Gayle A. Buck

Bringing female scientists into the elementary classroom: Confronting the strength of elementary students' stereotypical images of scientists

This study explored the effectiveness of bringing female scientists into the elementary classrooms on promoting changes in the stereotypical images of scientists. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analyzed to illuminate changes in stereotypical images of scientists. Results indicate that despite the efforts of the scientists to encourage the students to question their image of a scientist, the students held on to stereotypical images. Instead, the students questioned the true identity of the scientists, categorizing them as teachers. The results led to questions of the strength of the image and the extent of efforts needed for students to question that image.

Terms of inquiry

Teaching and learning continues to be driven by a version of professionalism that construes practice to be a form of applied science. This paper challenges that paradigm. In particular, subjecting and assimilating practical activity to a technical mode of rationality is challenged as not being the most appropriate way to approach teaching, learning, and the process that drives both of these phenomena, inquiry. Middle school science classrooms provide the contexts to explore the situated consequences of embracing the terms of inquiry. Placing inquiry at the core of the thinking and experiences of middle school science educators as a philosophical/theoretical/practical educative process to be worked with, and concomitantly, working as dynamic practice, yields working notions to be necessarily embedded, cultivating, sustaining, and nurturing inquiry in teachers’ practices. As teachers experimented directly with the working notions of seeing, relational knowing, mindful embodiment, and assessment as interrelated and interdependent with inquiry, the teaching/learning outcomes authorized more and more inquiry in teachers’—and then students’—practices. An operative and active professional model emerges out of these working notions with the lived terms of inquiry identified as participatory in nature, vigilant to the question(s) in which the inquiry originates, organic in form, and always turning back on self, as catalysts in support of inquiry.

Professional Development Risks and Opportunities Embodied within Self-Study

This paper documents a self-study research groups development and its effects on 11 participants. Drawing on the scholarship of the self-study tradition within educational research, we see teacher knowledge as an important and largely untapped source for the improvement of teaching. Positioning participants to look at the sense and selves being made on a continual basis is the task embraced by this self-study group. The paper reveals professional development risks and opportunities confronted by educators through vulnerably, accountably, integrally, and mindfully negotiating teaching-learning lives. The findings suggest that our bodies are the reflexive ground of comprehension, confronting vulnerability, seeking accountability to self, negotiating theory as working notions, and experiencing the pull of teaching-learning possibilities. Thus the role of embodiment within teaching-learning practices is elucidated through educator professional development in action.

Learning to Look through the Eyes of Our Students: action research as a tool of inquiry

Abstract The story we are about to tell occurred when Gayle was a middle school science teacher and graduate student in Joannes seminar on the study of teaching. Gayle was trying to make sense of her science students indifference toward the environment, an attitude that concerned her as an environmentalist. She turned her inquiry into an action research project that sought to answer the question, ‘What are the assumptions that my middle school students have about their relationship with the environment?’ Joanne was mentoring Gayle in her action research study, and at the same time exploring Gayles perspective as an action researcher. Now, several years later, we are both action researchers and teacher educators and understand that we have been looking through the eyes of our students in order to become scholars of our own teaching.

Broadening Middle-School Students' Images of Science and Scientists

This article presents a summary report of the 18 th biennial conference on National Materials Policy, held May 24–25, 2004 at National Academies Keck Center, Washington DC. This conference addressed the educational needs in materials science for the 21 st century through a series of presentations which focused on all aspects of materials education including elementary (K-12), undergraduate as well as graduate education and continuing education. The conference therefore contributed to the definition of the educational needs for the 21 st century workforce.

Teaching discourses: Science teachers' responses to the voices of adolescent girls

The purpose of this study was to provide an opportunity for science teachers to ‘listen’ to adolescent girls discuss their ideas and feelings about the contemporary structure of middle-level science education. The reflections of these teachers were then analyzed to capture how the teachers interpreted what adolescent girls had to say and the action that they will take in the classroom as a result of those interpretations. This qualitative study investigated 11 teachers and 51 Grade 7 and 8 girls from various states across the continental USA. The girls discussed such things as their favorite science topics, comfort level in science classrooms, and curiosities about the physical world. The study revealed that adolescent girls strive to make a connection to science. They can see how science can help them to understand better themselves and their world, but they seldom find such understandings in contemporary science classrooms. In addition, adolescent girls not only need to have choices in their studies, but they understand that need. The study revealed that the teachers interpreted the girls request from an assimilative perspective by seeking ways to help the girls ‘fit’ into the existing structure of science education. The implications of the study suggest that science education will need to change in response to the voices of the ‘others’, but that change will only happen if we prepare teachers better to be prepared to listen and change practice in light of what they hear.

Four Criteria for Engaging Girls in the Middle Level Classroom

I did not begin my middle level teaching career with a focus on working with young adolescent girls. However, I was not in that new career very long before finding ways to engage girls in middle level science became a priority of mine. This was the result of my daily experiences in the classroom. The girls in my classes were not failing science, but they were not engaged and they did not seem to be very enthusiastic about what we were studying. I began to explore different ways to engage the girls in my classroom. This exploration continues today with the help of other middle level teachers that I have found who share my pursuit. As I explore, my ideas of what it means to be an effective teacher of adoles