8

Teaching for Equity in STEM

In the previous chapter, we demonstrated how learning is fundamentally a sociocultural process that takes place across a variety of settings: learning happens through individual-environment interactions, which are built upon social relations and embodied in diverse cultural contexts. This advance in understanding learning has shifted assumptions about learners and reshaped approaches to teaching in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. In this chapter, we turn from learning to teaching, from how learning happens to how that learning can be facilitated and supported by educators. We consider the extensive scholarship on STEM teaching in the past two decades, giving emphasis to recent scholarship on teaching for equity and describing the ways that the work of teaching can be oriented toward or away from equity goals.

A common thread of this scholarship has been to represent teaching as a form of practice—that is, as something people do together (e.g., with other educators, with families, and with students) with the aim of promoting learning. As a practice, teaching is complex and contingent (Cohen, 2011; Horn & Garner, 2022; Windschitl & Calabrese Barton, 2016). Its success at least partly depends on the experiences and subsequent responses and actions of students within classroom activities. As such, we understand teaching as neither a method that can be prescribed, nor a simple repertoire of tools that can be applied to every situation; it necessarily involves in-the-moment improvisation work to support desired learning outcomes (Philip, 2019; Sawyer, 2004). Looking at teaching as practice across multiple contexts can help broaden the understanding of what teaching can be, and who can do it. In many settings outside school, there is very little

teaching that aims to “transmit” knowledge through direct instruction at all, though other forms of teaching and learning occur (Boyer & Roth, 2006; Rogoff et al., 2016). Who is a teacher can also vary across settings: peers and near peers often engage in teaching as collaborators (e.g., Palincsar & Herrenkohl, 1999), as tutors (e.g., Gillen, 2019), or in the context of joint activity (e.g., Vossoughi, Davis, et al., 2021). For our discussions, we define educators broadly, as those who take up the role of designing and organizing STEM learning with and for others across a range of settings (schools, families, out-of-school settings, community-based settings, etc.).

Understanding teaching as practices undertaken by various actors in various settings also opens up ground for discussing how education might further or hinder movement toward a more equitable world. Below, we explore evidence related to the idea that STEM teaching in schools, families, and communities can help attenuate inequities and work toward equity. Through STEM, educators have the opportunity to help students explore the world around them, find meaning and purpose, and solve real-world problems within their communities. However, as noted particularly in Chapter 2, teaching can also serve as a mechanism of the social reproduction of hierarchies and inequalities; it has long been a means by which young people relearn dispositions, ideologies, and forms of action that may sustain racism, ableism, patriarchy, and heterosexism in schools and society (Collins, 2009). Given these potential consequences of these pedagogical choices, it is critically important that teachers are both resourced and empowered to make decisions that support equitable instruction.

This chapter begins with a discussion of “equity-oriented” teaching, emphasizing the way that practice can be oriented toward or away from equitable practices. We do this via three detailed descriptions of what equity-oriented teaching can look like. We then discuss several pedagogical models, grounded in research, that can provide guidance for shifting STEM instruction to be more equitable. We end the chapter with a discussion of challenges and supports for shifting STEM instruction to be more equitable and how the equity frames can help to focus decisions and actions related to instruction so as to advance specific equity goals.

WHAT CAN EQUITY-ORIENTED TEACHING LOOK LIKE?

To set the stage, we offer three portraits of equity-oriented teaching. The term “equity-oriented” here means that the purposes or goals for learning focus on promoting equity in STEM education; the equity frames discussed in Chapter 6 help shape these purposes or goals, which can vary. Which is to say, “equity-oriented” does not mean that the teaching featured in these three portraits “achieves” equity, either based on students’ own perspectives or on measured learning outcomes. The purpose is instead to

provide concrete images of practice that can be revisited when exploring how such teaching practice is supported and develops within schools, museums, and afterschool programs. The portraits are also intended to highlight the role of educators’ decisions in equity-oriented teaching. We emphasize that the kinds of equity-oriented teaching represented here are not just for particular groups of students: forms of pedagogy that emphasize identity, social justice, and heterogeneity in STEM similar to the ones depicted below are appropriate for all learners (Kokka, 2020).

Building Toward Equitable STEM Teaching

Equity-oriented teaching is grounded in broad principles of effective STEM teaching that are informed by research over the past two decades. The portraits we offer reflect these principles. For one, students are engaged in rich, open-ended tasks or problems (Boaler, 1998; Stein et al., 1996; Tekkumru-Kisa et al., 2020; Windschitl & Calabrese Barton, 2016). These tasks and problems open up disciplinary uncertainties for students to grapple with and students have authority for building knowledge and defending their ideas (Engle, 2012; Engle & Conant, 2002). Engaging in this way helps learners gain access to ideas that hold power within the STEM disciplines (Moses & Cobb, 2001; Zevenbergen, 2000). Second, learners have opportunities to engage meaningfully in forms of disciplinary practice that provide an approximation of professional versions of those practices (Berland et al., 2016; Cobb et al., 2001; Manz, 2015). Third, students’ own ideas are elicited and built upon as the basis for the development of new ideas and concepts (Baranes et al., 1989; Smith et al., 1994; van Zee & Minstrell, 1997). Fourth, teachers are responsive to students in ways that show attention to their ideas (Bishop, 2021). Teachers draw on their own knowledge of subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge to help students make links between their ideas and formal disciplinary knowledge and practice (Ball & Bass, 2000; Carlson et al., 2019; Hill et al., 2005).

To enact these principles, teachers draw effectively on theories and models of teaching and learning and instructional materials to support students’ learning (Remillard, 2005; Sztajn et al., 2012; Windschitl et al., 2008). Importantly, students’ capabilities for doing sophisticated thinking are presumed (Lehrer & Schauble, 2005; Metz, 1995); that is, teachers adopt an asset-oriented perspective on students’ capabilities (see Chapter 6 for more on deficit- and asset-based thinking). While implementing these principles and ensuring that learners have access to instruction that is guided by them is important, more is needed to fully attend to equity and justice.

To this end, the three sample cases below also serve as examples for how to realize six additional goals for teaching explicitly related to equity,

drawing on principles that also find support in research. First, the teachers attend to students’ experiences as cultural and racialized beings (Bell et al., 2012; Martin, 2006; Nasir, 2002; Sengupta-Irving & Vossoughi, 2019; Shah, 2018; Windschitl & Calabrese Barton, 2016). That is, they recognize that students bring identities into the classroom that shape how they engage with STEM and with school. Second, they attend especially to the need to legitimately welcome students in science as “whole people with valuable knowledge, practices, and experiences that matter” (Calabrese Barton et al., 2022, p. 52). Third, they attend to equity of participation in learning activities through assessments and other mechanisms (Reinholz & Shah, 2018). Fourth, they intentionally disrupt traditional patterns of authority where the teacher is solely responsible for evaluating ideas and give greater authority to students (Agarwal & Sengupta-Irving, 2019) in ways that are grounded in cultural and sociopolitical understandings of learning and human development (Penuel & Shepard, 2016; Randall, 2021). Fifth, learning and teaching activities are contextualized within real-world problems and projects that tie directly to students’ interests, identities, and experiences and matters of concern to their communities (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018, 2019). Sixth, teachers provide connections to disciplinary ideas in practice in ways that are expansive, meaningful, and connected to students’ identities and possibilities for action (Agarwal & Sengupta-Irving, 2019; Espinoza, 2008; Espinoza et al., 2020; Warren et al., 2020). Note that these principles have connections to the principles of effective STEM teaching we outlined above, but they attend more explicitly to students’ identities, to the power dynamics in the classroom, and to students’ agency in their own communities.

These portraits also provide examples of what it can look like to establish cultures of learning where a concept of what it means to succeed and be capable challenges existing stereotypes about race, gender, and ability (Carlone et al., 2011; Gresalfi et al., 2009) and allows for fluid and flexible participation in activities (Rogoff et al., 2016). Finally, they indicate both ethical and political clarity with respect to the kinds of relationships with and among children and youth that educators seek to cultivate within learning environments (Madkins & McKinney de Royston, 2019; Philip & Sengupta, 2021; Valenzuela, 1999; Vossoughi et al., 2020). Taken together, these portraits show that equity-oriented teaching is more than just “good teaching” (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Secada, 1995); it requires explicitly connecting to the social, cultural, political, and ethical lives of the particular children in an educator’s classroom or program.

The Principles in Practice: Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice in Middle School

Eric (Rico) Gutstein is a white mathematics teacher and university professor whose work focuses on teaching mathematics for social justice. Inspired by Freire’s notion that students need to be engaged in “writing the world” and not just seeking to understand it (Freire & Macedo, 1987), Gutstein (2003) constructed a year-long sequence of learning activities for his middle schoolers that combined an existing curriculum for teaching mathematics in context, Mathematics in Context (National Center for Research in Mathematical Sciences Education & Freudenthal Institute, 1997-1998), with a series of 17 real-world projects that engaged students in grappling with social justice issues. The class he taught was composed of 28 students—most of whom were Mexican-American immigrants—attending a neighborhood school. His aim was to help develop students’ social and political consciousness, their sense of agency, and their social and cultural identities. Gutstein sought to achieve mathematics goals outlined in state standards by helping students “read the world using mathematics”—that is, to use math to understand relations of power, resource inequities, disparate opportunities, discrimination related to race, class, gender, language, and other differences. He also sought to develop their mathematical power (that is, their confidence in applying mathematics ideas) to interrogate inequities in their neighborhood and city.

In one project, students analyzed racially disaggregated data on traffic stops. To do so, students had to apply concepts of proportionality and expected value (concepts they had learned in the curriculum) to understand racial profiling. Such concepts helped students gain a quantitative sense of just how disproportionately Black and Latinx drivers are stopped for traffic violations, which led them to examine root causes of disproportionality. In another project, students examined SAT and ACT examination scores by race, gender, and social class. They learned about the company that makes and sells the SAT (the Educational Testing Service) and, at the conclusion of their investigations, wrote a one-page letter to the Educational Testing Service about that data; in these letters, students were encouraged to ask any questions they felt were relevant and to make any points they felt advanced their arguments. These questions and points were supported by graphs showing the income level and average scores as a way to talk about and interrogate the data.

Other projects involved students using mathematics to answer questions about whether racism had anything to do with housing prices in the neighborhood. In this project, students had to decide what data they would need to find or collect to answer the question, and why those data would help them answer the question. They had to gather data and evaluate them,

deciding if and how those data supported a claim that racism either was or was not involved. They then had to articulate why they could reach the conclusion they did, given the pattern in the data they collected. Students were called on to communicate their findings and to represent math in multiple ways, sometimes creating their own solution methods and other times applying and extending methods learned through engagement with the curriculum.

Through these projects, the teacher normalized topics that are often politically taboo within classrooms related to race, racism, discrimination, power, and justice. And, as in the project on police stops, discussions opened to topics that went beyond narrow conceptions of mathematics, but students used mathematics alongside other ideas to explore. In the case of the SAT project, Gutstein emphasized the importance of posing or raising questions about the phenomenon of test score gaps without necessarily answering these questions (see Freire, 1970/2002) but rather, taking care to ensure students did not walk away with problematic concepts about intelligence being linked to race.

Gutstein also included several assessments throughout and at the end of the year. In addition to traditional assessments of students’ growth in their mathematical abilities, he often had students reflect on what they thought about the focus of the project before and after the activity, what they learned, how they used mathematics, and whether they have understood the ideas without using mathematics. At the end of the year, he asked students about how their views of mathematics changed from being in the class, and whether they felt they could see how to use mathematics in their everyday lives.

The Principles in Practice: Exploring Circuits in an Educational Space that Supports Translanguaging

Researcher Enrique (Henry) Suárez (2020) created and taught a structured afterschool program focused on helping elementary-aged students develop a basic conceptual understanding of electricity. He created a sequence of activities that were aimed at helping students investigate how flow of electricity within circuits is affected by resistance. Circuits are a common way to engage students in developing foundational understandings of energy and energy transfer in the elementary grades. Suárez, who identifies as a multilingual immigrant science teacher educator, was particularly interested in creating an environment in which the children in the program could use many different communicative resources to make sense of the phenomena they were studying, including gesture and their own home languages. He also was interested in supporting an environment in which children engaged in translanguaging (Garcia, 2009), that is, where students

from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds could use multiple modes of making meaning, alternating fluidly across modes as they interacted both with peers and with the teacher.

Though the program took place in an afterschool context, it was structured much like a typical instructional unit might be in a school. Students engaged in a series of eight, 1-hour sessions focused on investigating electrical phenomena, organized into a coherent progression in which students began by exploring the flow of electricity, and once they had developed an understanding of flow, to explore how to regulate that flow. Each session had a driving question, which students answered through a combination of investigations and discussion. Students engaged with traditional circuit phenomena, tested various conductors and insulators, and then explored in the latter sessions the geometry of lines of conductive ink.

The structure of each lesson created opportunities for students to experience them as coherent from their perspective, that is, organized around answering the day’s driving question. At the beginning, Suárez prompted students to summarize their activities and conclusions from the previous session, to help connect activities across lessons. In this opening routine, he emphasized that it was students—working together with each other and with assistance from him—who would be answering the questions through their investigations. After posing the initial question, Suárez made clear what was at stake in answering the question, problematizing it and inviting students to predict the answers they might come up with, and to identify potential experimental observations. The bulk of each day’s lesson comprised students working in small groups proposing and then conducting investigations with the available materials. During this period, Suárez’s role was to support students as they planned, collected, and interpreted data from their investigations, asking them questions and encouraging discussion among different team members. Finally, at the conclusion of each session, students constructed mechanistic explanations for their observations, often using pictures and models, and shared their explanations with the whole group in discussion, and students compared different student explanations with each other.

To support the goal of encouraging students to use a wide range of communicative resources in sensemaking, Suárez took care to speak both in Spanish and English to the students in the program. For the students, Spanish was a first language, though because they attended a dual immersion bilingual program during the day, they were accustomed to using both English and Spanish in learning activities. One strategy Suárez used was to use Spanish purposefully in whole group discussions, particularly when students had been using English, to encourage the use of the less socially dominant language. Another was to encourage the use of drawing and gesture when constructing explanations to be shared with the whole group.

These were supported explicitly by the specific material tools students used to explore electrical phenomena, not just by the pedagogical moves of the teacher (Suárez, 2022).

In studying how students took up these opportunities, Suárez observed that students often followed his lead. When he spoke Spanish, or when he moved between Spanish and English, students did, too, both in small groups and in large groups. In addition, students used a variety of gestures when describing observations and when presenting and evaluating models and mechanistic explanations. They used gestures both to point and coordinate attention, and in constructing metaphors to make sense of electrical phenomena. Two of the students in particular, Yesenia and Elio, drew regularly from different communicative resources throughout the program. At the same time, Suárez (2022) observed, not all students took up translanguaging practices, and the opportunities for translanguaging were limited by the students’ and teacher’s common language(s).

The Principles in Practice: Teaching Tinkering in an Afterschool Club

The joint work of a multiyear research-practice partnership between the San Francisco Boys and Girls Club and the San Francisco Exploratorium provides an example of what equity-oriented teaching can look like in the context of activities outside of school. While teaching is rarely the focus of inquiry in out-of-school spaces, it was for this particular initiative, in which an ensemble of educators and researchers sought to develop and refine an understanding of what supporting equitable making and tinkering activities could look like (Vossoughi et al., 2013). This ensemble worked together over 3 years to co-design activities and to document and reflect on interactions with children in the program (Vossoughi & Escudé, 2016). The focal Boys and Girls club served Mexican, Central American, Black, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipinx children and families in the city. The program staff and research team were also from immigrant and diasporic backgrounds. Some children flowed in and out of the program; a few were part of the program for multiple years, as is common in out-of-school spaces (Borden et al., 2005).

The aims of this collaboration were to explore ways that “tinkering” might provide a means for the children in this program to engage with practices that are part of—but also go beyond—the kinds of design activities typical of engineering. Activities sought to emphasize problem solving, process, and iteration, and were grounded within a context that supported invention, artistic expression, and play. Another important goal was to promote a different way of relating among adults and children in the space, one that embraced different forms of support, including among

peers (Vossoughi et al., 2020). The kinds of relationships they sought to promote are akin to what others in intergenerational afterschool spaces call “relational equity” (DiGiacomo & Gutiérrez, 2016), designed specifically to transform hierarchical relationships between adults and children, and also to shift who is seen as “teaching” in the space. Here, justice-oriented pedagogical practices were also treated as a space of invention and artistry, with multiple generations of educators working together to design, practice, reflect on, and iterate the forms of assistance and mediation made routine within the setting (Vossoughi, Davis, et al., 2021).

A program structure provided a routine for daily activities in the club. Each program session began with “circle time,” which introduced the day’s activity to all children who were present and allowed participants to get to know each other. After this, participants worked in pairs or groups on their projects. Examples of projects include opportunities to design scribbling machines, stop-motion animation films, shadow plays, wooden pinball machines, and musical instruments. As children worked in the space, there were different modalities with which students engaged—sometimes, they “tinkered” and explored, but other times, they engaged in planning or even traditional forms of engineering. But mistakes and “failed attempts” were intentionally framed by teachers in the space as “drafts,” or ongoing “conversations” with materials that are an important part of the creative process. Adults, teen educators, and peers in the space offered suggestions, tried to understand students’ ideas and goals, and helped develop projects along the lines of students’ own goals, rather than externally defined ones. Often, they did so by inviting them to try out new roles and practices. Sometimes, teachers invited students to dwell in a problem space, before trying out a solution to a problem they have encountered. Teachers also sought to provide meaningful opportunities for children to share their creations with others.

The team has studied the many forms of assistance that enabled children’s participation, particularly in how children, teens, and adults oriented to one another in space and with their hands and eyes (Vossoughi, Escudé, et al., 2021; Vossoughi et al., 2020). Recognizing the ways that racialized, gendered, and other inequities can be reproduced or transformed within moment-to-moment interactions, teachers sometimes used both hands and words to help students gain a sense of a new tool and its possibilities or encouraged young adult mentors to carefully observe children’s thinking and activity before intervening. Peers sometimes shifted their bodies or hands to allow for another to observe them working with a tool with which the other child is less familiar. Each of these forms of assistance, the team has shown, helps prepare young people for future activity and acts of support and solidarity (Vossoughi et al., 2020).

An explicit focus of the work is to embrace heterogeneity in students’ thinking and creativity and to expand what counts to students in STEM

learning by connecting the everyday to science. In one example, one of the educator partners and lead teacher in the club, Meg Escudé, asks students to describe a photo of family and friends who are important to them. Escudé then explains that these photos are like history, just as the science notebooks they are about to create are going to be a place to record the history of their own making and tinkering activities. She connects this as well to the idea that even if their creations do not “work,” their notebooks remain as a record of their inquiries and activities. In so doing, Escudé positioned students in the club as people who can work on “significant problems, contribute ideas that were worthy of documentation, and placed value on what they got excited about in the process of making” (Sengupta-Irving & Vossoughi, 2019, p. 491).

Reflections on the Cases

These three cases illustrate the ways that teaching toward equity in STEM requires explicit attention to identity, culture, and power dynamics in ways that go beyond good STEM teaching. For example, Gutstein engaged students in effective practices for teaching mathematics, as described by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, such as

• engaging students in solving and discussing tasks that promote mathematical reasoning and problem solving;
• allowing multiple entry points and varied solution strategies; and
• facilitating discourse among students to build shared understanding of mathematical ideas by analyzing and comparing student approaches and arguments (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2014).

In his teaching, Gutstein added explicit attention to equity and justice by selecting tasks or problems that could connect to social justice issues. This meant that when students were engaging in discourse about mathematical ideas, they were explicitly leveraging mathematics to illuminate issues of injustice in their community, like bias in traffic stops.

Similarly, in the example of electric circuits, Suárez engaged students in open investigation of compelling phenomena, an approach grounded in research on effective science instruction (NASEM, 2018, 2021). In addition, he designed the participation structures in the classroom to explicitly honor and leverage the rich experiences and language resources that students bring with them into the classroom. In doing so, he created a learning environment where students feel welcome to communicate their developing science ideas in whatever ways are comfortable for them. In the afterschool club,

participants also engaged in open-ended problems, but here the facilitators were working to shift authority so that the adults in the setting were not seen as the repositories of “correct” knowledge of how to proceed. Instead, participants’ own ideas were elevated and used to anchor the engineering projects. Further, the facilitators made explicit links between the participants’ lives in their homes and communities and engineering and science.

This deepening of attention to equity and justice in the design and enactment of instruction requires careful attention. Current, evidence-based approaches to teaching the STEM disciplines, based on insights about learning discussed in Chapter 7, open up space for connecting with learners’ interests and identity and for more expansive visions of the disciplines themselves. However, without intentional and explicit attention to identity, disjuncture between students’ everyday experiences and STEM in the classroom, and to power dynamics in schools, these approaches to instruction will not advance equity and justice goals.

SUPPORTING EQUITY-ORIENTED TEACHING THROUGH PEDAGOGICAL MODELS

To realize visions for equitable learning, as well as be able to follow through on political and ethical commitments for teaching, the educators in the vignettes above benefited from models of pedagogy and from curricular materials. Pedagogical models, when made explicit to teachers, provide a source for teachers to draw on as they design ambitious disciplinary learning experiences for students (Furtak et al., 2012; McNeill et al., 2006; Penuel et al., 2009; see Box 8-1 for a summary of the models). Curriculum materials provide structure and resources that teachers can use to change their own practice to align with goals for learning promoted in those materials (Arias et al., 2017; Cervetti et al., 2016; Davis et al., 2017). The next section focuses on pedagogical models to support for equity-oriented teaching. In addition, Chapter 10 examines curriculum in greater depth.

A significant focus of scholarship in STEM education has been on what we refer to as culture-based pedagogies, including the models glossed in Box 8-1. What these pedagogical models all have in common is that they all presume that learning is a cultural process, and that a key goal in teaching is to relate disciplinary ideas to ways of knowing, speaking, and being that are part of students’ everyday practices in their families and communities. As highlighted above, teachers’ cultural competence is critical for these pedagogies, which emphasize building connections between disciplinary cultures and everyday cultures. But culture-based pedagogies also have many potential pitfalls, particularly if students’ cultures are presumed ahead of time and/or treated as a stable characteristic of an individual who identifies as a particular culture, gender, or sexual identity. Culture is “negotiated over

contested domains, and not, for example, a static grab bag of food, dances, and celebrations” (González et al., 2001, p. 118). Cultures are dynamic, porous, and hybrid (Seiler, 2013), and students bring their own repertoires for participation in cultural practices that need to be appreciated and recognized (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). Culture is everywhere, and all students live and learn culturally, not just certain groups of students. In addition, all disciplines are themselves cultural enterprises that both evolve over time and vary from place to place (Knorr-Cetina, 1999).

Funds of Knowledge

One of the most established culture-based pedagogical models is the funds of knowledge approach. Funds of knowledge refer to the bodies of knowledge and skills that have been historically accumulated and culturally developed that are essential for individual and household functioning and wellbeing (Vélez-lbáñez, 1988; Vélez-lbáñez & Greenberg, 1992). This pedagogical approach grew out of a desire to develop innovations in teaching that drew on funds of knowledge in children’s households and communities, initially within working-class, Mexican American communities in Tucson, Arizona. It involved deep partnerships with families who agreed to let researchers and teachers into their homes to interview them about household practices as well as their jobs. Teachers, in the fullest expression of this model of teaching, are first researchers, who are introduced to qualitative methods of study, including ethnographic observations, developing questionnaires, writing field notes, interviewing, and data management and analysis. Families, in this approach, are seen as more than ethnographic subjects: the idea is to draw from qualitative research topics when developing student projects in class. These would, ideally, address disciplinary goals for learning while also drawing on household and community funds of knowledge that invite parents, other relatives, and caregivers into the classroom to share essential expertise for carrying out these projects.

One early initiative, the BRIDGE project, focused on mathematics. It sought initially to understand what household practices might serve as the basis for projects that could connect to students’ lives and address topics typically found in K–8 mathematics curricula. Teacher José David Fonseca’s participation in the project illustrates how he approached the challenge of doing so (Ayers et al., 2001). He began his school year by administering a funds of knowledge survey to students in all his classes of eighth grade—five classes of 28 students each. From the survey, he learned that 60 percent of the children had a parent who worked in construction. He decided to create a unit on building a dream house, and the early lessons affirmed students’ desire to live in larger, more spacious homes. A challenge, though, was how to connect their interests in the project to the eighth-grade core curriculum topics of geometry, probability, fractions, and algebra. Fonseca decided to break the project into different phases to address each of these topics in more depth: designing the dream house; abstracting the geometry needed to build the house; calculating amounts of materials needed; and estimating costs. Along the way, he relied on his own background and experience considerably: he had been an architect in Mexico, and he was familiar with many of the decisions and aspects of the construction trade with which children’s parents were involved. The culmination of the project was a public presentation of their construction projects in front of parents, community

members, other students in the class, and the principal. Students presented their designs and, beyond that, provided reasons for their design choices and indicated the mathematical formulas used in building their designs, as well as the costs of realizing their design.

Enacting such an approach presents challenges to educators. For one, it demands of educators that they be able to see and make connections between the funds of knowledge students bring and the mathematical topics of the curriculum (Civil, 2007). The dream house project described above benefited greatly from Fonseca’s prior experience as an architect; such knowledge cannot be presumed ahead of time, particularly if students and teachers come from different communities. Second, the time demanded of teachers to get to know families and learn the kinds of techniques needed to do so in a way that is open and builds trust is considerable. Finally, the approach demands an openness to transform academic concepts as taught in schools into the everyday, and to expand what counts as mathematics, science or engineering (González et al., 2001). More recent instantiations of the approach seek both to find practical ways to elicit students’ funds of knowledge (e.g., through photo elicitation; see Clark-Ibañez, 2004) and to ground what is learned in flexibly adaptable instructional materials that scaffold the bridging of funds of knowledge with academic content (e.g., Tzou & Bell, 2010). In addition, newer work also focuses on building connections between curricular content and students’ funds of identity, which refers to the historically accumulated and culturally produced forms of self-definition, self-expression, and self-understanding that are valued by students (Esteban-Guitart, 2016; Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014).

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Another widely explored culture-based teaching model is culturally relevant pedagogy, developed by Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995). Like the funds of knowledge approach, culturally relevant pedagogy seeks to build a connection between students’ everyday cultural knowledge and the curriculum. But it takes up more directly the organizational and societal contexts of racially minoritized students’ educational experiences and calls on teachers to engage their students with those dimensions of their experience. The approach has three key criteria: “(1) students must experience academic success; (2) students must develop and maintain cultural competence; and (3) students must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 160). For teaching to meet the first criterion, teachers need to focus on cultivating students’ intellectual curiosity and leadership and on supporting their intellectual growth, rather than on behavior management (Ladson-Billings, 2014). To meet the second criterion, teachers need to draw on

students’ culture in their teaching—which may go beyond household funds of knowledge to focus on media and arts as young people encounter it in and out of school—and to allow for their everyday ways of communicating to be used as resources in their learning. To realize the third criterion, teaching needs to engage students in critiquing “the cultural norms, values, mores, and institutions that produce and maintain social inequity” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 162). In a reflection on how culturally relevant pedagogy has been taken up, Ladson-Billings (2014) observed that few have taken up this third criterion to any depth. Teachers, for their part, report this criterion as challenging to meet (Rivera Maulucci, 2013; Young, 2010) and that it requires sensitivity to issues of trust among students about engaging in critical conversations at school (Everson et al., 2022).

A recent exception to this observation is a study of engineering class by Madkins and McKinney de Royston (2019). The focus of the study was on a middle school science teacher, Mr. Coles, a Black teacher in a school serving primarily Black students. Mr. Coles was chosen for the study because he showed a high level of political clarity himself, which was necessary to be able to orchestrate critical conversations with students in his engineering class, a key condition for being able to support the development of students’ sociopolitical consciousness. During one class period, Mr. Coles begins class by situating his demands that students take care with the papers in their notebooks by noting the stereotypes held of Black students: he says they will be judged about whatever they do because they are Black. He reinforces these high expectations throughout the class at several points, even naming different levels of effort students might put in, signaling clearly his own expectation that students will need to work “as engineers,” and “as engineers, explaining and justifying their designs.” “‘You must explain,’ [he says,] and [then] engages students in a discussion about how to manage their time in order to complete the project and also have time to ‘put their ideas on paper’ to ‘explain to the class what you did’ the following day” (Madkins & McKinney de Royston, 2019, p. 1333). He also links their work explicitly to that of scientists and engineers, and positions students as capable of pursuing the kinds of high-wage careers that are possible in those professions. He tells the students “that you can ‘get billions for your ideas,’” and that being creative and getting paid for your ideas and creativity is “‘what engineers do’” (Madkins & McKinney de Royston, 2019, pp. 1332–1333). In interviews, it was clear that Mr. Coles had a self-conscious sense of identity as someone responsible for guiding his Black students toward success, while also making them aware of the systemic racism they were up against, and that he saw teaching as a political act.

One form of culturally relevant pedagogy whose efficacy has been studied is disaggregate instruction, an approach developed by Brown and colleagues (Brown, 2019; Brown & Ryoo, 2008). The basic premise of this

approach is that students should have the opportunity to first use everyday language to make sense of science phenomena while exploring and gaining clarity about science ideas, before learning the specialized language of science. The premise is grounded in an understanding that learning science terms is more complicated than connecting new words to ideas already known; it requires learning new ideas and how they help to explain things in the world. It also requires learning specialized meanings of words used every day, like “force” and “drop” (Gee, 2004; Lee et al., 2013).

In disaggregate instruction, teachers adopt language used by the students to guide initial everyday content instruction. Students then engage in learning activities that make the idea accessible without needing to use complex science terminology. Such activities are typically varied—they involve teachers explaining concepts, student modeling, as well as direct investigations of phenomena. In the next phase, students’ ideas and language are paired with science language—they are given the terminology to use—to make explicit that learning the language is an integral part of teaching. Last, the teacher creates opportunities for students to explain phenomena using scientific terminology for the concepts studied.

Using a computer-based application of disaggregate instruction, Brown et al. (Brown & Ryoo, 2008; Brown et al., 2010) conducted an experiment to test whether the approach helped students develop an understanding of photosynthesis better than an approach where students learned the ideas and language simultaneously. While both groups of students in the random assignment study grew in their understanding, the students in the disaggregate instruction group grew more. The biggest difference between the groups was their performance on open-ended tasks, where students had to provide their own explanations.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Developed by Geneva Gay (Gay, 2018, 2021), culturally responsive teaching centers the cultural diversity of students in classrooms. It offers a model that emphasizes high expectations for all students, and particularly for students of color, whose capabilities are often viewed through a deficit lens; this model also makes use of the cultural experiences, perspectives, heritages, and contributions of different groups in classroom instruction. There are two broad “pathways” to realizing culturally responsive teaching practice. One is focused on using and leveraging cultural knowledge to develop disciplinary understandings and the kinds of dispositions that are valued in disciplines. A second focuses on the curriculum itself: it calls for developing learning experiences that allow students to develop knowledge about the cultures, experiences, challenges, and achievements of different racial and ethnic groups. The idea behind the second path is that students

become more knowledgeable of their own cultures, as well as the dominant cultures of school and society, and other “non-mainstream” cultures.

Culturally responsive teaching sees race and culture as fundamental to the experience of people in schools and society, and, therefore, part of teaching. As other culture-based pedagogies are, it is asset focused, focusing on “the strengths or assets of ethnically and racially diverse students rather than weaknesses, possibilities instead of problems, and institutional responsibilities instead of merely individual indictments” (Gay, 2021, p. 218). In building bridges between those strengths and curriculum, educators can create better connections between home and school, provide more supportive learning environments to students from nondominant cultures and racially minoritized communities, and help students develop positive identities (Abdulrahim & Orosco, 2020).

As an example of culturally responsive teaching in mathematics, Jerry Lipka and a group of Indigenous (Yup’ik) colleagues (Lipka et al., 2009) developed materials focused on teaching mathematics within the context of Yup’ik everyday experiences and knowledge systems. In the project, Yup’ik teachers and community elders collaborated to build knowledge about daily activities among Alaska Native students, with the aim of identifying mathematics and science skills within these everyday activities; they then used the text descriptions of the daily activities to teach forms of mathematics and science common to U.S. education to the children. The curriculum was aimed at developing students’ knowledge of their own culture, as well as forms of mathematics typically taught in U.S. schools. Lipka et al. (2009) reported that when coupled with professional development, students learned more when using their curriculum than from the district’s adopted mathematics curriculum. See Box 8-2 for an example of an effort to develop culturally responsive assessments in science.

A recent review of the use of culturally responsive interventions in preservice education concluded that the ten studies examining their efficacy failed to meet sufficient standards of evidence to draw conclusions about their impact (Wang et al., 2022). Note that the lack of research does not indicate such pedagogies are ineffective, only that their efficacy has not been extensively studied using methods that could trace the impact of them across multiple sites.

Culturally Sustaining and Culturally Resurgent Pedagogies

Newer models of culture-based pedagogy in STEM education include culturally sustaining pedagogies and culturally resurgent pedagogies. Culturally sustaining pedagogy emerged as a “loving critique” of culturally responsive pedagogy, with an emphasis on incorporating the multiplicities, hybridity, and dynamism of identities and cultures that students bring to

the classroom, while also establishing as a key purpose for education the valuing and maintaining of a multiethnic, multilingual society (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2017). For example, within STEM education, scholars have used culturally sustaining pedagogies to build hybrid engagements between hip hop culture and science (Emdin, 2013, 2017), hip hop and computational science (Champion et al., 2020), mathematics and dance (Taeao & Averill, 2021), and physics and dance (Solomon et al., 2022).

Culturally resurgent, or culturally revitalizing, pedagogy traces its roots to Indigenous scholars, whose communities face a distinct challenge in revitalizing cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and educational practices that white settler colonialism has sought to extinguish. Key dimensions of this approach include confronting colonizing influence, enabling dreaming beyond settler futurities, community-based accountability, and a commitment to Indigenous educational sovereignty (Corntassel & Hardbarger, 2019; McCarty & Lee, 2014). Tzou, Meixi, et al.’s (2019) TechTales project (first discussed in Chapter 5) is an example of this approach to pedagogy. TechTales is a community-based project that includes a university, a science center, a library, an Indigenous theater group for youth, and the Native Education program of a district near Seattle, Washington. In the project, families are invited to develop, tell, and animate stories from their own lives using robotics components, sensors, and everyday materials over the course of a 5-week series of workshops. Grounded in an understanding of learning as a cultural process, the program actively promotes multiple ways of knowing and making in STEM, begins with the premise that learning should begin with the lives of learners, and repositions family members as expert—no matter their formal preparation in STEM. The program positions parents as co-facilitators, centering members’ own family and cultural knowledge in the stories they created and told. The program also elevates participants’ observations of and ways of relating to land, drawing on Indigenous ways of knowing and being (Tzou, Meixi, et al., 2019). The team uses collaborative methods across researchers and participants to co-design and co-facilitate in order to design alongside or with partners rather than for them (Tzou, Bell, et al., 2019).

Complex Instruction

One model of equity-oriented instruction grounded in a sociological, rather than cultural, framework that scholars have investigated extensively within mathematics education is complex instruction (Cohen, 1986; Cohen et al., 1999). Complex instruction is a pedagogical approach based in group work that emphasizes heterogeneity of knowledge and skills, deep collaboration, and involves the elevation of low-status students’ contributions to knowledge-building. In a complex instruction approach, teachers assign

students to heterogeneous groups and state publicly that different kinds of knowledge and skill that different members of the group hold are required for the task. The teacher is also encouraged to highlight low-status students’ contributions to knowledge-building, with the goal of elevating their participation and encouraging further participation. “Assigning competence,” as this practice is referred to, can help students find ways to participate in classroom learning activities and broaden their own conceptions of what it means to be knowledgeable (Esmonde, 2009). Complex instruction also calls for the use of tasks that can only be completed when other group members contribute to the activity, such as through a Jigsaw cooperative activity structure (Aronson & Patnoe, 1997) or “Numbered Heads Together,” a structure that contributes to positive interdependence of group members (Maheady et al., 2002, 2006). Other strategies for addressing status include establishing community norms or agreements and roles within tasks. In small groups, it may be particularly important to have explicit agreements related to equity that students are asked to monitor and intervene to maintain (Patterson, 2019). Intellectual roles within small groups can help ensure each student has clarity about their expected contribution, and it helps students appreciate the role of listening to and learning from others in small group collaboration (Herrenkohl, 2006; Herrenkohl et al., 1999).

Early studies of complex instruction report success in improving student learning outcomes (e.g., Boaler & Staples, 2008; Cohen et al., 1999) and in providing rich contexts for teacher collaborative workgroups to reflect on instruction in mathematics (Horn, 2005). At the same time, studies of small group work where complex instruction has been enacted show the persistence of status issues in small groups that impede groups’ abilities to work productively together on academic tasks—particularly in ways that are racialized and gendered (Langer-Osuna, 2015, 2016). In addition, some scholars have questioned whether a common form of collaboration as articulated in complex instruction is culturally appropriate, regardless of the composition of the classroom (Hunter & Civil, 2021). Together, these point to an important if partly neglected area of pedagogical inquiry, namely, how to promote more equitable small group collaborative work.

Summary

The models of culture-based pedagogy reviewed in this section include the funds of knowledge approach, culturally relevant pedagogy, culturally responsive pedagogy, culturally sustaining and culturally resurgent pedagogy, and complex instruction. Each of these models fosters learning in ways that combine formal learning and cultural understanding to increase knowledge in both areas, and to establish or strengthen a connection between the two. There is strong evidence showing the efficacy of

culture-based instruction in helping students to learn in ways that they experience as more just and equitable. Such inclusive models are an important tool in the work of developing equitable education experiences. Furthermore, the inclusivity fostered in these models can and must extend beyond ethnicity and race—and the cultural practices, values, and identities associated therein—to other facets of identity, such as gender and sexuality (see Box 8-3).

While the pedagogical models described above are supported by research as being effective tools both for teaching STEM content and for advancing equity and justice within this instruction, they are not always easily implemented within the present system. The section below discusses the promise and challenges that such a shift might entail.

SHIFTING INSTRUCTION IN A COMPLEX SYSTEM

The pedagogical models described above offer some guidance for shifting STEM instruction to advance equity and justice. However, making the necessary shifts requires effort, deliberate attention, and reflection. The equity frames discussed in Chapter 6 can help to guide teachers’ decisions and action when revising instructional approaches. Instructional shifts of the kind that are needed will take time, and teachers will learn as they make mistakes, recover, and adjust. Teachers will need opportunities to reflect on their own instructional practices and to try out new instructional strategies in their classrooms. Teachers will need to reflect on their own preconceptions about STEM learning and on their own identities and positionality. This means that administrators at multiple levels will need to prioritize opportunities for professional development (see Chapter 9 for further discussion of teacher learning and professional development).

In addition, educators in many contexts are often navigating multiple demands and different conceptions of what constitutes “good teaching” or successful outcomes in STEM (Marshall et al., 2021; Philip et al., 2019). Although teaching practices are carried out by individuals, instructional possibilities—that is, what is reasonable or feasible for a teacher to be able to achieve in their classroom—are shaped by the schools, districts, and states they are nested within. In formal school settings, policies and practices at the school, district and state level can either constrain or enable teachers’ instructional choices: in this way, all actors in the system are implicated in making decisions to facilitate equitable instruction. For example, there may be limits on the amount of time available for instruction in science, which can make it difficult to engage in extended investigations that require time for student discourse and to make connections with community contexts. Another challenge may come from administration, such as when a principal observing a mathematics class has narrow views of what effective mathematics instruction should focus on and look like. Like decision making related to other parts of STEM education, the equity frame an actor is holding when making choices will inform what kinds of decisions they make.

CONCLUSIONS

In this chapter, we consider teaching as a practice that can be oriented toward or away from equity, and discuss several examples and pedagogical models that promote equity and justice. In our discussion of the four examples of what equity-oriented teaching looks like in multiple STEM disciplines, we emphasize teaching as a set of practices that spans formal and informal settings. Furthermore, the concept of teaching as practice underpins our emphasis on improvisation and decision making involved in instruction: in the examples discussed above, we highlight how educators have the opportunity to make decisions in their spaces to teach toward equity by intentionally connecting to the social, cultural, political, and ethical lives of the children in their respective classroom or out-of-school program.

The pedagogical models of culture-based teaching we turn to in the second part of the chapter extend the idea of teaching as practice, serving as guides for how teachers might craft learning experiences for students that conjoin formal curriculum content and cultural knowledge, practices, and identities specific to their students. They highlight decisions teachers might make as they seek to integrate culture and attend to the social dynamics within racialized and gendered settings of STEM classrooms. In particular, this material shows the important role that culture-based pedagogies can play in furthering equity and justice within STEM education.

Throughout this chapter, we have emphasized the importance of teaching as a set of practices that can serve the dual purpose of promoting STEM learning and strengthening students’ understandings of their own culture and cultural identity. When those two things are integrated, rather than set in conflict, students’ learning experiences can be more equitable.

Conclusion 8-1: To enact instruction that advances equity in STEM requires understanding how to interweave pedagogy that supports the development of competencies in the concepts and practices of the disciplines with pedagogy that promotes learners’ agency, leverages their cultural and linguistic assets, and centers their competence as sensemakers. This goes beyond traditional conceptions of disciplinary pedagogical content knowledge. There are research-based models for advancing this kind of instruction that can be leveraged to support educators as they reflect on and transform their own practice.

Conclusion 8-2: Enacting instructional changes that promote equity will require changes in other school and district practices and policies to both eliminate barriers and encourage and incentivize instructional change.

REFERENCES

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