Teaching Science in an Equitable Fashion

One goal every teacher has is to be able to teach their students in an equitable fashion. I have always had the assumption that being colorblind as a teacher would be a good thing. It is a nice thought but it makes it difficult to reach the students. I never really understood that it can take away from the students' individuality. We should be more accepting to other cultures and use experience from other cultures to enhance our lessons. Showing a genuine interest in the student's culture will help them feel more comfortable in class. Being "colorblind" and not acknowleging other cultures is ineffetive in reaching students in a diverse population since it can hint to an ethnocentric point of view.

I feel like this chapter really sums up the important keys to teaching science. Things like working with process skills and learning what science really is are important. I also really agree that inquiry based learning is an important method to learning science. "Real Science" and research is typically done through an inquiry process anyway so it can give them experience in what it's like to do research themselves.

It may be difficult for teachers to come up with good equitable science lessons that utilize process skills and inquiry, but it is crucial that we try. In order to show an interest in the various cultures the students bring to a class why not ask them about thier culture. It would be interesting to learn more about other cultures and how they interpret topics in science. Even just asking them how to say something in a different language could help them include their culture in the lessons.

Discovering How Kids View Science

Since I am a secondary major I have had limited experience with students in the primary grades. I have worked with 4th graders in Glastonbury which not only was a completely different setting but did not have any experience in finding out how they understand science. Both of the students told me that so far this year they learned about waves, water currents and mixing hot and cold water. Neither of them have tried science experiments at home on their own but one did show interest in doing so. The experiment I conducted with them involved rolling a metal ball down a ramp and colliding with another ball.

When I asked them what they think happens in a collision the student said that the two things either collapse and don't move or they go in opposite directions. This student briefly just explained elastic and inelastic collisions. By saying that they can go in opposite directions also shows he could probably understand that the forces in the collision are acting in opposite directions. I was very surprised to hear him explain this. The second student I interviewed said that when the marbles collide they will "stick together". When she conducted the demonstration she witnessed the other type of collision instead. I asked her why she thought the metal balls did not stick together and she said it was because they are not made of the same material. She then told me that "when they hit each other they have opposite ways". As far as I can tell they are made of the same material but she must have associated this idea with some things that mix with the same material but not others like water and oil.

The second thing we looked at was whether or not the size of the marbles made a difference. When the large marble was going to collide with the smaller one the first student predicted that "it will hit harder cuz the big one has more weight". The second student had a similar response involving the larger marble's weight. The first student then wanted to find out more about moving things like "flying cars" and "hoverboards"(skateboards that fly like in Back to the Future II). The other student showed interest in the center of the Earth and what is in the core. From this visit I can tell that these kids were thinking about science and trying to explain the events they see with some kind of rational. They both made predictions, conducted the experiment, made observations and came up with explanations for what they saw. I was very impressed with the level of understanding and comprehension both of the students had.

Culture and Education

I agree with the author about culture being a word with different definitions in our society. I often hear people say how one is not "cultured" or "cultually deprived" because they don't appreciate the fine arts or have a high social status. I also agree with the author's definition of culture because it is similar to what I had learned in previous courses. We also see how cultures influence other cultures in every society. It is common for people of one culture to appreciate aspects of another group's culture.

I do find it intriguing that many people who speak standard English or text book English think of Black English as being saturated with mistakes and improper conjugations or whatever they say about it. However expression from Black English often make thier way to standard English and become part of it. It emphasizes the idea that minority cultures often affect the majority culture.

"Because culture is complex, learning a culture that is not one's native culture is an exceedingly difficult task" (Nieto 138). This is exacly what we need to be thinking about when we teach science to kids. Science has its own culture that can be very difficult for many to understand. As cultures influence one another we have to relate science to the cultures of our students. There is fascinating scientific research being conducted in every country around the world and we need to show how the science culture is affected by the same cultures of our students. How is science related to their culture?

Yes We Can

The article “Yes we can” had a much more positive tone than the previous article “Unemployment Training”. Instead of highlighting a number of negative aspects of the public school system it offers the idea that we can make a difference in the school system and these student’s lives. There are still some frightening statistics given, “And by the time Latino and African American students hit the age of 17, they have been taught to the same level as 13-year-old White students”. I noticed that it does not say how they score at that level but they are taught at that level.

Given the education gap between students of different race I was actually surprised to see that generally African American students enter kindergarten with slightly better reading skills than their peers. How do these students fall behind by the third grade? is the big question. What is happening to hold these students back? It is clear that some districts are more successful at teaching minority students like Charlotte, or New York. These districts had higher success rates than L.A. or D.C. because of better programs.

“When we teach children of color to high levels, they can and do achieve at high levels”. This shows that students generally live up to our expectations. If we have low expectations for a group of students they will likely achieve only what we expect of them but if we set the bar high for them they tend to rise up to the challenge. This is something every teacher must do with all of their students. I can expect the world from my students but if their other teachers don’t follow this method the students will have low expectations for themselves academically. This article does pose a realistic method to improve the status of the education gap. There are more methods to help this situation other than having higher expectations. The success in the NY school is likely do to the personal motivation the faculty puts on the students. “We push our kids to excel in all their classes. If I hear that a student is arriving at gym unprepared, or isn’t doing well in art, I’ll ask him about that” (Alicia Calabrese). Here you can see why students would be more motivated to go beyond high school and graduate from college.

Urban Ecology in East Hartford

So far in my internship we have created a few writing activities for the students to work on involving their acid rain lab. The idea is that we are supposed to make activities for them that are somewhat relevant to them and their daily lives. The school is also incorporated a new writing program known as the John Collin's writing program. It is expected to help them increase test scores as well as a better understanding of writing in every subject. I am curios to see how this program will affect the students test scores. This may be the question I want to ask for my project.

We have started to get into set some more specific goals in our internship. The three of us will work on different sections of the curriculum but will still collaborate and try to make solid connections with our different areas. I will start to focus more on the environmental science class which is a new area for me but I still find interesting. So most of the students I would be making lessons for are juniors / seniors. I have a few ideas that might get them interested in environmental science. An example would be how modifications to cars affect gas millage. I think I have a good amount of automotive knowledge to come up with some interesting activities.

One thing that I would need to keep in mind is that the article"What Science Teaching Looks Like" mentions how many class activities in the United States have little or no conceptual content. So I need to make sure my class activities have a good focus and are not only relevent to the students but to the content as well.