Culturally Responsive Science: Equity and NGSS SPELL 2015 Adele Schepige, WOU

Culturally responsive means what?  Introduction to Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Education experts Jackie Jordan Irvine, Geneva Gay and Kris Gutierrez explain how to make culturally relevant pedagogy a reality in your classroom.

Culturally Responsive Teaching Equity Alliance 15 features of culturally responsive teaching  Actively engage your students in learning. Coach your students to question, consult original material, connect content to their own lives, write to learn, read broadly, build models, test hypotheses, and make time to build relationships with them so that the disappointments that come from trying and not quite succeeding don’t cause them to quit learning  Anchor your curriculum in the everyday lives of your students. Connect their knowledge and skills to content knowledge. Spend time on helping students learn the content. Use real life, authentic texts. Engage students in inquiry about things that matter to them.

Culturally Responsive Teaching Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence (CREDE)  1. Joint Productivity – promote collaboration, common context  2. Language development – instructional attention to language and literacy within and across disciplines. Language development at levels. Culturally based ways of talking link to academic discipline language  3. Contextualization – connect school curriculum to students’ prior experiences from home and/or community, connecting school to students‘ lives. Begins with what students already know from home, community. Assist students in applying learning to home and community  4. Challenging Activities - Maintain academically challenging experiences with appropriate scaffolds. Thinking, analysis, going deeper, more complex levels  5. Instructional conversation - use of questions that elicit higher order thinking, sharing ideas. Teacher listens carefully, makes guess about intended meaning

Think about science and your own experiences with learning science Science is often taught as, thought about or is known for  being unbiased, objective  being based on facts and evidence only  having a Western, Eurocentric view  using “the” scientific method  being white, male dominated  textbook as authority

Culturally Responsive Science Developing culturally responsive science by Gilbert (Northern Arizona University), Indigenous Bilingual Education, pp Phase 1: Gather prior knowledge Phase 2: Introduce cultural context Phase 3: Communicating and doing science Phase 4: Merge phases 2 and 3

Culturally Responsive Science  Include the Nature of science and different ways of knowing  Provide experiential learning opportunities- offer more opportunities to recognize students’ cultural norms and resources  Find ways to use students lives outside of the classroom as a resource for their classroom based science learning.  Support: everyone can learn science, and scientists are from all around the world  Acknowledge degrees of cultural differences between students’ cultural self identities, the teacher’s cultural identity and the culture of the science classroom.

Culturally Responsive Science: NGSS Appendix D - All Standards, All Students Equity is deliberate  Classroom Strategies  Home and Community Connections to School Science  School Resources for Science Instruction Highlighter activity

Culturally responsive science – what’s out there? Implementation ideas activity- Station 1: Citizen Science Station 2: Scientists and engineers at work Station 3: Engineering unit Station 4: World science Station 5: Culture

Culturally Responsive Science  Does not mean you toss what you have been doing.  Does mean reshaping the science curriculum.