CHAPTER 12
Science Learning in Urban Settings
Last year I was interviewing a group of sixth-grade students from a high-poverty urban school in New York City. I had spent a great deal of time with them in an after-school program and thought I had a good sense of what they cared about. I had also spent time in their science class. The science class was interesting, primarily because most students held strong opinions about the teacher, Mr. Logan. Nearly all of the students I talked to believed that Mr. Logan was a good science teacher. Yet, nearly all of the students also said that they did not like science class!
As I began to probe this contradiction with the students, I said to them, “Tell me about one thing you learned in science class today.” I was immediately struck by their overwhelming response: “We didn't learn anything!” On the one hand, I knew that Mr. Logan had spent time that week talking about the parts of cells and was getting the students ready to make their own cell models. I had the urge to say to this group of students, “Come on, of course you learned something! What about the cell?” On the other hand, I wanted to explore why they thought they really had not learned anything at all. What did the students really mean by their statement about not learning?
As I reflect on this experience, my gut reaction to the students’ response is that students are learning all of the time whether they realize it or not. However, what students learn and how they learn it are open for debate. In other words, learning is oriented toward an outcome (what are students learning?) and a process (who is learning, and when, where, and why?).
When learning is referred to as a product it is often conflated with achievement. Indeed, the past 20 years have given rise to a number of carefully documented studies focused on student achievement as an outcome measure of student learning. It is well established that these studies have helped to quantify and clarify the very specific challenges faced in urban science education. Achievement studies have highlighted who is (and is not) achieving, demonstrating that gaps in achievement still exist between ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups as well as between high-poverty and non-high-poverty urban students (see also Chapter 8, this volume). Achievement studies have also spurred more focused investigations that examine reasons for differential achievement in urban centers, including access to resources, teacher qualifications, and other classroom-related barriers.
When learning is referred to as a process, it is often discussed relative to a given context (What are students learning? Where are students learning?) and characterization (What actually constitutes learning in these settings?). Situated cognition theories tell us learning ought to be considered as a form of participation, with individuals and contexts intertwined. This lens for understanding the process of learning underscores the importance of both culture and community. In her study of urban high school students participating in a summer gardening program, Rahm (2002) pointed out that what accumulates through participation in science is not only deepening understandings of scientific facts, but also a way of talking, acting, and becoming a member of a community. Understanding learning as a process is also important in urban science education because it influences how we understand what students are learning and the means by which they do so.
Thus, I find myself contemplating the questions: What learning matters in high-poverty urban science classrooms and who should decide when learning takes place? What does learning in these urban classrooms feel like and sound like from different stakeholders’ perspectives? The students I interviewed attend a school that is labeled as failing, and they exist in a system marked by high-stakes exams, strict rules regarding behavior, and certain ways of knowing that are deemed acceptable. In addition, their teachers are not always encouraged to be attentive to their students’ home languages and cultures. Their educational futures are not always determined by whether they believe they have learned something—or anything—in their science class.
FRAMING QUESTIONS
In this review, I begin by examining those studies that document the outcomes of student learning through achievement, attempting to show how these studies have laid a foundation for the characterization of who is learning (and who is not learning) science in urban centers. As part of this review, I include a discussion of those studies that draw upon achievement patterns to examine the barriers or obstacles that frame opportunities to achieve in science. Thus, the questions I take up in the first section include the following:
- Who is learning science in urban schools?
- What are the conditions that mediate student achievement and learning?
Second, I move on to those studies that examine the process of learning in urban science settings and examine how science learning is mediated by context, including those contextual factors that influence not only how students learn (i.e., discourse, culture, etc.) but also what students learn in the name of science instruction. As part of this review I closely examine the tools researchers use to document the “differences” in the language, culture, and practice of science that mediate learning in science classrooms. Thus, the questions I take up in this second section include these:
- What are the primary tools that urban science education researchers employ to understand and bridge differences in what and how urban students learn science?
- What else are students learning in science class besides science?
As these questions suggest, learning as a process cannot be divorced from the process of teaching. Therefore in my discussion of these questions, I will also take up issues of teaching relative to when and how students learn.
Before I delve into either set of questions, however, I want to backtrack for a moment to address two additional questions: First, why is it important to understand learning within a uniquely urban context? Second, what kinds of articles are included in a review on learning and urban science education and why is this so?
URBAN SCIENCE EDUCATION THROUGH RESEARCH
There has been a growing interest in urban science education studies over the past 10 years. As a result, a growing number of published articles in journals like Science Education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Research in Science Education, and the International Journal of Science Education have titles that include words like urban or city. As I have reported elsewhere (Calabrese Barton, 2002), urban science education research, in a broad sense, studies the intersections among students, their families and their teachers, science, schooling, and the historical, physical, environmental, social, economic, and political aspects of urban life. This perspective suggests that urban science education research is especially attentive to the forces that frame the urban context through both the research questions and methods, and that the analysis and subsequent knowledge claims made reflect a propensity for generating a specialized knowledge based around urban science education.
Therefore, I developed a list of 39 articles1 that I believe fit into urban science education studies and that address issues of student learning. To develop this list of articles, I examined the contents of the major science education journals over the past decade for relevant studies. I then examined the reference lists in these studies, which led to additional articles. I also used the search engines ERIC, First Search, and Ingenta to conduct a refereed journal-wide search for urban science education articles. I analyzed each article for questions, research frameworks, guiding assumptions, and findings.
The selection of these articles, by the nature of what they report, places further boundaries on what is reported in this chapter. First, the majority of the articles focus on those aspects of urban life that contribute to the great divide between those urban communities that have and those that do not. In some cases, published reports reviewed here use the word urban synonymously with urban poverty or urban minority. I want to avoid this assumption in this chapter. However, because of the nature of the studies published in the science education literature, urban studies have taken a decidedly focused perspective on poverty, race, and language issues. Additionally, urban schools in the United States, for example, are “more likely than ever to serve a population of low-income, minority students, given increased residential segregation and recent court decisions releasing schools across the country from desegregation orders” (Oakes, Muir, & Joseph, 2000, p. 5). Second, the vast majority of the studies I reviewed were situated in the United States. I recognize that this limitation is partly my responsibility, as I only reviewed articles available in English. To compensate for this limitation, I have tried to point out the differences in the urban issues of concern in the United States and how this may or may not differ from other geographic and national locations.
ACHIEVEMENT IN SCIENCE IN URBAN CENTERS
In contemporary educational discourse, achievement and learning are often conflated. In a detailed study commissioned by the Council of Great City Schools, Snipes, Doolittle, and Herlihy (2003) found that urban districts effective in promoting student achievement across racial and socioeconomic gaps “focused on student achievement” and encouraged teachers “to use achievement data as a tool to help them improve instructional practice, diagnose students’ specific instructional needs, and increase student learning/achievement” (p. xx). As these authors suggest, conflating achievement and learning is generally the result of targeting the outcomes of the learning process, as high-stakes assessments generally do. Outcome measures of learning, however, must be part of the science learning conversation because of their profound implications for urban students. For example, recent legislation in some states in the United States has linked high-stakes outcome measures with state-endorsed diplomas, school funding, and teacher pay.
The studies reported below reveal three key findings: (a) that a significant gap exists between urban and suburban learners, and that this gap is punctuated by differential achievement between White students and students from minority backgrounds; (b) that the achievement gap is a function of the sociocultural status of learners; and (c) that the achievement gap is also a function of students’ and teachers’ access to resources to support the teaching and learning of science. Thus, in what follows I review studies that examine (a) urban science achievement patterns across sociocultural status and access to resources and (b) the function and form of resources in urban science student achievement and learning.
The Urban Science Achievement Gap Is a Function of Sociocultural Status
Norman and his colleagues (Norman, Ault, Bentz, & Meskimen, 2001) offered an in-depth analysis of the achievement gap between White students and Black students in urban America. This study demonstrates that there exist “multiple achievement gaps” among urban science learners and that these gaps are a complex phenomenon, sustained by a complex organization of factors that frame urban communities, such as race, ethnicity, immigration patterns, and socioeconomic status.
Using a historical macro-analysis, Norman et al. (2001) suggested that a significant gap exists between Black and White students, and that this gap has a distinctly urban–suburban undertone, given the demographic patterns that mark urban and suburban settings in the United States. However, in comparing his finding for urban Black Americans with other ethnic and racial groups over the last 100 years, Norman et al. argued that the achievement gap in urban science classrooms more likely reflects the sociocultural position of groups in society rather than racial differences. To make a case for achievement as a sociocultural phenomenon, Norman et al. presented an analysis of the different achievement gaps in the United States during the twentieth century. Their analysis reveals that at different times achievement gaps existed and then disappeared for a number of immigrant groups, that these groups had a low scholastic profile at the same time that they occupied a low-status position, and that as the immigrant groups became mainstreamed and assimilated, their achievement gaps diminished and they generally moved away from urban centers into more suburban locations.
Norman et al.’s study (2001) suggests that achievement gaps are complex phenomena that shift over time with changing populations and changing contexts. This study sheds light on the complex phenomenon of the achievement gap, and it raises many questions worth pursuing. First, within the urban Black population, do these same trends hold for the multiple ethnic populations? Are similar trends found for Latino populations for whom similar sociocultural barriers also exist within U.S. society? How might a micro-analysis of urban Black Americans who defy the achievement trends in the United States provide insight into how sociocultural status and school success overlap? One major implication of this study is that actual achievement gaps may be a reflection of a combination of other gaps, including a group's social and political power, knowledge of U.S. systems such as schooling, and access to resources.
The Urban Science Achievement Gap Is a Function of Resources
Most researchers are generally familiar with the chilling statistics that describe high-poverty and minority urban students’ differential access to resources in U.S. schools. Students attending poor, urban schools in the United States by and large have limited access to updated scientific books and equipment and science-related extracurricular activities (Oakes, 1990). They also have limited access to certified science teachers or to administrators who could support high-quality science teaching, such that students are either denied high-level science courses (because they are not offered) or they take courses with uncertified or unqualified teachers (Darling-Hammond, 1999; Ingersoll, 1999). 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, 1990). In fact, some studies have shown a complete absence of science in low-track urban science classes (Page, 1990).
The impact of differential access to resources has been particularly detrimental to urban students. Oakes’ studies (1990; Oakes et al., 2000), which analyzed student scores on national exams and course-taking patterns in California, reveal that although both achievement and course-taking have increased for all groups of urban students, serious gaps remain between White and non-White students and between high-poverty and non-poverty students, and that these gaps correlate with inequalities in opportunities to learn between schools and within them (Oakes et al., 2000).
Similar studies have been conducted in Australia. Two studies in particular compare student achievement in urban versus rural settings and demonstrate the complexity of the relationship between location, resource availability, and achievement. It is worth examining these studies in detail. Using data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, Webster and Fisher (2000) conducted a multilevel analysis, which took into account school-, classroom- and student-level variance, to determine levels of achievement in Australian urban and rural communities and their association with location and access to resources. Although larger variances in achievement were noted at the student level when issues of socioeconomic class and sex were considered, when researchers controlled for these differences at both the classroom and school level, rural schools demonstrated statistically significant positive differences in achievement. In making sense of these differences, researchers noted that “contrary to what has been written previously, the information provided by the schools in this study shows that rural schools are more adequately resourced than urban schools.” However, researchers noted that access to resources was a factor in student achievement significantly only at the student level rather than also at the school level. This study is important, and its findings suggest the need for further investigation into how achievement trends may vary when the analysis more rigorously accounts for location, such as the differences in kinds of urban and rural locations investigated.
This concern has been taken up in part by Young (1998), who, by using multilevel modeling techniques in an effort to question the generalizability of the comparison of rural with urban schools, found that the location of the school had significant effects on achievement. Her study revealed that differences in achievement were more pronounced among students from remote locations. In particular, she determined that when achievement levels were examined only in Western Australia, students attending rural and remote schools did not perform as well as those students in urban schools, nor did they have access to as many resources as students from urban schools. This study indicates the importance of general access to resources in student achievement; but it should also be noted that when these data were analyzed relative to student socioeconomic status, sex, aboriginal status, English-speaking background, and academic self-concept, the size effect of these findings is relatively small.
These two Australian studies, therefore, indicate the importance of the relationship between access to resources and student achievement in science in urban versus rural settings. However, they also show how complex student achievement relative to location is, and how models developed to explain differences need to consider the nuances of specific locations and student ability differences. Like Norman et al.’s study (2001), which demonstrates the complexities in how achievement gaps ought to be understood as both individual and group phenomena, this study also suggests that careful consideration must be given to how individual factors interrelate with broader-scale factors (i.e., classroom, school, regional, social) to confound larger effect size. In urban science education studies this is of particular importance, given that higher-level policy discussions around educational practices in urban settings, like New York, have been based on generalized large-scale learning outcomes.
Thus, this collection of studies highlights the conditions under which many high-poverty and minority urban youth attend school and the impact the conditions have on their growth and development as science learners. They also set a baseline measure of differential access and opportunity and challenge basic assumptions around how access to resources in urban contexts changes across countries and even within countries.
The Form and Function of Resources and Science Achievement
The next series of articles examines what actually counts as resources and how resources are activated in the support of opportunities to learn science.
The most comprehensive set of studies that has examined access to resources has been conducted at the school, system, and state levels. In her research on the Equity Metric, Kahle (1998) demonstrated a relationship between differential achievement and access to resources. The Equity Metric advances our understanding of how achievement suffers in under-resourced schools, such as those in high-poverty urban centers, because it quantifies a set of human, social, and material resources to make sense of how well a school is moving toward equity goals. Furthermore, rather than focusing on equity in terms of individuals or groups of individuals, the Metric addresses the conditions within a system (a classroom, school, or district) that define equity in science education.
The Equity Metric and related research provide a flexible reconceptualization of what ought to be counted as resources, including clearly understood and accepted goals for reform; responsible and accessible leadership; teachers who feel efficacious, autonomous, and respected; and a community that is supportive and involved (Hewson, Kahle, Scantlebury, & Davies, 2001). For example, application of the Metric reveals that even in U.S. urban schools where academic achievement plans with strong equity components were in place, students were still exposed to a science education that was inequitable along three resource fronts: lack of home resources and the cultural knowledge to succeed in schools, a lack high expectations and culturally relevant practices, and a lack of engagement in science education reform practices (Hewson et al., 2001; see also Kahle, Meece, & Scantlebury, 2000; Roychoudhury & Kahle, 1999).
These studies focused on the Equity Metric reveal that a combination of resource-oriented factors, which the authors believe to be unique in urban schools, consumed the attention of science teachers such that they had little time or energy to teach science.
In successful schools, teachers assume they will have the conditions needed to support quality teaching. Try as they might, [the urban] science teachers could not focus on science teaching. Webster's [suburban] science teachers, in contrast, worked in a cooperative, stable environment that provided the time and space to focus their energies on teaching science. (Hewson et al., 2001, p. 1142)
This last point is crucial to understanding the connection between student achievement and resources in urban settings, for it suggests that there are resource concerns unique to urban centers, at least in the United States. Such a conjecture is worth further study.
Spillane, Diamond, Walker, Halverson, and Jita (2001), like Kahle (1998), examined the form and function of resources as both the building and district levels. In their study, they focused more on how the activation of resources—in addition to their actual presence—is fundamental to opportunities to learn science in urban settings. Whereas Kahle and her colleagues (1998, 2000) worked to quantify resources, Spillane and his colleagues drew upon a fluid conceptualization of resources and focused on the importance of the activation processes used by school leaders to utilize available resources. Their study, which examined 13 high-poverty Chicago elementary schools’ efforts to lead instructional change in science education, demonstrates the importance of framing resources in terms of how material, human, and social capital is identified, accessed, and activated. Using an in-depth case study of one of their schools, where resources for leading instruction were extremely limited and unequally distributed across subject areas—more for literacy and math, fewer to none for science—Spillane et al. showed that successful changes in school-wide science achievement were brought about by school leaders who placed value on how leaders activated resources for science instruction, developed teachers’ human capital, recognized and used social capital inside and outside of school, and juggled all with an eye toward achievement and accountability measures.
Each of the authors above argues for a broader conceptualization of resources in school science settings. However, it is interesting to note that their reasons for doing so are different. Spillane et al. (2001) were interested in how teachers and leaders might use what is around them to build more equitable learning opportunities in an under-resourced subject. Kahle (1998) was interested in setting standards for adequate resources in urban schools and making a case for how some of the overlooked but extremely important resources affect student achievement. Each of these articles also makes a case for how resources inform the process of how students go about learning in urban settings. These studies reveal challenging questions about the role that resources play in student learning. Spillane et al.’s study suggests that it is possible for a broad and nontraditional repertoire of resources to positively affect school science, but it only provides us with a glimpse of the resources drawn upon by school leaders in promoting reform-based science instruction, and does not show how students may also activate a fluid resource bank. What could we also learn if more systematic attention were paid to the strategies for activation that matter to students, teachers or leaders, and to whether the employment of differing strategies matters in learning outcomes?
Thus, studies on resources in urban science education provide a baseline understanding of how urban student achievement and attitudes in the sciences are directly linked to the access and activation of resources. They urge us to consider how various conditions within schools, communities, and nations are centrally part of how resources ought to be understood and activated. Although the debate is rich and at times contentious with regard to how the identification and enactment of resources ought to be framed—as measurable quantities or fluid contexts dependent upon arrangements—such richness opens up powerful lines of questioning and research. At this point, one could also argue for including those studies that examine the use of local resources or student funds of knowledge as starting points for a curriculum (see Bouillion & Gomez, 2001; Fusco & Calabrese Barton, 2001; Seiler, 2001). However, I have decided to include studies that approximate this concern in a later section dealing more directly with the role of cultural toolkits and funds of knowledge in the process of student learning.
THE PROCESS OF LEARNING: ARTICULATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE URBAN LEARNER, SCIENCE, AND THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
Studies of achievement and resources in science only crack the door for understanding student learning in urban settings. Although they provide us with a framework for understanding who is succeeding in educational environments and who is not, they are unable to provide us with insight into why some high-poverty groups succeed in urban schools and others do not. They demonstrate a compelling relationship between access to resources and academic achievement, but most leave open questions around how nontraditional resources facilitate learning or the motivation to learn. In this next section, I move on to those studies that take up these questions more directly by focusing on the process of learning.
With the introduction of the ideal of scientific literacy into international science education discourse, achievement studies of urban student populations have been complemented by studies that focus on how context frames urban student learning in science. Situated within the broad framework of social cognition, these studies, taken as a whole, have attempted to step away from singular outcome measures in order to characterize what learning is in urban science education settings and how learning is mediated by the local context. Just as achievement studies have revealed differences in learning outcomes among differing populations within urban centers and between urban and non-urban centers, social cognition studies have revealed that successful science learning is an artifact of the learning environment created for or by students.
Even though understanding context is central to understanding the process of learning in urban science education, the investigation of context is a difficult one. It is a dynamic construction, grounded in a set of geographic and structural features as well as in the histories, cultures, experiences, and identities of those individuals who make up that context. Each of the studies described below offers either an analytic lens for making sense of student learning in science or a depiction of the link between student learning and context. Thus, the questions I take up in this section include:
- What are the primary tools that urban science education researchers employ to understand and to bridge differences in what and how urban students learn science?
- What else are students learning in science class?
Understanding and Bridging Differences
In this section, I examine a set of articles that present tools for making sense of student learning in urban environments. By “tools” I refer to theoretical constructs that researchers have developed or adopted to help describe and explain the process of student learning. Across the studies reviewed for this section, three categories of tools are covered: (a) appropriation frameworks, (b) congruence, and (c) legitimate participation.
Appropriation Frameworks
The studies presented in this section describe tools that provide insight into how urban students learn to appropriate or assimilate science content and culture. Each of the studies shares two ideas. First, each is grounded in the belief that science is a cultural practice, with its own ways of talking, acting, and becoming a member of a community. Second, each draws upon the idea that the process of learning to become part of the scientific culture ought to be transformative for the students, for the classroom-based scientific culture they join, and for the teachers who help to form that culture. The tools described in this section include genres, everyday sense-making, and cultural toolkits.
Genres. Varelas, Becker, Luster, and Wenzel (2002), in their study of the oral and written work of students in a sixth-grade African American urban science class, used the framework of genres to analyze student learning. Genres, according to Varelas et al., are “staged, goal-oriented social processes” that suggest a “purposeful way of doing things in a culture” and that help students to organize ideas, experiences, and practices in ways that make sense to them (p. 581). In a typical science classroom, there are two categories of genres that frame science learning. There are student genres, which include youth genres, classroom genres, and student science genres. There are also teacher genres, which include their favored classroom genre and their own science genre. According to Varelas et al., genres can be a useful tool because they “may shed light on the fullness, complexity and richness of learning science in urban classrooms” (p. 583).
Genres may be a particularly interesting analytic framework for understanding student learning in urban contexts if we apply them to making sense of pedagogical conflict in the classroom. I see three powerful points emerging from this study. First, genres provide an explanation for why and how students often resist learning science. Learning science requires students to incorporate a new way of talking, knowing, and doing into their assimilatory frameworks that they use to make sense of the world. Part of learning is using one's assimilatory framework to make sense of an experience; but an equally important part of learning is allowing the assimilatory framework to be changed by that experience. Second, genres bring into focus the ways in which science learning can be facilitated or constrained by how well values and expectations overlap in the classroom. If student genres do not map onto teacher genres, then conflict may emerge and learning is hindered. Conflicts between genres can result from differences in what is valued by the teacher or the science education community, but also from the student's enculturation into a view of schooling or science that may not reflect reform-based practices. Third, the conflict generated over the meeting of genres can be instructive for both teachers and students. Situating the source of conflict within the realm of how ideas, values, and so forth are assimilated, rather than within an individual and her capabilities, opens up more empowering challenges to teachers and students.
Everyday sense-making. The next appropriation or assimilatory framework tool is everyday sense-making. Whereas genres focus on “ways of doing things within cultures,” everyday sense-making examines how what students, teachers, and science contribute to the learning environment frames the nature of that environment and the interactions that occur there.
The idea of everyday sense-making suggests that there are different cultures that frame what and how students learn science. Students’ cultured understandings of science can be used as a tool for enhancing the learning process (Warren, Ballenger, Ogonowski, Rosebery, & Hudicourt-Barnes, 2001). Warren et al. argued that everyday experience and ways of talking/knowing are seen not only as discontinuous with those of science, but also as barriers to robust learning in science learning settings, negatively affecting urban students and students from minority backgrounds in their opportunities to learn science. Drawing upon sense-making, this research group attempted to reverse this trend. Using descriptive case-study analysis, they provided rich examples of students making sense of science by employing accounts of everyday experience as both a context for understanding scientific phenomena and a perspective through which to engage with new dimensions of a given phenomenon, making such accounts analytically generative. For example, Ballenger reported on how some urban learners, as a way of making sense of science, engage in “embodied imagining,” where they imagine themselves in the scientific phenomenon they are trying to understand (Ballenger, 1997). Viewing student learning as a process of everyday sense-making, grounded in the cognitive, physical, and cultural dimensions of being, opens up new channels for how learning in classrooms is encouraged and understood.
Cultural toolkits. Cultural toolkits also fit under appropriation because they offer an analytic lens for understanding how youth draw upon and activate those aspects of their capital in order to appropriate science in ways transformative to them. As Elmesky (2003) wrote, “By understanding the structure of different cultural environments in which students interact and the associated strategies of action within their cultural toolkits, teachers can become better equipped with the skills for helping their students learn science in a manner that will encourage social transformation” (pp. 32–33).
Cultural toolkits offer a unique tool for understanding how youth learn to appropriate science along three different lines of thought: identity, power, and practice. In terms of identity, Seiler (2001), in her critical ethnographic account of student learning in a lunchtime program, demonstrated how students draw upon funds of knowledge that are not necessarily part of the traditional school day to craft a new place in the discourse and community of science. Looking closely at eight African American male high school students, Seiler poignantly showed how cultural and language differences are important markers of personal and group identity and can serve as a valuable form of capital to be drawn upon in learning in the science classroom. Furthermore, what Seiler's article also brings to light is that often students do not realize that the capital to which they have access can serve them well in school and does have connections to science learning. She argued that one important outcome of her study linking resources to science learning is the importance of making sound curricular and pedagogical decisions that help students to recognize the science in their everyday activities.
In terms of power, my own research group has examined how the activation of resources from one's toolkit is influenced by how the activation process is understood and taken up by others within the learning setting. For example, in one publication we drew upon case studies of five urban homeless children to make two points relative to power and activation of resources (Calabrese Barton, 1998). First, more important than understanding that differential access to material, human, and social/organizational resources exists in high-poverty learning communities is understanding how “a margin–center” continuum set up by differential access is often construed as a natural rather than a created phenomenon. This continuum often leaves students with access to traditional resources on the margins of school practice. Second, students without traditional resources are institutionally set up to fail, while not having the ways in which they activate their nontraditional resources recognized in their attempts to learn science.
Finally, in terms of practices, Elmesky (2003) looked at how using a cultural toolkits framework can help teachers to re-envision the role of confrontation in science learning, and in particular the practices of what are traditionally referred to as disrespect, acting out, and violence. The author made a persuasive case that confrontational strategies of action, both verbal and physical, exist as part of a toolkit shaped within a structure that demands excellence, respect, and sometimes survival of the fittest, and utilization of such strategies in turn reinforces the structure that exists. She argued that when youth spend the majority of their time within fields structured by ideology, it is not surprising that they unconsciously engage these strategies within the classroom. However, I wonder about the overt focus on what are construed as stereotypical qualities of inner-city youth. On the one hand, this could be an attempt to shatter stereotyping by transforming our understanding of those strategies of action. On the other hand, I wonder why other more socially positive examples were not selected, or if it is necessary that teachers take into account all possible strategies of action available to students.
Implications of and questions for appropriation frameworks. Everyday sense-making strategies, like genres and cultural toolkits, are well-equipped theoretical constructs to offer new ways of understanding science learning in urban classrooms. They reveal to us the diversity of resources that youth draw upon to learn science—especially those resources not traditionally viewed as scientific. They also show us how even the most experienced teachers can struggle with the challenge of knowing what to do with students’ ways of sense-making, even when they recognize them and see connections. All of these tools also clue us into some of the less spoken of challenges that teachers face when attempting to implement reform-based science education: conflicts in science class can and do emerge when the ideals of science (i.e., collaboration, shared responsibility) conflict with the ideals of schooling (i.e., individualism) or the ideals of students (individual ownership).
These appropriation or assimilation framework tools raise many questions worthy of further study. For example, to date, none of these research lenses for understanding learning take up the question of how school science and high-stakes testing require students to express certain ways of knowing and of articulating that knowing. In what ways might genres, sense-making, or cultural toolkits foster real integration of student ways of knowing with scientific ways of knowing that still enable the kind of scientific literacy valued in schools to be possible? Finally, these studies all appear to be initial studies. Although rigorous, each study is small in scale. Clearly, more broad-scale studies need to be conducted across different ethnic groups, different urban centers, different kinds of schools, and different ages of students. After all, the science demands of high school students are quite different from those of elementary school students. School science goals in science magnet schools may look different from goals in general comprehensive schools or schools with other foci. Such studies will deepen the complexity of our understanding of the import of genres, sense-making, and cultural toolkits.
Congruence
Congruence, as congruent third space (Moje, Tehani, Carillo, & Marx, 2001), instructional congruence (Lee & Fradd, 1998), and composite culture, is a framework used to describe those pedagogical practices that bridge the worlds of students with the worlds of science and school in ways meant to be empowering and relevant to students. Studies focused on congruence pay close attention to the funds of knowledge that students bring to the classroom and those required to do science well in a school setting. How those funds of knowledge are validated and applied meaningfully in the learning of science is the crux of studies that examine congruence.
Congruent third space. In describing congruent third space, Moje et al. (2001) examined how, in urban middle school science classrooms, science learning is framed by differences in culture and discursive practices. However, they also showed that more often than not, the discourse of science is privileged over social, everyday discourse even when both are used and valued in the classroom. Moje et al.’s work challenges urban science educators to consider how the process of bridging the worlds of students and science is more complex than simply bringing both into the classroom. Rather, they argued that bridging differences is insufficient to facilitate learning among urban students, and that science learning is facilitated (or constrained) by how well discourses are integrated. These dynamic moments of authentic integration, otherwise known as the congruent third space, provide the mediational context and tools necessary for students’ social and cognitive development.
Instructional congruence. Similar to congruent third space is the construct of instructional congruence. Instructional congruence, according to Lee and Fradd (1998), is the process by which teachers build epistemological, cultural, and linguistic bridges between science and students. These authors asserted that instructional congruence is an important way to make science learning fair and just to second-language learners in urban settings, because it expands school science from being about not only knowledge (knowing, doing, and talking) and the habits of mind (values, attitudes), but also the languages (academic discourse, social discourse, and cultural understandings) of the students. Lee and Fradd used several examples from years of mixed-methods research in Miami-area public schools to make this point.
Composite culture. Composite culture, developed by Hogan and Corey (2001), describes the classroom culture of science that students actually experience. These researchers argued that science learning is a process of enculturation, or of learning to take on the culture and practices of the professional science community as reconstructed by classroom life. They argued that science learning, when viewed as enculturation, can be understood as mediated by the intersections of the experiences that students bring to the classroom, the pedagogical ideals of the teacher, and the teacher's explicit understanding of how to bring together the dimensions of professional science practice and pedagogical ideals.
The researchers made the case that composite culture is a useful construct in urban classrooms, because it sheds light on how teachers and students work to negotiate common understandings of science across what are sometimes vast cultural differences. For example, in their investigation of how low-income, urban fifth-graders engage in the study of ecology, Hogan and Corey (2001) used composite culture to show that students have opportunities to experience the culture of professional science. They also used composite culture to raise questions around the role a teacher's understanding of composite culture can play in her ability to prepare her students to be successful within that culture.
Implications of and questions for congruence. Congruence suggests that there are different cultures that frame what and how students of science learn. It provides us with a way to understand how and why tensions might arise in the learning of science, such as when there is conflict between the culture of the students and the composite culture of the science classroom.
Although the outcomes of instructional congruence and congruent third space are similar—to facilitate learning among students for whom science poses different discursive and cultural practices—the form and purpose of congruence differ. Whereas congruent third space refers to the learning community established when students’ discourses are fully integrated into scientific discourses, instructional congruence refers to the pedagogical process that serves to bridge the epistemological, cultural, and linguistic practices of students and science. Moje et al.’s (2001) construct of third space creates a new shared space that exists in both the world of the home and the world of the school, where urban educators should strive to be with their students. Lee and Fradd (1998), although they did not argue that their ultimate goal was to bring youth over to the culture of science, also did not make a case for the worlds in between. Furthermore, Moje et al. paid more attention to the role that conflict in discourses might play in mediating the creation of a congruent third space and student learning, whereas Lee and Fradd did not directly address conflict.
Despite these differences, both Moje et al.’s (2001) and Lee and Fradd's (1998) research, along with Hogan and Corey's (2001) research into composite culture, carry political overtones; both articles also suggest that learning in urban classrooms is embedded with power relations that frame who is labeled scientific or capable of learning science. The findings from these studies suggest that it would be important to advance this research, to study what happens when instructional models of congruence are applied in urban schools, and to learn more about how they affect youths’ achievements in science as well as their visions of what it means to do science and be a part of the scientific community.
Legitimate Participation
Those studies that I group under legitimate participation all make a case for how learning science in urban settings is also about being legitimate participants or valid members of or contributors to a science community. The studies that fit in this category are all grounded in the pedagogical belief that urban learners ought to be afforded formal learning opportunities to participate in authentic science or science-like experiences.
Connected science/project-based learning. Connected science, a form of project-based learning (PBL), is both an approach to student learning and an analytical construct for understanding the design of leaning environments. As an analytical construct, connected science foregrounds the importance of the funds of knowledge that students bring to class and situates science learning within a community context. As an approach to science teaching, connected science draws upon mutually beneficial partnerships and real-world problems as contextual scaffolds for bridging students’ community-based knowledge and school-based knowledge.
Connected science, as a form of project-based learning, is centered around authentic driving questions and activities that matter to students. Teachers who practice connected science, or PBL more generally, create learning environments where students socially construct knowledge based upon readily available resources. Because PBL environments shift the focus of science learning away from such indisputable, “correct” answers to debatable and refinable solutions, they create a dynamic space where power, authority, control, learning, and teaching are shifted between teacher and student (Moje et al., 2001). Although connected science has not been used to show achievement gains, PBL, in general, has been used in urban classrooms (Schnieder, Krajcik, Marx, & Soloway, 2002).
Bouillion and Gomez (2001) qualitatively reported that a connected science approach among fifth-grade urban learners and their study of ecosystems led students to a deeper understanding of ecosystems and a more situated understanding of the nature of science (i.e., in reporting on their understandings of ecology, students also reported on how they viewed their relationships with and in science in a connected fashion). Drawing upon connected science as an approach to student learning and an analytical construct for the design of leaning environments presents the science education community with a set of tensions with which to grapple. Finding real-world problems that meet science standards and the cultural context of the school and community raises questions of what can count as connected science. Moreover, how should the science education community constructively confront how power differences between students learning science and businesses frame how experiences and the science learning agenda are prioritized? These questions are worth further investigation.
Multiscience. Hammond (2001) used the construct of “multiscience” to capture a kind of learning community and a vision of science similar to connected science. In an ethnographic account of a collaboration involving a team of bilingual/ multicultural teacher educators, teachers, students, and community members in an urban California elementary school and their efforts to build a Mien-American garden house, Hammond described how students, teachers, and student teachers learn a new kind of science—a multiscience—by garnering a community “fund of knowledge” about the science to be studied in the classroom. Multiscience refers to the incorporation of indigenous science and personal science into Western modern science, which is a foreign culture that must be learned by all students, whether they are indigenous or mainstream. Hammond argued: “All students bring to the science classroom the indigenous science of their own culture's folklore and their own personal world view, derived from their age, gender, sociohistory, and many other factors. In order for Western science to be learned, meaningful reflection upon and dialogue with these cultures of science must occur” (p. 987).
What is particularly interesting about Hammond's (2001) construct of multi-science is its focus on collateral learning. Collateral learning suggests that when learners are confronted with conflict due to the discrepancies between formal scientific knowledge and their own indigenous knowledge, instead of holding the two contradictory systems of knowledge in parallel, conflicts are explored until they are gradually resolved, allowing both systems of knowledge to be transformed. However, although Hammond advanced the claim that students learn “to see science as accessible and relevant to their lives” and to learn to view participation in science as “centered in praxis rather than in learning for its own sake” (p. 988), she did not report on what students actually learned through their participation in the Mien-American garden house experience. Further questions for investigation include how a multiscience approach might allow for collateral learning in the nature of science as well as in a student's understanding of the concepts and processes of science.
Emergent learning experiences. Rahm (2002) took up the question of learning as participation through her qualitative case-study exploration of emergent learning opportunities in an inner-city youth gardening program. She writes of how work, science, and community can be integrated in a community of practice around gardening in out-of-school science programs. What is important in this study from a learning science perspective is that it demonstrates not only what science youth learn as a result of their participation in the program, but also how learning science was tied to learning about doing science in authentic and applied contexts. She reported that this kind of learning moves beyond motivating students to learn science. It also captures a way of being or participating in a community that has consequences for the individual and for the community. This is a different take on learning science than is seen in other articles, because it focuses on the interrelationship between the individual and the community and the mediating role that science (or doing science) plays. It also focuses on unplanned emergent learning moments that were created by the interaction of the participants with the context. For example, Rahm reported how the participants in her study first and foremost became members of their community of practice (i.e., gardeners for City Farmers). Rahm provided a multitude of other examples that show how student talk around gardening led to several scientific investigations that were not necessarily a formal part of the program. These emergent learning opportunities were one primary reason the students described City Farmers a place where “you get to do the whole package.”
Similarly, my colleagues and I (Calabrese Barton, 2001, 2003; Calabrese Barton & Darkside, 2000; Fusco, 2001; Fusco & Calabrese Barton, 2001) have drawn upon critical ethnographic accounts of urban middle and high school students learning science in a community-based science setting—a practicing culture of science learning. In our research youth transformed an abandoned lot into a community garden. Through emergent learning opportunities, we have focused on three kinds of learning. Students develop deep conceptual understandings about content knowledge, such as what plants grow and how they grow, urban pollution, and skills such as mapping, computation, measurement, observation, analysis, and the communication of results. Students also learn about the value-laden and context-embedded nature of science. Third, students learn how to be legitimate participants. In our studies, we reported on how youth underwent cultural shifts in such areas as identity (from shelter youth to caring squad) and in the production of science (from “fake” school projects to real social action).
Both sets of studies reported here, however, took place in out-of-school contexts, providing a kind of freedom in the learning environment not afforded by schools—with differing time constraints, access to materials, and adult-to-student ratios, and the obligatory-voluntary nature of the experiences.
Implications for legitimate participation. Each of the studies presented here makes a distinction between “doing” science and “talking” science that frames learner's engagement with science. Just as Rahm's (2002) students reported that City Farmers gave them the “whole package,” students in the Fusco and Calabrese Barton study (2001) remarked on how doing science made it real. Second, science learning emerged from having purpose and real-world obligation. For example, Bouillion and Gomez (2001) reported that science and science ideas emerged from doing science in the service of community, supported by a context where young people were givers and creators of a plan to improve the community. Third, each of the studies emphasized how emergent opportunities were socially oriented rather than task oriented. For example, in my own research around student's community gardening (Fusco & Calabrese Barton, 2001), students learned about qualities of soil because they wanted to transform a lot into a garden.
The implications for legitimate participation approaches to framing urban science learning are that learning as participation centralizes the embeddedness of the individual in the sociocultural world and the ways in which new knowledge is negotiated and remains situated in context. “Through participation what accumulates is not scientific facts but a way of acting, talking, and becoming a member of a scientific community” (Rahm, 2002, p. 165). Furthermore, although what authentic and meaningful science looks like differs across the articles discussed in this section—from outof-school gardening programs to in-school project-based science—cutting across each article is an attentiveness to doing as both an epistemological and cultural bridge between the worlds of professional science and student lives. In other words, in each of these studies students learned about the culture of science and learned to appropriate it and transform it into a new culture that was inclusive of other things.
These studies guide us toward fruitful avenues of research. Hammond (2001) acknowledged that the roles of teachers and students will have to change to embrace learning environments supportive of legitimate participation. One important next step might be to explore the implications this has for classroom science. Furthermore, each of the articles presented in this section addressed the fact that the process of embracing legitimate participation changes what students may learn about or in science. One direction for further study would be to explore how such an approach might be made compatible with the instructional goals, time constraints, and logistical concerns of schooling, especially in high-poverty communities. Finally, fundamental to each of the arguments presented in this section is a shift in goals for science education—that doing science is learning science. Further investigation into the ways in which students may have opportunities to metacognitively reflect on this process is important. Also important are investigations into what kinds of authority students or community members ought to have in deciding upon the focus of a project, or in what is worthwhile and related to their real world.
Emergent Questions in Understanding and Bridging Difference
Many researchers make the claim that if science were to be represented differently—that if it were built upon the experiences of students—then urban students would connect to it and learn better. The studies in this section, focused on understanding and bridging differences, examine this claim from different angles and compositely suggest that this is a much more complex process than such a statement lets on. Considerations must be taken into account, not only of the funds of knowledge that students or teachers bring to the classroom, but also of how these experiences are integrated with the world of science. Furthermore, although science learning may be about the content of exploration, it is also a process of participating—of learning to do science in a community.
However, embedded in each of these studies are tensions around culture, community, and science learning. The researchers whose work is presented here are clearly cognizant of the contradictions that emerge when the worlds of home and community are brought together with the worlds of science. What would happen if researchers also used that powerful space of contradiction to push forward our understandings of culture, power, and a just education? Finding these spaces of contradiction and using them in deeply contextual ways may help to deepen our understandings, not only of what teachers know (and need to know) and the spaces they occupy (and need to occupy), but also of what youth know (and need to know) and the spaces they occupy (and need to occupy). Furthermore, understanding the tools for bridging difference would be served by an in-depth set of policy studies that provide analyses, both content-wise and conceptually, of the major reform documents in various national contexts, that drive science for all in urban settings.
What Else Do Students Learn? Success and Participation
The previous section detailed the tools for understanding the differences between urban learners and school science and the role that understanding these differences might play in designing effective learning environments. Yet, embedded in the subtext of many of the research studies reported above is the conclusion that much goes on in a science learning community besides the learning of content. In this section of the chapter, I report on those studies that address urban learners and science from the angle of what other things the students learn as part of their science experience. As the studies outlined below indicate, studies around urban science learning shed insight into learning to (a) succeed and resist and (b) participate.
Learning to Succeed: The Normative Practices of Schooling and Resistance
Haberman (1991), in defining the pedagogy of poverty, argued that urban teachers work within tremendous constraints, including large class sizes, inadequate prep time, lower levels of training, inadequate classroom space, and outdated materials. These constraints result in a directive, controlling pedagogy that runs counter to reform-based practices.
A pedagogy of poverty and similar teaching models have been observed in urban classrooms and have contributed to success in science class as based upon rule following and cognitive passivity rather than conceptual learning (Griffard & Wandersee, 1999; Seiler, 2001; Seiler, Tobin, & Sokolic, 2001; Songer, Lee, & Kam, 2002; Tobin, Seiler, & Walls, 1999).
For example, Griffard and Wandersee (1999) shared qualitative case studies of two African American female biology students to make a case for a cycle of “cognitive disengagement.” In this study, based primarily on observations and clinical interviews in a math and science public school, attention to behavior over learning and to academic habits over cognitive engagement appeared to be the norm that defined the academic learning environment for students. These practices taught students that success in science was based upon rule following and that academic engagement was not necessary.
Just as students in Griffard and Wandersee's (1999) article learned to be cognitively passive, students in other urban settings act upon these institutional expectations to play a role in reproducing a culture of low expectations. In a series of articles, Tobin and his colleagues (Seiler, Tobin, & Sokolic, 2001, 2003; Tobin et al., 1999) made the case that framing science success through following norms and expectations leads students to resist, which at its heart is an opposition to being controlled. Across a set of three studies, these researchers outline how the “normal practices of schooling” such as tracking, teaching to the test, and curricula geared toward minimal attainment led to a “culture of low expectations” in science for high-poverty urban students. Yet, the same students who were exposed to these low expectations helped to reproduce the culture of low expectations by engaging in multiple forms of resistance, including resistance to high expectations, learning, the teacher, and attendance, even when science instruction was being led by a competent, caring teacher. What we can read from these studies is powerful: that resistance is an active process that students use to make claim to their own space in schools and by which students and teachers negotiate control in schools—control over identity, over what schooling is about, and over relationships and respect.
At issue here is the very notion of control. School agents either knowingly or unknowingly control students by framing their participation, effort, and achievement in narrow cognitive terms. Little attention is paid to how cognitive goals may be deeply rooted socioculturally. In other words, the teachers in Tobin et al.’s (1999) studies embedded learning in a culture of respect, where respect ranges from valuing the interests that students bring to the classroom to utilizing the primary discursive practices of the students. Such differences in the currency of schooling leads students to act differently from what teachers wish from and for them, even when those wishes are well intentioned. These different actions, which often conflict with “desired” actions, are labeled resistant.
My colleagues and I (Calabrese Barton, 1998; Calabrese Barton & Yang, 2000) have drawn upon resistance and its connection to the culture of power in school science. In a case study of one young father, Miguel, we showed how, during his teenage years, he resisted the culture of school science while at the same time, as a self-taught herpetologist and businessman, he sought to create his own subculture of science in his close-knit neighborhood. For Miguel, resisting school science turned out to be both an act of self-preservation and an act of defiance. Both Miguel's peer culture and the culture of school science were restrictive, demanding conformity to a narrow set of norms that failed to connect his interests and talents to the wide range of possibilities offered by our society and economy. Miguel was placed in a position of having to choose one over the other. Yet, unlike his peer culture, schooling did not provide a safety net of support if he chose to conform to schooling over peer culture. What is particularly interesting to us in this case study is how science itself could have mediated this difference. As a self-taught herpetologist, an occupation highly respected among his peers, Miguel possessed the interest and capacity for a practice of science that could have bridged these two worlds.
One important issue raised by these studies that ought to be studied further is that resistance has been framed as an individual activity rather than a community action. All of these studies focus on individual students. If we begin to understand resistance as a social phenomenon, then we are offered new options for interpreting what students may be resisting and why. As Moscovici (2002) suggested in a critique of Seiler et al. (2001), what if we viewed student actions through the larger lens of becoming immersed in science rather than as resistance? Individual actions that may come across as behavior challenges or resistance to teacher direction may be a result of students actually aligning with the overarching desires of the teacher— to engage in science meaningfully. A second issue raised specifically by Seiler et al. (2003) is that labeling actions as “resistant” is culturally constrained. In other words, student actions labeled as appropriate are actions that fit neatly into what a teacher or researcher expects to see. Those student actions labeled as resistant are actions that do not fit neatly. Further investigation of how student resistance could facilitate learning could be conducted, as Seiler et al. suggested, by examining what science educators view as resistant through the lens of cultural exchange, rather than as a negative action that detracts.
Learning to Participate
Who can do science and what it means to be a legitimate participant in science is another question that has garnered attention in the focus on student learning in urban science education. In urban science education, those studies that examine what students learn about who can do science concentrate on developing two kinds of claims. First there is the claim that students come to believe in whether they can participate in science based upon their perceptions of what science is and who science is for. Part of this claim is rooted in identity studies, which suggest that learning ought to be thought of as a process of identity formation. Part of this claim is also rooted in broader sociocultural studies, which suggest that one's vision of what science is or who it is for is also grounded in community-supported expectations and practices. Second, there is the claim that science is a social, cultural, and political practice and that if urban youth are to feel they are part of science, then all of these dimensions of science must be integrated into the learning environment. Although few studies in urban science education take up the question of participation, those that do pack powerful and provocative claims.
Brickhouse and Potter's (2001) ethnographic case studies of urban girls revealed that, through the experience of marginalization in the science classroom and even in peer groups, urban girls learn that membership in a school science community is often impossible or undesirable. Using the construct of identity, Brickhouse and Potter showed us how complex the relationship between identity and success in school and in peer groups can be for urban girls. Having a science- or technology-related identity does not mean that one will necessarily succeed in school, if that science-related identity does not also reflect the values of school-mediated engagement, or if students do not have access to the resources they need to do science well. However, successful participation in school science or technology, despite a lack of resources in the home environment, can be better facilitated when students have a science-related identity they can fall back on. Indeed, one of the primary claims made in this study is that students who aspire to scientific competence, yet do not desire to take on aspects of the identities associated with membership in school science communities, face difficulties and even school failure. Brickhouse and Potter's study is important because it raises questions about how to help students retain an identity that is desirable to them in their home communities, yet also allows them to cross the boundaries of race, class, and gender in order to get access to a science culture that too often resides only in more privileged communities.
In our case study of Miguel discussed earlier in the section on resistance (Calabrese Barton & Yang, 2000), we showed how Miguel learned through experiences at home and at school that science was only for “special people” or that scientists were discovered rather than self-made. Miguel expressed a keen interest in science through the Boy Scouts and through his herpetology business, yet Miguel still believed he was not capable of becoming a scientist. He had no science role models in his low-income urban neighborhood who he reported remembering, and his teachers and counselors did not encourage his interest seriously.
Only one study to date makes an explicit examination of how school-based interventions can foster students’ learning to develop positive science identities. In her study of standards-based learning among high school African American studies in Philadelphia, Seiler (2001) reported on the impact that a lunchtime science group had on the students’ scientific identities. In this study, she revealed how learning science intersects with learning to participate in science. However, she also suggested that learning to participate in science is hampered because the emphasis on the acquisition of certain school-based ways of speaking and interacting in science has devalued African American students’ ways of being and has inflicted symbolic violence on them. Seiler's primary finding was that when science learning opportunities reflect the funds of knowledge and the strategies of action that students bring to science, then students will be more willing to appropriate scientific discourse. As a result, she reported that students learn to begin to see themselves as scientific—as individuals who can contribute to and participate in science.
What is interesting about these participation studies is how neatly they overlap each other in terms of their findings. Yet, what could we learn if this question of participation were to be taken up more systemically? Miguel, like the students in Seiler's study, believed that science was not for him. Yet, other studies included in this review that did not focus on participation presented stories of successful participation in science among high-poverty and minority urban youth. What did the students in Rahm's (2002) study of urban gardening or Bouillion and Gomez's (2001) students of urban ecosystems learn about participation in science? Was a scientific identity as important in those learning environments as these studies suggest it to be?
Implications for “What Else” Students Learn
The studies presented in this section show that learning in science class ought to be broadly conceived to cover things other than just content and process skills. Although learning how to identify with science or about what success means are most likely much more subjective components of science education than learning content might be, the studies reviewed here suggest that how or why students achieve in science depends upon these measures. This review also shows us that few studies have been conducted within the subfield of urban science education studies that use this kind of analytic lens. What does it mean to craft a science learning community that favors the positive development of scientific identities among urban youth? What resources are necessary in this environment? How does identity formation relate to learning and to success in school-based science? What role does the teacher, the curriculum, or the school culture play in how or why students as individuals or as members of a community try on new identities or new ways of interacting in the classroom? Does understanding the forms of resistance help to guide us toward new pedagogical approaches to classroom practice? Does rethinking the production of resistant communities actually help to promote student learning in science? The studies presented here open up what has really been uncharted territory in science education worthy of exploration.
CONCLUSIONS
How do urban studies change the landscape of what learning is in urban science education in both its form and its function? Today's educational climate is marked by a propensity for high-stakes exams and outcomes-based learning. The process of learning has become obscured by its product, and little attention has been paid to just how much either context or the multiple purposes of learning matter. In the United States, policies are being written and implemented that exchange a focus on learning standards for a standard process of learning. Although science education has yet to go the way of mathematics or literacy in cities like New York or Los Angeles, where teachers are prescribed page-a-day teaching requiring teachers and students in all classroom to be on the same page of the curriculum on the same day, one could easily imagine science education moving along the same trajectory. These policies have hit urban centers hard, especially those communities within urban centers where poverty rates are high and where schools serve majority minority populations.
Two considerations are crucial. First, despite what we know about learning science in urban settings at the policy level, learning continues to be addressed primarily as a unidirectional process and product with the goal of promoting learning of science content or process. However, as this review suggests, we ought to also be considering how the science education community might reshape learning so that it is viewed as a multidirectional process/product, framed not only by content goals but also by identities, purposes and goals, and context, and why this is particularly important in urban settings. Although the studies presented in this review mark only the beginning of a potentially powerful research trajectory, as a community, science education must be diligent with regard to how these kinds of studies find their way to the policy arena.
Second, although in this review I focused on student learning, it is also important to focus on the learning of others involved in science education—parents, teachers, administrators, and policy makers—and to do so through the same multi-directional lenses utilized by the studies on student learning. Our own research into parental engagement in science education in high-poverty urban schools reveals that parents often activate innovative combinations of traditional and nontraditional resources in their efforts to learn how to engage powerfully in their children's schooling. Like the students in studies presented here, their learning also covers the content of school subjects along with the processes of schooling and how home/ community does or should connect with what happens in schools (Calabrese Barton, Drake, Perez, St. Louis, & George, 2004).
Current science reform efforts are largely built upon visions of scientists, science, and the scientific community that may or may not reflect what urban youth and their teachers bring or have access to in the urban classroom. Although the ideas embedded within such policies and their ascribed practices are crucial components to any balanced approach to facilitating scientific literacy among urban students, the articles covered in this review suggest that these ideas alone may not be sufficient in supporting and sustaining meaningful learning in urban science education. Although the purpose of this review is not to answer the question of who should decide the learning agenda, the research findings presented in this review suggest that a vision for science learning must include the day-to-day practice, struggles, and meaning-making of students and their teachers as part of the portrait of learning.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Ken Tobin and Maria Varelas for reviewing this chapter.
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1 For the purposes of this review, I relied only on articles published in research-oriented refereed journals, and primarily upon those articles published in the major research-oriented science education journals (International Journal of Science Education, Science Education, Research in Science Education, and Journal of Research in Science Teaching).