Sara Tolbert

Critical caring for people and place

ABSTRACT What role does caring play in environmental education? The development of caring relationships in formal school settings remains a foundational yet underexamined concept in environmental education research. This study examines the role of caring relationships between people and place in an urban high school in the United States. We draw upon theoretical lenses of caring and justice by egalitarian and feminist scholars to examine the role that authentic caring plays in a teachers practice and in students’ experiences when engaged in urban park restoration. Findings reveal that the caring role of the environmental science teacher in this study is significant; the teachers caring/carework mediates how students in his class relate to the environmental learning experiences. Further, through these experiences students in the study likewise initiated care both for themselves and others.

Reassembling the Natural and Social Commons

Since modern times, human activity has significantly altered the earth’s physical and biological composition to such an extent that scientists have now renamed our current time the Anthropocene (Lewis and Maslin, Nature 519:171–180, 2015). Such a designation exposes the arbitrary boundary between the natural and social world. Large-scale social phenomena and injustices such as deforestation, mass agriculture, slavery, and brutal conquests now permanently mark planet Earth’s living and non-living components. Such events are enacted within assemblages of material and discursive components that have a history and ‘life’ of their own. This essay argues for dissolving the boundaries between ‘natural’ and ‘social’, human and non-human, and discursive and material, so as to fuse the natural and social commons (Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire [Penguin, 2004]; Commonwealth [Harvard University Press, 2009])—the purpose of which is to create critical, activist spaces in education, integral to the exercising of biopower via the (re)production of subjectivities. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory and a short series of diagrams, we attempt to provoke reconfigurations of the material and social world.

Surviving teacher education: a community cultural capital framework of persistence

In this article, we communicate the experiences of a bilingual/biracial Peruvian-Anglo European student teacher, Serina, enrolled in a ‘teacher education for diversity’ program. Although the majority of the 13 (mostly Anglo European) students in Serina’s cohort expressed satisfaction with the social justice focus of the program, Serina was frustrated by the mixed messages she received about teacher professionalism as both teaching for social change and as deference to power. Serina was often vocal in her critique and, as a result, endured and negotiated cumulative microaggressions throughout her teacher education program. Despite these challenges, she drew on her community cultural capital to become a credentialed science teacher in an underserved urban middle school. Serina’s experiences compel us to think about how teacher educators might better support pre-service Teachers of Color – particularly as we strive to more actively recruit Teachers of Color to our teacher education programs. Implications for ‘becoming’ more socially just teacher educators are also discussed.

‘They might know a lot of things that I don’t know’: investigating differences in preservice teachers’ ideas about contextualizing science instruction in multilingual classrooms

ABSTRACT This paper describes the results from a qualitative study of 72 preservice teachers’ initial ideas about contextualizing science instruction with language minority students. Participants drew primarily on local ecological and multicultural contexts as resources for contextualizing instruction. However, preservice teachers enrolled in the bilingual certification program articulated more asset-oriented and less stereotypical ideas than those not seeking bilingual certification. Results can inform teacher education programs that aim to prepare graduates for teaching science in multilingual classrooms.

Altering the Ideology of Consumerism: Caring for Land and People Through School Science

In this chapter, we examine how school science can engage ethics of care to interrupt harmful environmental and economic practices of consumption. More specifically, we question: how can science education promote ethical practices of sustainability, particularly within contexts of economic oppression? We first describe how consumerism has become an under–interrogated dominant neoliberal ideology, calling attention to how unfettered consumerism has had devastating effects on individuals, communities, land, and other living beings. We outline how these effects are disproportionately intensified within economically oppressed communities. We then propose an ethic of caring for land and people by drawing on conceptualizations of caring in education literature, environmental education, and Indigenous thought. Next we draw from two case studies of high school science contexts to show ways that youth and their teachers critique consumption through and within an ethic of caring for self, each other, land, and community. As youth re/learn sustainable practices, they attend to both ecological and economic dimensions of sustainability–caring for both land and people. Ultimately, these cases highlight how youth benefit from opportunities to rethink consumption and consumerism in ways that are situated within the complex ecologies of their lives.

Preparing Pre-service Secondary Teachers to Teach Science to English Learners: Theory into Practice

This chapter focuses on the preparation of pre-service teachers to teach science to English Learners (ELs) and is based on the SSTELLA (Secondary Science Teaching with English Language and Literacy Acquisition) project that has been implemented in four pre-service teacher education programs in Arizona, California and Texas. The SSTELLA project uses a practice-focused model of teacher education to engage novice teachers in observation, analysis, and experience with explicit models of the instructional approaches they are being prepared to teach. It describes how four SSTELLA practices – Scientific Sense-making, Scientific Discourse, English Language and Literacy Development, and Contextualized Science Activity–are articulated across the coursework and practicum requirements of the teacher education program through the use of instructional exemplars, video cases, and professional development with cooperating teachers and teacher supervisors. Data are presented that show that teacher candidates who participated in the SSTELLA intervention implemented several key practices at a higher level: contextualizing science activity, and engaging students in productive talk and student-student interaction. Furthermore, these teacher candidates showed higher self-efficacy for teaching ELs than candidates who were not part of the intervention.