison de jeunes de River City a pu se doter d’un nouveau toit écologique. Ces récits nous permettent de montrer que les façons dont les jeunes décrivent leur rôle dans la réalisation de ce projet reflètent une gamme de positions que les sujets adoptent et modifient au fur et à mesure que progresse la réalisation du toit. Ces différentes positions indiquent que l’activisme est un processus génératif lié à la ‘connaissance’ et au ‘savoir’, processus qui juxtapose les pratiques quotidiennes et celles des sciences.

Internalization of Aeromonas hydrophila by fish epithelial cells can be inhibited with a tyrosine kinase inhibitor

Aeromonas hydrophila is a Gram-negative bacterium that is pathogenic in fish, causing motile aeromonad septicaemia. It can enter (invade) fish cells, and survive as an intracellular parasite. The host-pathogen interaction and signal transduction pathway were studied by screening signal transduction inhibitors using carp epithelial cells and a virulent strain of the bacterium, PPD134/91. Genistein, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, postponed internalization of A. hydrophila into host cells, suggesting that tyrosine phosphorylation plays a role in internalization. In contrast, staurosporine, a protein kinase C inhibitor, and sodium orthovanadate, a protein tyrosine phosphatase inhibitor, accelerated internalization of PPD134/91. Other virulent strains of A. hydrophila were also examined and it is likely that all strains, irrespective of serogroup, use the same signalling pathway to facilitate bacterial uptake.

Science Learning as Participation with and in a Place

In this chapter we take up the questions: (1) How do youth work to transform their science learning as participation through the dialectical, hybrid practices as they engage in community-based participatory research projects in a youth-based afterschool program called Green Energy Technologies in the City (GET City)?; and (2) How do youth expand their identities through the dialectical, hybrid practices? Drawing upon critically oriented frameworks for understanding the relationships among place and learning, this 2-year longitudinal study of youth in an afterschool program shows how place facilitates and constrains participatory learning by the contextual scaffolds it gives rise to. We explore how place shapes the process by which youth worked to transform their participation, and how youth hybrid practices are layered into their identity development with and in a place.

Science as Context and Tool: The Role of Place in Science Learning Among Urban Middle School Youth

The students in Mr. Nader’s environmental statistics class were involved in the “pigeon project.” The pigeon project, inspired by Cornell University’s Pigeon Watch Project was a 3-week investigation focused on two goals: To support students in learning to recognize the different color morphs of pigeons and pigeon behaviors; and to use this information to learn how to classify animals as well as to produce simple environmental statistics. It was precisely because he wanted his students to connect to the content of environmental statistics that the teacher selected the pigeon unit. Students in large urban centers, like New York City, are frequently around pigeons and thus have a great deal of experiential knowledge about them that can be tapped to support them in connecting with environmental statistics. By standard measures, the pigeon project was a success in Mr. Nader’s classroom. The students demonstrated their learning about pigeon morphs, classification, and graphing through their coursework and at the end of the unit KWL (Know, Want to Know, Learn) activity. For example, in the initial class KWL discussion of what students knew about pigeons and what they wanted to know, students talked about how pigeons were dirty, carriers of disease, and “rats with wings.” At the end of the unit, the “What we have learned” column was populated with comments like they “follow each other, there are many types or morphs, the majority of pigeons [in our neighborhood] are blue bars and checkers, they get along together although they are different types, and pigeons do not attack (are not aggressive).”

A Longitudinal Study of Equity-Oriented STEM-Rich Making Among Youth From Historically Marginalized Communities:

The maker movement has evoked interest for its role in breaking down barriers to STEM learning. However, few empirical studies document how youth are supported over time in STEM-rich making projects or their outcomes. This longitudinal critical ethnographic study traces the development of 41 youth maker projects in two community-centered making programs. Building a conceptual argument for an equity-oriented culture of making, the authors discuss the ways in which making with and in community opened opportunities for youth to project their communities’ rich culture knowledge and wisdom onto their making while also troubling and negotiating the historicized injustices they experience. The authors also discuss how community engagement legitimized a practice of co-making, which supported equity-oriented goals and outcomes.

Designing for rightful presence in STEM-rich making: Community ethnography as pedagogy

Making and makerspaces have largely proliferated as an out-of-school, informal activity that mostly self-selects interested participants. To take up equity concerns seriously, we need to consider the ways in which classroom teaching is both an historicized and relational activity, and how classroom STEM teaching and learning, under which making is subsumed, has long alienated youth of color. The construct of rightful presence is one way to consider more systemically how to make sense of the historicized and relational nature of teaching and learning. We show how integrating an equity-oriented design approach, community ethnography as pedagogy, as a part engaging in STEM-rich making, support the emergences of three making present practices: modeling ethnographic data, re-performing injustices towards understanding and solidarity, and making change dynamic and visible through engineering practices, all of which reflect the on-going struggle youth face in their lives, write these injustices onto a longer history of struggle in the school/classroom, and allow for a refusal to be victimized.