Emotions in Teaching Environmental Education

This op-ed article examines the emotional impact of teaching environmental science and considers how certain emotions can broaden viewpoints and other emotions narrow them. Specifically, it investigates how the topic of climate change became an emotional debate in a science classroom because of religious beliefs. Through reflective practice and examination of positionality, the author explored how certain teaching practices of pre-service science teachers created a productive space and other practices closed down the conversations. This article is framed with theories that explore both divergent and shared viewpoints

Member Checking Process with Adolescent Students: Not Just Reading a Transcript

This paper explores the way in which educational researchers created a member checking process with adolescent students during a study to uncover and understand female and male’s dynamic mathematics identity in single-sex and coeducational mathematics classes within a public coeducational middle school in the United States. The authors developed a member checking process that included I-poems and Word Trees, which provided the youth with opportunities for self-reflection, enhancement of findings, examination of the students’ learning, and as a way to shift some of the power from the researcher to the participants. This paper serves as an example for other researchers to begin thinking about the important process of member checking and participants’ roles in the research

Connecting to Our Community: Utilizing Photovoice as a Pedagogical Tool to Connect College Students to Science

In this study, we investigated the ways in which university students connected with science through the use of photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1994) as a pedagogical tool. Results indicated that students came to appreciate their connections to the science that operates in their lives as they reflected on and became empowered with regard to the science content behind environmental issues of interest to them on campus. Photovoice allowed students to authentically inquire about local science, as well as the potential to generate change in their own community. This understanding is significant to science educators because first, it empowers learners to connect with science and provides a way to deepen that connection with science; and second, it provides a pedagogical tool for science educators to use with their students to engage them in the science in their community. Finally, it has the potential to improve science teaching by creating students that are more connected to science and the world around them

Creating Space: Pedagogical Choices to Encourage a Third Space in an Urban, Kindergarten Science Classroom

“The butterfly is in the chrysalis stage,” Victory informed us as she pointed to the brown chrysalis in the jar on the lab bench, “It was an egg then it formed its chrysalis or pupa and then it will become a butterfly.” When we asked her how she would describe this to her friends, she remarked, “It is like when you go into the dressing room and put on a church dress- you act like someone different.” In this example, Victory, a kindergartener, was translating the scientific language taught to her in the science classroom into a language her friends would understand. Understanding marginalized students’ ability to translate scientific knowledge in a manner that acknowledges cultural and discursive identity is needed in science education (Brown, Ryoo, & Rodriguez, 2010; Lee, 2001)

Through Their Lens: The Potential of Photovice for Documentation of Environmental Perspectives among Kenyan Teachers

This study explores the potential of photovoice for understanding environmental perspectives of teachers in the Narok District of Kenya. The objective of this paper is to share this photo-methodology with environmental educators so they may use it as an innovative methodological tool to understand the construction of environmental perspectives. The researchers analyzed the digital images and the accompanying narratives for themes emerging for each of the key terms. The researchers utilized Critical Visual Methodology to guide the data analysis. Each photograph was coded according to its site of audiencing (including both compositionality and social modalities). The themes - shares local knowledge, documents context, documents knowledge emerged from the participants’ photovoice. The researchers theorize this tool illustrated the ways in which this community valued the environment, their community, and the ways in which they conceptualize the solutions

Environmental Agency in Read-Alouds

Despite growing interest in helping students become agents of environmental change who can, through informed decision-making and action-taking, transform environmentally detrimental forms of human activity, science educators have reduced agency to rationality by overlooking sociocultural influences such as norms and values. We tackle this issue by examining how elementary teachers and students negotiate and attribute responsibility, credit, or blame for environmental events during three environmental read-alouds. Our verbal analysis and visual representation of meta-agentive discourse revealed varied patterns of agential attribution. First, humans were simultaneously attributed negative agentive roles (agents of endangerment and imbalance) and positive agentive roles (agents of prevention, mitigation, and balance). Second, while wolves at Yellowstone were constructed as intentional (human-like) agents when they crossed over into the human world to kill livestock in nearby farms, polar bears in the Arctic were denied any form of agential responsibility when they approached people’s homes. Third, anthropogenic causation of global warming was constructed as distal and indirect chains of cause and effect (i.e., sophisticated sequences of ripple effects), whereas its mitigation and prevention assumed the form of simple and unidirectional causative links (direct and proximal causality). Fourth, the notion of balance of nature was repeatedly used as a justification for environmental conservation but its cause and dynamic nature remained unclear. And, fifth, while one teacher promoted environmental agency by encouraging students to experience positive emotions such as love of nature, freedom, and oneness with nature, the other teachers encouraged students to experience negative emotions such as self-blame and guilt. This study’s main significance is that it highlights the need for environmental educators who set out to promote environmental agency to expand the focus of their instructional efforts beyond rational argumentation and reasoning. It also underscores the importance of increasing school teachers’ awareness of implicit discursive messages in particular patterns of environmental agency attribution when discussing environmental issues with students and implementing pedagogical strategies centered on oral deliberation such as read-alouds

The Viability of Portraiture for Science Education Research: Learning from Portraits of Two Scientific Classrooms

The purpose of this paper is to describe the relevance of a qualitative methodology called portraiture for science education. Portraiture is a method of inquiry that blends art and science by combining the empirical aspects of inquiry with the beauty and aesthetic properties. This method encompasses all aspects of a research study, including protocol, data collection and analysis, and presentation of findings. To examine the viability of portraiture as methodology for science education researchers, we provided two portraits of science teachers and their classrooms to illustrate how context played a significant role in teachers’ experiences and how it influenced their classroom pedagogy. The implications of this work show how portraiture can support deep, dynamic understanding of context in science education. This work also illustrates the importance of attending to relationships and voice, both of which are often lacking in science education research

Issues and techniques in translating scientific terms from English to Khmer for a university-level text in Cambodia

Teachers and students spend much time interacting with written resources such as textbooks, tests, or worksheets during classroom instruction. What if no text is available, however, in the language of the learners? This case study describes the processes and techniques adopted by two university lecturers in Cambodia, as they translated an L1 (first language) science text into Khmer in a manner that tried to take full account of the cultural, linguistic, and social dimensions of language. Using a variety of translation techniques, they aimed to produce a Khmer text which would be most effective in promoting the learning of the new scientific terms required. Among the approaches used were the employment of English–Khmer word pairs, repetition throughout the text, and the incorporation of pictures where appropriate. The significance of this study is that it provides detailed and specific examples of how teachers and lecturers might respond to the challenges of translating scientific texts into languages that have not been extensively used as a medium of instruction at third level in recent times. It is hoped that it will also make some contribution to the larger effort to promote and restore native languages to their rightful place in education in post-colonial countries

Profiles of Urban, Low SES, African American Girls’ Attitudes Toward Science: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed Methods Study

The purpose of this study was to increase the science education community’s understanding of the experiences and needs of girls who cross the traditional categorical boundaries of gender, race and socioeconomic status in a manner that has left their needs and experience largely invisible. A first of several in a series, this study sought to explore how African American girls from low SES communities position themselves in science learning. We followed a mixed-methods sequential explanatory strategy, in which two data collection phases, qualitative following the quantitative, were employed to investigate 89 African-American girls’ personal orientations towards science learning. By using quantitative data from the Modified Attitudes toward Science Inventory to organize students into attitude profiles and then sequentially integrating the profile scores with year-long interview data, we found that the girls’ orientations towards science were best described in terms of definitions of science, importance of science, experiences with science, and success in science. Therefore, our mixed method analysis provided four personality orientations which linked success in school and experiences with science to confidence and importance of science and definitions of science to value/desire. In our efforts to decrease the achievement gap, we concluded there should be more emphasis on conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills, while still being cognizant of the danger of losing the connection between science and society which so often plagues achievement-focused efforts. Our continued efforts with this group of girls will center on these instructional techniques with the goal of addressing the needs of all science learners

Exploring the Potential of Using Explicit Reflective Instruction through Contextualized and Decontextualized Approaches to Teach First-Grade African American Girls the Practices of Science

Contemporary science education policy documents call for curriculum and pedagogy that lead to students’ active engagement, over multiple years of school, in scientific practices. This participatory action research study answered the question, “How can we successfully put twenty-three first-grade African American girls attending a gender school in an impoverished school district on the path to learning the practices of scientists”. The Young Children’s Views of Science (YCVOS) (Lederman, 2009) was used to interview these first-graders pre-, mid- and post-instruction during an instructional unit designed in response to many of the pedagogical strategies research has demonstrated to be effective in other contexts; explicit reflective instruction utilizing contextualized and decontextualized activities. Classroom observations, copies of student work and planning documents were also collected and analyzed. The cumulative findings indicated that the decontextualized aspects of our science initiative had positive impacts on the girls’ understandings of observation and inference while the contextualized aspects of instruction supported an increase in their understandings of empirical evidence. The contextualized aspect of instruction appeared to hinder our efforts in regards to observation and inference. The results extend current understandings of the potential of using these approaches to teach first-grade African American girls the practices of science by supporting some of the aspects of these approaches and raising questions in regard to others