5

Centering Student Experience in Science

The Framework advocates for engaging students in the doing of science, said Ravit Duncan (Rutgers University). The Framework report states that a major goal for science education is to allow students to “systematically investigate issues related to their personal and community priorities.” By centering instruction on students’ lived experiences, said Duncan, science education can be coherent across lessons, units, and grades. However, she said, coherence and centering student experiences are “in the eye of the beholder.” Not all students feel that their experiences, knowledge, and bodies are welcome and valued in science. Duncan shared several quotes from students that illustrate this idea (Calabrese Barton and Tan, 2020, 2021; Calabrese Barton, Tan, and Birmingham, 2020):

• “When you walk into some classrooms, you feel they don’t want you there.” (Sana, age 13)
• “Teachers care, but they do not care about the community all of the time. We go outside on our time, and find places where we can go do science or engineering for our communities. School doesn’t know how to do that. School doesn’t know that we do that. We need to tell our teachers how we do it. We got to help them.” (Samuel, age 14)
• “The racist stereotype is that Black people are not listening to science. But that is not true. Maybe it’s the other way around, like science is not listening to us…. I want you to know how I feel as a young, Black girl in America and in STEM. I want to feel like I can be me in STEM and have that celebrated.” (Jazmyn, age 15)

In thinking about the experiences of students in the classroom, said Duncan, several questions emerged during the planning of this session: Whose experiences are we centering? How and when are we centering them? Toward what end? The extent to which science learning environments are spaces in which students feel seen, heard, and valued as persons and knowledge producers depends on how we answer these questions. How equity and justice are considered day-to-day has consequences for student experiences in the classroom. To frame the discussion, Duncan shared definitions of “equity” and “justice” from the report on Science and Engineering in Preschool through Elementary Grades (NASEM, 2022). The committee used the term “equity” to address ways—through changing policies and practices—of removing barriers to participation in science and engineering and increasing achievement, representation, and identification, whereas the term “justice” refers to addressing systemic oppressions that cause those barriers, thus seeking fair treatment of all people and supporting opportunities for self-determination and thriving (NASEM, 2022). In this session of the Summit, Duncan asked the panelists a series of guiding questions, followed by open discussion. The five panelists were as follows:

• Edna Tan: professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro; focuses on equitable and consequential science learning for historically underrepresented minority youth
• Rabiah Harris: eighth-grade science teacher and team lead at Ida B. Wells Middle School; 17 years experience in teaching
• Lauren Kaupp: educational specialist for science and STEM at the Hawaii Department of Education; experience in curriculum design, professional development, and standards implementation
• Maria Olivares: research assistant professor at Boston University; works in partnership to develop learning environments that support expansive and creative inquiry in STEM
• Enrique Suárez: assistant professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst; designs learning environments that support young, emerging, multilingual students in leveraging their conceptual resources and trans-languaging practices for learning science

STUDENT PERSPECTIVES

Students’ experiences in science class, said Kaupp, often boil down to a simple dichotomy: “they like the hands-on part of science class, and they don’t like when science class is boring.” Part of the standards implementation, she said, has been broadening teachers’ understanding of what science teaching and learning looks like, and moving away from the idea of “hands-on science” toward the idea of “minds-on science.” However, said Kaupp, students are telling us that they like hands-on science: they want to touch things and do things. This has always been important to students, but it particularly resonates after a year and a half of distance learning. While it is important to center students’ real-life experiences in science education, said Kaupp, it is also critical to consider their experiences in the classroom itself.

Olivares added that it is essential to reflect on the purpose of teaching and learning, the purpose of scientific thinking, and the value for students in engaging in these disciplinary practices. Coming out of the pandemic, she said, there has been a “hyper focus” on learning loss. The question, however, is what did they lose, and do we want to impose that on them again? Pre-pandemic learning was not founded on nurturance, meant to uplift students, or meant to expand thinking; there is now an opportunity to rethink the purpose of learning with a longer vision. The children in our classrooms are the future, she said, and “we should be teaching them as such.” Everything we do in the classroom needs grounding in the long-term vision of education rather than “triaging whatever is happening in that moment.”

DIMENSIONS OF STUDENT EXPERIENCES

When considering how to center student experiences, said Tan, it is productive to frame the work against a backdrop of historical and systematic injustices and oppressions that have been visited on the bodies of particular groups of students disproportionately. “The past is carried in our bodies, in our ideologies, in our framings, in our positionings,” and the past impacts how individuals perform in the here and now. Students in a classroom are not a homogenous group—some are from the dominant culture, whereas others are students of color, immigrants, refugees, multilingual students, or students who identify as LGBTQ+. Some students have multiple identifiers and intersecting identities and experiences that are germane to their sense of self and how they come to science learning. The question, said Tan, is whose experiences do we center, and when, and how? Tan argued that there

is a need to develop guidelines to answer this question, because “when we go back to the norm,” we amplify the dominant culture of white, middle class, and heterosexual. This is the norm of science education, the norm we have been entrenched in, and the norm that we know, she said.

Harris added that teachers have a duty to learn about students as individuals because “they matter,” and they are a part of the community space. This can be done in many ways and different places, such as on recess duty, in conversations with parents, and in class discussions and assignments. Tan agreed and said that teachers are usually familiar with eliciting student stories and experiences as part of the exploration or framing of the phenomenon (e.g., “Have you ever encountered this in your family?”). However, she said, it often stops there, and student experiences are only used as an on-ramp to a science unit that is already mapped out. Harris said that this part is “so tricky.” For science education to be centered on student experiences, it is critical for units and curricula to be given “space to breathe.” That is, teachers need to be able to adjust and adapt based on what their students are bringing to the table. Teachers can be flexible in this way, said Harris, but only if administrators give them the space to do so. Tan added that centering student experiences is a paradigm shift that requires teachers to be nimble and requires administrators and staff to foster an environment of support for teachers and students.

Harris gave an example of how students’ lives and experiences can be brought into the science classroom. In a unit on chemical reactions, Harris asked her students to tell her about ways that matter changed in their life (e.g., eating dinner). Her students responded that her homework was “a little weird” because she was asking them about things that happened in their day-to-day life. She said that students were “blown away” and reported that no teacher had ever really asked them to think in this way before. The more that teachers can connect topics with student experiences, the more the students will understand that they are already doing science. Olivares added another example of a middle school teacher who designed a unit on Newton’s laws of motion. The students were given the assignment of making kinetic sculptures, or something that moves. The teacher asked the students to consider how social movements—such as Black Lives Matter—connect with ways of understanding motion and physics. This assignment allowed students to decide what they wanted to make, to connect science with things that were important to them, and to “author themselves” into the materials that existed within the physics course. Olivares said that this was a very enriching experience for students, with engagement, collaboration, and enjoyment without the pressure to produce a particular product or come up with a particular answer.

EQUITY

“I start from the understanding,” said Suárez, that while opportunities and access to resources are important parts of equity, “we cannot stop there.” Suárez shared several perspectives on an equitable approach to science education. He said that an equitable approach

• centers student experiences and acknowledges, mitigates, and redresses the sociohistorical and sociopolitical oppressions of the past and the present;
• creates opportunities for self-determination and group deliberation, instead of using students’ experiences only as steppingstones toward dominant knowledge and ways of knowing; and
• recognizes the value of diversity and acknowledges that “we are doing ourselves a disservice” by excluding certain people and different ways of knowing.

If we coordinate multiple ways of understanding and multiple ways of relating to the natural world, we create better knowledge. These issues, said Suárez, are systematic and systemic, and addressing them requires bringing together diverse stakeholders to create space for conversation with people “outside of our bubbles.”

Olivares agreed and added that it is not enough to solicit diverse voices without sustained and meaningful engagement of stakeholders, in a way that is consequential, nurturing, and responsive. Although the need for STEM education is often framed in relation to the need for the future workforce, it is essential that we are integrating students and their needs into our systems. Nurturing the process of learning and personally meaningful experiences, she said, encourages expansive and creative thinking, which is what will be needed in the future. Olivares added that the systemic nature of inequity should push researchers to reconceptualize how they think about collaboration. As researchers, she asked, “How do we orient to our communities? Do we orient to them as fellow researchers, with a depth of knowledge and expertise that we do not have?” Collaborating with communities allows us to pool our resources and “disrupt inequity simultaneously on multiple fronts.”

BARRIERS

A recent survey found that only about 20 percent of teachers felt well-prepared to teach in ways that are culturally responsive and culturally sustaining, said Suárez. In addition, only about a quarter of teachers said that they attend professional development that addresses these issues. This is a barrier to centering student experiences with a focus on equity, he said. Administrators, researchers, teacher educators, and professional development providers need to be intentional about centering racial justice and making it central to the work of science education. Furthermore, it is critical to understand how ableism¹ is pervasive in how we think about science learning. Suárez noted that the phrase “hands-on learning” has a “twinge of ableism.” We need to provide opportunities and resources for K–12 science educators to engage with these issues and address them. Olivares added that this can be done in ways other than in the rigid environment of traditional professional development. For example, research-practice partnerships can cultivate the knowledge and experience needed to center student experience and move science education forward.

IMPLICATIONS FOR CLASSROOMS

Tan said that equity and centering student experiences are systemic issues, and that an ecosystem lens is necessary to understand and address these issues across space and time. Tan encouraged a zoom in/zoom out approach, in which stakeholders can zoom out to see the historical and contextual nature of inequities and can zoom in to address these issues in the classroom day-to-day. She said that there is a need to upend the status quo, and that “the time is now” to find ways to address systemic oppressions and rethink the classroom. Tan shared an example of one classroom

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¹ Ableism is the discrimation of and prejudice against people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior. For more information, see https://www.accessliving.org/newsroom/blog/ableism-101/.

initiative and noted that while the issues are systemic, individual stories are “empowering and very necessary empirically to document” the efforts to disrupt the system. A partner teacher in North Carolina was developing a unit about engineering for sustainable communities. The teacher, said Tan, was a white, middle-class woman, whereas the class was extremely racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse. The students conducted a community ethnography, with the school itself as the community. Students interviewed stakeholders, parents, and students, and identified problems such as low morale, stress, and bullying. One particular issue was bullying in the bathroom, and the students found that the small size of the stall doors was causing girls to have to contort their bodies to stay safe, or to avoid going to the bathroom altogether. The students engineered a door extender with a panel for more privacy. Tan said that while this solution may not seem “dramatic,” it addressed an injustice that was preventing the girls from being functional, alert, and motivated. Trauma and injustice can be mundane yet insidious, she said, building up over time. This project made a basic human need “visible through engineering,” and allowed the students to do rigorous science while being the experts and the leaders of their own community.

Kaupp added that there is a need to rethink the physical space of classrooms to better support student learning. Even before the social distancing of COVID-19 protocols, she said, science classrooms were often arranged with desks in rows all facing one direction. To facilitate the types of teaching and learning advocated for by the NGSS and the Framework, it is important to consider ways to rearrange the physical spaces of the classroom.

Kaupp stressed that these are systems issues, and “we can’t put the full weight” on classroom teachers. Supplies, equipment, and professional development to support classroom teachers can be provided by the system, and the system can also provide resources such as videos, high-quality curricular materials, and supplemental materials. When we are asking teachers “to do a heavy lift,” there is a need for the system to honor their time and treat them like the professionals they are. Olivares added that when she works with teachers, she tries to identify flexible structures rather than particulars. In contrast, the educational system tends to focus on particulars in the absence of process, deep thinking, and deep engagement. Teachers need to be allowed to be versatile and improvise within a flexible structure, she said. Suárez said that there is a need to rethink how we evaluate expertise in teachers. There is expertise at every level, and expertise in different areas, and we need to facilitate bringing teachers together to share expertise and support each other. “Throwing people into the deep end” without support is not advisable, he said, but we also need to recognize that all teachers at all levels bring an expertise that can be honored and built upon.

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