Science + Culture + Place = Social Justice

By: Kirsten K. N. Mawyer, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Secondary Science, University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa
Heather J. Johnson, Ph.D., Professor of the Practice of Science Education, Vanderbilt University

Secondary teacher candidates working to clear grass and weeds from a loʻi to prepare it for planting kalo.

“To really know a place is to understand how environment, culture, and politics have worked to shape it, and to appreciate that any particular place may have diverse and competing meaning for different groups or individuals.” (Greenwood, 2013, p. 94)

Adopting a critical and cultural equity perspective challenges science teachers to examine issues of access, opportunity, and achievement. Embracing such a potentially transformative stance also requires they attend to power, identity, and sociopolitical context when designing learning environments (Gutiérrez, 2002; NASEM, 2022). With such commitments in mind, we believe that preservice science teachers (PSTs) have a profound responsibility to learn about, understand, and respect the cultural and social context of the students they teach and the local communities to which they belong.

For the last seven years we have used a Community Asset Mapping assignment in our respective secondary science methods courses at University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa and Vanderbilt University. Using this assignment in two vastly different sociocultural settings provides important insights about how to support PSTs as they develop critical and cultural science teaching practices that engage all students in science that is culturally sustaining and revitalizing (Paris & Alim, 2014; McCarty & Lee, 2014; Thompson et al., 2020). It is our hope that by sharing this assignment we can contribute to ongoing dialogue about how science teacher preparation can use place to transform science teaching and learning in ways that are inclusive of community-specific ways of knowing and doing.

Critical and Cultural Ambitious Science Teaching

The Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) framework (Windschitl et al., 2018) is the foundation for our co-designed secondary science methods courses. Over fifteen weeks we introduce our PSTs to four core AST practices: (1) planning for engagement with science ideas using an anchoring phenomenon; (2) eliciting students’ initial ideas and experiences about the anchoring phenomenon; (3) supporting students to use a sequence of activities involving engagement in scientific practices to construct new knowledge relevant to the anchoring phenomenon; and (4) pressing students toward improving their evidence-based explanations of the anchoring phenomenon. We have found that these core practices anchor PSTs as they learn to de-emphasize the memorization and recitation of science information in favor of centering student ideas and sensemaking. To support our PSTs in developing a critical equity perspective, we partner the core practices and tools with the principles of Critical and Cultural Approaches to Ambitious Science Teaching (C²AST) (Thompson et al., 2020): (1) recognizing our own and other’s worlds and developing critical consciousness; (2) learning about and prioritizing students’ communities and cultures; (3) designing for each student’s full participation in the culture of science; and (4) challenging the culture of science through social and restorative justice. While we have explored a variety of tools in this work (Thompson et al., 2021), here we draw attention to Community Asset Mapping as one of several C²AST activities, assignments, and field experiences that particularly well supports PSTs as they learn how to design culturally expansive curricula (Bang et al., 2017; Barton & Tan, 2020).

Assignment

Our Community Asset Mapping, Inventory & Inquiry into Place assignment asks PSTs to examine the social, cultural, and historical contexts of students’ communities and identify assets that can be cultivated in the design of learning opportunities. Engaging in the work of community asset mapping is an entry point for PSTs to learn about their students’ lives, the significant concerns at play in their community, and questions students have about the world around them. By making these assets visible, PSTs have the potential to develop them as powerful resources for science teaching and learning. The specific goals of this assignment are to 1) get to know the students and the communities in which they live; 2) determine the existing assets for their school and the community it serves; and 3) serve as a resource to cultivate community assets in science instruction. Additionally, community asset mapping provides PSTs with a tool for identifying place-specific real-world phenomena in ways they can use to design science learning experiences that are meaningful and relevant to their students (see Figure 1). Knowing what is valued in a community offers a lens into and connections with local culture that help teachers tap into local ways of knowing or doing as their students engage with the natural world.

Figure 1: Community Asset Maps help PSTs connect students’ lives to real-world phenomena.

Introduced in the second week of class, the Community Asset Mapping, Inventory & Inquiry into Place assignment is designed to engage PSTs in the C²AST principle learning about and prioritizing students’ communities and cultures. They are asked to consider the question: How can we make teaching and learning relevant to the languages, literacies, cultural practices, and sense of place of our students? The following details this three-part assignment.

Part I: Community Asset Map & Inventory

PSTs create an asset map and inventory for their (1) Classroom, (2) School, and (3) Community served by the school. To do this, PSTs walk the neighborhood looking for and documenting a variety of community resources, including physical assets (e.g., buildings, transportation hubs), economic assets (e.g., businesses, restaurants), stories that offer insights (e.g., memories, values), local residents (e.g., youth, artists, pastors, cultural practitioners), and institutions and associations (e.g., churches, hospitals, youth clubs). We strongly encourage them to walk with a member of the community who shares stories of lived experiences and their own observations about the spaces, places, people in the community, and how the place has changed over time (Evans & Jones, 2011). This walk and map-making approach has the potential to nurture relationships that can spark and sustain scientific inquiry and connect science learning in the classroom to the community. Each map is then annotated by labeling features the PSTs identify as assets. They may include information about the sources they used to inform their map (e.g. mentor teacher, students, colleagues, community members, research-online, books etc.) and incorporate photos, drawings, audio/video, or other relevant materials to showcase various assets. Figure 2 includes an example of an inventory and community asset map completed by a PST placed at a school in Nashville. Once PSTs map and inventory the school community, they need to learn more about the place.

Figure 2. A community asset map and inventory for a PST’s field placement school in Nashville.

Part 2: Inquiry into Place

After mapping and making the here-and-now of a community visible, the second part has PSTs conduct an inquiry into place. This inquiry is framed by questions such as: What is the history of this place? What was here before? Who was here before? What are places of cultural and/or historical significance? How has the ecology changed over time? Using historical and archival resources (e.g. maps, photos, stories) to learn more about the land, people, and culture is a powerful tool for thinking about how to connect science teaching to place and different ways of knowing and experiencing real-world phenomena. At the University of Hawaiʻi, a land grant institution committed to being a Native Hawaiian place of learning, this assignment explicitly asks candidates to attend to kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiian) language and culture as it relates to place. PSTs research the ahupuaʻa (land division around a source of freshwater extending from the mountains down to the ocean) in which their school is situated. This inquiry into place provided one PST the opportunity to learn about the place name, how it relates to water, and how the land has dramatically changed. He was struck by the fact that the place name of his school Waipahu means “gushing water” and that in the past this ahupuaʻa provided more freshwater than anywhere else on the island. He noted that even though today the location of his school is “very hot and dry, it was once a fertile region of land that supported loʻi kalo (traditional wetland kalo farms) and loko iʻa (fishponds)”. Another student appreciated how the “Hawaiian perspective and place came into this assignment” and learned that “you don’t have to be Hawaiian to care about this place or want to make this place special for your students”. The culturally and historically sensitive inquiry into place, asset mapping, and inventory together become an invaluable resource for designing science curriculum which support critical and cultural equity perspectives.

Part 3: Designing Place-based Curriculum

The third part of the assignment asks PSTs to cultivate science learning experiences informed by what they learned in Parts 1 & 2. We want PSTs to consider how community assets can inform and shape curriculum design. Ultimately, we want our PSTs to engage students in meaningful science learning connected to a real-world phenomenon and issues of consequential concern for the community. We ask PSTs to think expansively about how to cultivate meaningful partnerships that go beyond thinking about visiting a community asset one time or inviting a guest speaker into the classroom. As teacher educators, over the last seven years we shifted away from supporting our teacher candidates to leverage community assets that helped them focus on canonical relationships with community toward emphasizing more expansive, community centered place-based ways of knowing and doing science. We challenge PSTs to think about questions such as: How can you build bridges between multiple cultures represented in the school community? How can you sustain or revitalize language, race, and culture when designing engaging and inclusive curriculum with historically marginalized students?

We believe the Community Asset Mapping, Inventory & Inquiry into Place provides PSTs with resources they need to design curriculum for each student’s full participation in the culture of science, as well as challenging the culture of science through social and restorative justice. For example, as part of planning for engagement with science ideas, a Nashville PST imagined working with the Nashville Tree Foundation to anchor a unit on photosynthesis in urban forestry as a way for students to take positive action in response to loss of green spaces¹.

In another example, a PST in Hawaiʻi designed a unit on natural resources and interdependent relationships in an ecosystem anchored in aloha ʻāina (stewardship of the land) and kanaka maoli ʻōlelo noʻeau (traditional wisdom) about the relationship between water, life, and land². This PST highlighted how her unit benefits from the intersection of a number of community assets including community activists focused on bringing kanaka maoli water stewardship through murals and loʻi kalo restoration projects focused on how traditional wetland frames clean water.

Looking across how PSTs at our two institutions are intentionally weaving community, culture, and place into science learning experiences highlights how this assignment is a powerful resource that empowers PSTs to make space for a multitude of ways of knowing and doing science that extend beyond both the canon and the walls of the classroom. We have noticed that when we support our PSTs in thinking deeply about how to learn about and prioritize their students’ communities and cultures, their curriculum incorporates relevant and culturally sustaining and revitalizing tasks, opportunities for talk, and alternative assessments.

 Final Thoughts

The PSTs Community Asset Mapping, Inventory & Inquiry into Place assignment captures the diversity of relevant dimensions of students and their communities’ lived experiences. We believe that getting to know students and the communities in which they are rooted is not only a useful pedagogical strategy. Instead, we suggest it is critically foundational work that must be done before PSTs can engage in the complex process of designing inclusive learning environments sensitive to the lived worlds and experiences of students located within the here-and-now of their particular communities. One PST noted that it was “powerful to utilize phenomena students would experience in their own lives” and “anchoring events that were founded in a community context really interested and engaged students”. Science teachers need to break down obstacles and provide entry points for all students to fully participate in science learning. This assignment gives PSTs the tools to do this essential work. As a final thought from one of our graduates who is in his third year of teaching, “Science + Culture + Place = Social Justice.”

Footnotes

¹Nashville Tree Foundation. This organization aims to preserve and renew the urban forests in Nashville while educating the public about the value of trees. The Foundation has planted over 10,000 trees in the city since 1986, has helped produce 25 designated arboretums, and even has educational outreach programs.  The students at my high school come from a range of areas within Nashville and with students from varying SES levels that experience some form of tree loss due to urbanization or industrialization. In November, the students will learn about the cycles of matter, photosynthesis, and other important plant life-related concepts that I think could tie really well into a partnership with the Nashville Tree Foundation. They offer an outreach program for 9th-12th grades called “Plant a Tree” where students have the opportunity to learn to plant and care for a tree. I think that would be a great opportunity for students to “give back” to their own community and actually get to apply and conceptualize what they are learning in the classroom to the field.  

²Ola Ka Wai, Ola ka Honua. After 150 years of political struggle for water rights, water was finally restored to the Kapakahi stream. This event brings up topics in preservation/restoration of land and culture, environmental justice, and social justice. This unit will use the Water Writes Mural series designed around the ʻōlelo noʻeau: “Ola Ka Wai, Ola ka Honua (When the Water Lives, the Earth Thrives) to learn about loʻi protocol and the process and progress of restoring native biota and stream systems as a way to reduce reverse human impact on nature to explore the cultural, social, political, economic significance of streams to local loʻi kalo. Throughout the quarter, students will visit and work at the Papahana Kuaola  & Kaʻonohi Loʻi to guide their thinking about the steps/actions that can be taken to restore the Kapakahi stream. They will develop a stewardship practice and protocol based on research and interviews of community members, kupuna, and/or community organizations to identify issues related to Kapakahi stream.  

Kirsten K. N. Mawyer, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Secondary Science, University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa
kmawyer@hawaii.edu

Kirsten Mawyer is an Associate Professor of Secondary Science in the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa School of Teacher Education. Her scholarship focuses on secondary science teacher preparation with an emphasis on culturally sustaining and revitalizing place-based approaches to equitable and ambitious science teaching and learning. She teaches in the Kahalewaiho‘ona‘auao Secondary Program which centers social justice, developing a sense of Hawaiʻi, and cultivating a Native Hawaiian place of learning within teacher preparation.

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Heather J. Johnson, Ph.D., Professor of the Practice of Science Education, Vanderbilt University
heather.j.johnson@vanderbilt.edu

Heather J. Johnson is a Professor of Science Education in Peabody College’s Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University, Nashville. Her scholarship focuses on supporting secondary science teacher candidates and in-service teachers in learning how to surface, recognize, and cultivate students’ resources and lived experiences in the world as assets for science learning in classrooms. By positioning student thinking and student resources at the center of instructional decisions, teachers will move their practices to be more ambitious, equitable and inclusive.