Gale Seiler

Reproduction of social class in the teaching and learning of science in urban high schools

The study examines the teaching and learning of science in an urban high school characterised by African American students from conditions of relative poverty. An interpretive study was undertaken involving a research team that included the teacher in the study and a student from the school. Despite the teachers effort to enact a curriculum that was transformative the students resisted most of his efforts to enhance their learning. The study highlights the difficulties of engaging students when they lack motivation to learn and attend sporadically. In an era of standards-oriented science in which all students are expected to achieve at a high level, it is essential that research identify ways to tailor the science curriculum to the needs and interests of students.

Educating Science Teachers for the Sociocultural Diversity of Urban Schools.

This interpretive study of the preparation of science teachers for urban high schools explored the extent to which learning to teach was facilitated by the methods courses, cooperating teachers and university supervisors. Because the methods course was minimally effective in addressing the needs of teaching low track students from conditions of poverty the methods instructor, Tobin, decided to be a teacher-researcher with such students. He joined Smith, a student teacher and Seiler, a doctoral student, in an investigation that examined learning to teach in a graduate teacher preparation program. In an endeavour to gain a first hand grasp on the challenges of teaching African American students placed in a low track program of study the three authors of this paper co-taught science in an urban high school. The paper incorporates rich perspectives gained from the teacher-researchers and theoretical frameworks associated with resistance, habitus and learning to teach by co-teaching. The paper advocates co-teaching as an essential component of teacher education programs.

Student-Powered Science: Science Education for and by African American Students.

A liberatory pedagogy, from a Freirean perspective, seeks to transform the classroom into a dialogic and student-powered learning environment by restructuring the student-teacher dichotomy. The purpose is change—not only to individual students’ lives and opportunities but also to the wider social reality. While these are the goals of many science educators, we rarely see Freirean perspectives specifically applied to science teaching. This article considers liberatory pedagogy applied to science teaching where it is perhaps needed most—in a classroom with racially and economically marginalized youth—and explores the challenges that both the structures of urban science classrooms and traditional views about science education pose to the application of Freirean pedagogy.

Reconstructing Science Curricula Through Student Voice and Choice

How can teachers enact a curriculum that is responsive to students and emergent from them when teachers are under enormous constraints to cover specific course content and to prepare students for standardized tests? Rather than an either/or perspective, this article embraces a both/and approach based on the belief that teachers can do both. Drawing upon qualitative classroom data gleaned from 3 years of research in an inner-city high school, four “best practices” inform a science curriculum model based on student voice and choice. In a recursive fashion, both the evidence and aspects of the curriculum that instantiate these practices are described. The end result is a new way of thinking about high school curricula that is situated in the students’ lives and experiences and has room for their voices and choices while addressing content standards and the development of critical thinking skills. It also demonstrates how research can inform curriculum development in overt and significant ways, when empirically identified best practices are made visible in a curriculum’s organization and implementation.

Recognizing “Smart Super-Physicists”

The study we present here included doctoral students (6 women and 5 men) who, over the course of one year, participated in an ethnographic study aimed at exploring the kinds of subject positions constructed and performed by students engaged in the Discourse of recognizable physicist. We begin with a discussion of the most recognizable subject position in physics-the stereotypical physicist.