Read an Excerpt
Empowering Science and Mathematics Education in Urban Schools
By EDNA TAN ANGELA CALABRESE BARTON ERIN E. TURNER MAURA VARLEY GUTIÉRREZ
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-03797-4
Chapter One
Changing the Discourse on Equity and Math and Science for All
"Mmmmmm! Now That's Science!"
It was late morning on a sunny but brisk November day. The students in Mrs. Tiller's classroom had been engrossed in a science unit focused on dynamic equilibrium and the human body. One of the goals of the unit was to support students in learning how to bring scientific evidence and reasoning to bear on making healthy eating and activity choices. The curriculum was introduced to Mrs. Tiller's school as part of a much larger federally funded project. Along with all of the material resources needed to teach this unit, Mrs. Tiller had weekly access to professional development and classroom support.
Mrs. Tiller had been a teacher at Jefferson Middle School for many years, with a long-standing reputation for caring deeply for her students but also for being a no-nonsense kind of teacher. While her background was not in science, a typical situation in underresourced urban districts, she did have a background in nutrition and home economics, giving her a particular knowledge base to bring to a unit on dynamic equilibrium in the human body.
The first unit of the curriculum focused closely on the complex system of influences on young people's food and activity choices, which are biological, environmental, personal, and cultural in origin. In the second unit, students learn about how taste influences food choices. They learn about the biological taste preferences that humans have for fats and sugars, and how stores, fast food establishments, and food advertisements take advantage of our innate taste preferences, making it challenging to achieve health-oriented goals.
The curriculum instructs the teacher to begin the lesson by telling students that they are to close their eyes and listen to the following scenario:
You are walking down the street and smell French fries cooking at a fast food restaurant. They smell hot and delicious [please add any relevant descriptors]. You and your friends are hungry so you decide to go in and order some food. The French fries smelled so good you decide to order some with your meal. When you get the fries, they are exactly what you wanted. They taste even better than they smelled! Each one is crispy and satisfying. You eat all your fries.
The teacher is to read the scenario out loud, and then, after listening to the scenario, the students are to individually answer questions on a five-point scale (from never to always), about whether the smell of French fries makes them want to buy some, whether they order French fries in fast food restaurants after smelling them, and whether French fries taste good to them. After students discuss their responses in groups, the teacher tallies up the student responses and uses that to help students build initial theories about the biological preferences of taste.
Mrs. Tiller was excited to teach this lesson! In our professional development sessions with her before the implementation of the unit, she was never short of a story on how her students lived on a diet of fast food. However, she was not satisfied with a simple visualization, especially given her background in home economics. As she said,
I know what I'm going to do for this lesson. I'm going to get some potatoes and cook up in my classroom some home-made French fries. Just imagine how the smell of those fries will linger in the hallway as they walk to my classroom. I'm even going to let them eat the fries. Savor their taste. Enjoy them. They are going to have to answer those questions honestly with the fries right there in front of them! (Field notes, professional development session)
True to her word, Mrs. Tiller made the fries and the smell wafted down the hall just as predicted. In the class periods before lunch, the smell for many of her students was irresistible. As she anticipated, her students entered her class curious, excited, and hungry. The hot fries sat in the front of the room, and getting her students to step away from the fryer and back toward their seats proved somewhat challenging. One student seemed to get the whole class laughing when he said rather loudly, "Mmmmm ... Now that's science!" However, Mrs. Tiller used her students' excitement to engage them immediately in the lesson:
OK, who wants fries? Hot, crispy fries? Hmmm. Don't they smell good? Sit down and raise your hand if you want fries!
As she passed out the plates of French fries, she re-created the initial visualization scenario for them, inviting her students to think about how much the smell of the fries made them want to eat them. As she enticed the class, "The smell is just making my mouth water. How about you?" she asked them to record their observations in addition to their scores to the questions on taste and preference. After she finished passing out the French fries, she directed her students to answer the questions on smell, taste, and preference while she made a chart on the board, which she used to tally student responses (see Table 1.1).
Using the students' tallies, Mrs. Tiller worked to get her students talking about the patterns in the table. Did students like French fries? Did they want to buy them? The students seemed to key in more to what they liked about French fries and whether Mrs. Tiller's French fries were good. After turning their table into graphs, she was able to get her students to notice that most of the students in class liked fries and would buy them because they smelled good. When one student said, "Well, just about all of us picked 4 or 5 for all of the questions," Mrs. Tiller capitalized on the comment, telling her students, "That's right! Our bodies are naturally inclined to want fast food and we are hardwired to want to eat fries!"
Whereas Mrs. Tiller initially intended to spend most of the class period talking about the pattern of taste preferences, talk about French fries led the students to insist on a more complex and perhaps realistic discussion about the social and cultural influences of taste and healthy eating. As one student said, "Why say fast food is bad if we are supposed to like it?" Another student wondered why one student in the class actually voted that French fries do not ever taste good if the human body is supposed to prefer fatty food. Creating lots of laughter was a student comment about how businesses make their money off their smells. Compared to normal discursive patterns in Mrs. Tiller's class and around Jefferson more generally, students were loudly engaged in debating the value and relevance of the science of taste and its sociopolitical connections. They began to build evidence-based claims not only around the intended focus (i.e., the biological preferences of taste) but also around unintended ideas and experiences central to making healthy eating decisions in everyday life (i.e., the role of the complex environment in food choices) and the limits of scientific ideas (i.e., not everyone has the same preferences for sweet and fatty foods).
While the entire activity (estimated in the curriculum to take about 10–15 minutes) took her entire class period, Mrs. Tiller felt satisfied with the results. Later Mrs. Tiller justified her pedagogical decisions:
It was a little chaotic in there. Everyone wanted fries, seconds and thirds. It was the perfect set up. I know that my students will just want to give the "right" answer. But there is no right answer. I just want an honest answer. How else can I get them to really use their knowledge to make healthy choices if they don't know what they know? (Interview)
Mrs. Tiller wanted her students to answer "honestly," rather than in a fashion that parroted back the content. She believed that her students had rich, personal experiences directly relevant to this science topic and creatively engaged her students in activities that allowed those rich experiences to emerge as valuable threads in the classroom discussion. Even though her classroom looked and sounded unconventional, Mrs. Tiller was committed to helping her students engage in authentic inquiries that are essentially messy in nature. Mrs. Tiller told us that while the science of dynamic equilibrium in the human body, or "energy in and energy out," is "pretty straightforward," making healthy choices is not, because "science mixes with all of the things in kids' lives." She viewed her task as the teacher of this unit as helping her students use science to reason through good choices and helping her students see that the question of healthy eating, like many science questions, is not neatly "answered by a textbook."
Unpacking Equity, Access, and Empowering Science and Math Education
What Constitutes Equitable Opportunities to Learn Math and Science?
Math and science hold uniquely powerful places in contemporary society. These domains open doors to high-paying professions; provide a knowledge base for more informed conversations with health care workers, educators, and business and community leaders; and demystify issues of global importance, such as air and water quality standards, population density, toxic dumping, and the economy. Despite the interconnectedness of science and math with global sustainability, Western culture has a history of limiting access to the influential discourses that shape decision making in these areas (Buckingham, Reeves, and Batchelor 2005; Newman 2001; Gutstein and Peterson 2005; R. Gutiérrez 2007; Powell and Frankenstein 1997).
Schools play a crucial role in mediating access to math and science. Yet schools have also been complacent in the reproduction of the demographic trends of who has access to science and math and who does not (Gilbert and Yerrick 2001; Oakes, Joseph, and Muir 2003). While access to science and math actively occurs through tracking and the course- taking patterns allowed or supported by a school or district, it is almost always amplified by the ways in which classroom practices maintain norms and routines that depict science and math as "objective, privileged way[s] of knowing pursued by an intellectual elite" (Carlone 2004, 308), and as discontinuous with the ways of knowing and doing held by students from nondominant backgrounds (Martin 2000; Turner and Font Strawhun 2007; Warren et al. 2001).
When schools equate teaching science and math and learning with "knowledge acquisition" (at best) and "doing school" (more likely)—rather than with scaffolding participation in a community of practice of which knowledge is only one dimension—students have few, if any, school-based opportunities to develop the kind of mathematical and scientific literacies necessary for broader societal engagement (Gutstein 2006a). Such focus on "what" students learn to the exclusion of "why" or "how" they might learn to participate in science- or math-related communities of practice delimits the possibilities for understanding why students opt out of science and math, and why these trends noticeably manifest themselves along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines. It should be no surprise that research continues to indicate that not only do students from urban and nondominant backgrounds lose interest in learning science and math as early as middle school but also that this trend has not changed in the past 15 years (Atwater, Wiggins, and Gardner 1995; Barmby, Kind, and Jones 2008).
The need to address equitable access to science and math education dates back several decades, even centuries (Spencer 1859; Wilkinson 1857). While the reason and scope for the call for science and math education "for all" has shifted over time from legitimizing the core courses in the standard school curriculum in the late nineteenth century, to national security in the mid-twentieth century, the call to make equitable math and science instruction has tended to reside in the policy sector with extension into curricula, rather than in any systematic line of inquiry into what this should look like and why. Further, and relevant to our course of inquiry, there has been no attempt to examine how equitable experiences might also be empowering experiences, especially for those students from nondominant backgrounds. There has also been scant attention to the specific needs of urban learners in the effort to promote science and math for all, despite decades of research outlining the inequities present in urban communities.
Bill Tate (2001) has argued that high-quality science and math education is a civil right for all students, and that this right is especially significant for those from nondominant groups. He rests his case on the mounting evidence that science and math education has been and continues to be mired in inequality. That is, children of racial and ethnic minority backgrounds and from high-poverty backgrounds living in high numbers in cities and rural communities disproportionately lack access to opportunities to learn science or math, even though they may have gained the physical space in schools to do so. In fact, he argues that to address fundamental issues of equity in science and math education, the research community must shift from arguments for civil rights as shared physical space in schools to demands for high-quality academic preparation that includes opportunities to learn. We concur with Tate in his call for equitable opportunities for all learners in math and science. And yet, we wonder, what exactly do these equitable opportunities to learn science or math that Tate and others rightly demand for our children look like? What are their outcomes?
Equity as Equality
The lines of reasoning around equitable opportunities to learn are anything but straightforward. In the immediate post–civil rights and post–womens rights eras, equity-driven concerns in math and science education, as instantiated in educational policy and practice, tended to draw upon a focus on equality, or in other words, an understanding or measurement of either "equal treatment" or "outcomes," usually based upon comparisons of demographic groups (Secada, 1989, 68). The focus in science and math education, therefore, has centered on whether opportunities to learn exist for all students (i.e., equal treatment) or on whether all students are achieving in science and math, and if not, where the achievement gaps exist (i.e., equal outcomes).
Studies of equal treatment and equal outcome have played, and continue to play, powerful and historically important roles. Most researchers are generally familiar with the chilling statistics that describe high-poverty and minority urban and rural students' differential access to resources in US schools, and are aware that these trends have changed little in the past three decades. Students attending zoned schools in low-income urban and rural communities by and large continue to have limited access to updated science and math books, equipment, and extracurricular activities (Oakes, Joseph, and Muir 2003; Campbell and Silver 1999). They also continue to have limited access to certified teachers or to administrators who support high-quality science and math teaching, such that either students are denied high-level courses (because they are not offered) or they take courses with uncertified or unqualified teachers (Allexsaht-Snider and Hart 2001; Darling-Hammond 1999; Ingersoll 1999; Spade, Columba, and Vanfossen 1997). High-poverty, urban students are disproportionately tracked into low-level classes where educational achievement typically focuses on behavior skills and static conceptions of knowledge (Oakes, Joseph, and Muir 2003). In fact, some studies have shown a complete absence of science in low-track science classes (Page 1990; Gilbert and Yerrick 2001).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Empowering Science and Mathematics Education in Urban Schools by EDNA TAN ANGELA CALABRESE BARTON ERIN E. TURNER MAURA VARLEY GUTIÉRREZ Copyright © 2012 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
