Justine M. Kane

Content Learning and Identity Construction: A Framework to Strengthen African American Students' Mathematics and Science Learning in Urban Elementary Schools.

We present a theoretical framework that views learning as a process involving content learning (CL) and identity construction (IC). We view identities as lenses through which people make sense of, and position themselves, through stories and actions, and as lenses for understanding how they are positioned by others. As people become more (or less) central members of a disciplinary community (e.g., a science or mathematics classroom) and engage (or not) in various cultural practices, changes in identity and knowledge accompany changes in position and status. IC and CL share an important characteristic: they both involve meaning making. For IC, it is the development of reasoned, coordinated, coherent, and meaningful ways of seeing one’s self in relation to communities, and for CL, it centers on the development of disciplinary concepts, processes, tools, language, discourse, and norms within practices. Focusing on Black students in mathematics and science classrooms, we claim that three intersecting identities are particularly important: disciplinary identity (as doers of the discipline, i.e., mathematics and science), racial identity (emerging understandings of what it means to be Black), and academic identity (as participants in academic tasks and classroom practices). In this paper, we elaborate on the CLIC framework as a useful tool for understanding how Black students negotiate participation in, and come to see themselves as doers of science and mathematics in their school classrooms. We synthesize empirical findings from our research with younger and older students, as well as with parents and community members, to illustrate dimensions of this framework.

Science Learning in Urban Elementary School Classrooms: Liberatory Education and Issues of Access, Participation and Achievement

We examine what we know about science learning inside classrooms in American urban elementary schools that educate predominately low-income students of colour (African-Americans and Latino/as). Mindful of a Freirean liberatory framework for education, we analyse research published in journals in the last decade that addresses classroom learning issues, what learning takes place and how, benefits (perceived and conceived) of science learning, when classroom learning is more successful and for whom, and the relationship between teaching and learning. The research synthesis points to the usefulness of various constructs, such as language, identity, hybridity and meaning making in exploring and understanding science learning in the urban elementary school classrooms of students who usually have limited access, participation and achievement in science.

Concept Development in Urban Classroom Spaces: Dialectical Relationships, Power, and Identity

Conceptual development in science has been studied for decades with learners of all ages and for a variety of science topics, ideas, and concepts. Increasingly, scholars have presented differing views regarding what it is important to be studying about conceptual development and conceptual change, how teaching practice is/should be influencing and be influenced by research in this domain, the extent to which cognition, social interactions, and affect/emotions (could) shape conceptual development and change, the extent to which language and other modes of communication influence, or possibly constitute, concept development/ change, and whether, and the degree to which (from zero to a high degree), a variety of theoretical frameworks can be used together and inform research in this domain.

Elementary School Teachers Constructing Teacher-of-Science Identities

In US elementary schools and especially in early grades, there is a heavy emphasis on English language arts, often to the exclusion of other subjects, such as science and social studies (Crocco & Costigan, 2007). This, coupled with many elementary school teachers seeing themselves as more “literacy people” rather than “science people,” encouraged us to conceive of a project Integrated Science Literacy Enactments (ISLE) that aimed to develop, enact, and study integrated scienceliteracy teaching and learning in urban elementary school classrooms (Varelas & Pappas, 2013).

Multiple Identities and the Science self

Children make meaning of their lives by telling stories. Using the characters, plots, and settings embedded in the worlds that are familiar to them, they construct narratives about themselves, about who they are and who they want to become. When listening to the stories that young children tell about their lives, we hear what is important to them and may be surprised by the unexpected connections they make between real and imagined worlds, between worlds inside and outside of school, and with the world of science.