Using Science Education to
Expand the Agency of Urban
Youth
Kenneth Tobin
The Graduate Center of CUNY ktobin@gc.cuny.edu

Why science education?
 Power discourse--gateway to social advancement
 Meet graduation requirements
 Doorway to further learning and careers
 Aesthetic reasons
 Useful to meet and change goals in out of school fields

About science…
 Form of culture that seeks to explain/understand, and in some cases control, the experienced events and phenomena of the universe (of the natural world)
 System of practices and associated schema
(always both)
 Enacted by participants in a variety of fields including classrooms and test/examination sites

Thoughts on science achievement
 Enacting science (as culture) within fields.
 Ways of participating reflect position in a field
 Legitimate peripheral
 Central
 Dynamic
 Conscious | Unconscious

The fields of school science
 Subject matter (e.g. chemistry)
 Whole class interactive
 Small group discussions
 Individualized
 At the chalkboard
 The back row
 Labs
 Demonstrations
 Field trips
 Internet and computers
 Homework

Key points about fields
 Structured with resources
 Material (e.g., space, physical environment, equipment, supplies, aids, practices of participants)
 Schematic (e.g., conventions, rules, ideologies, hegemonies, concepts, values, feelings, status and other identity markers)
 Social (e.g., networks, tools such as language aptitude)
 Support characteristic forms of culture
 Have porous boundaries

Boundary crossing

Peripheral versus Central
 Intermingled with culture from other fields
 Misses opportunities to participate
 Reliant on scaffolds from others
 Error prone
 Limited self correcting
 Mainly conscious actions
 Appropriate
 Just in time
 Anticipatory
 Fluent
 Autonomous
 Self-correcting
 Responsive
 Increasingly unconscious

Urban Science
 Teachers and students differ in culture, social class, age, and often gender
 Achievement measures require science to be done “on demand” including paper and pencil tests, computers, and lab tasks.
 Well-advertised achievement gaps between urban and suburban schools
 Strident differences in resources (teachers, equipment, buildings) to support urban science education

Learning as cultural production
 Reproduction | Transformation
 Enactment utilizes practices and schema from other fields
 Is enactment legitimate peripheral or is it outside the border (non-canonical)?
 Which parts of culture, from each side of the border, are foundational for producing science?

Learning as expanded agency
 Agency | Structure
 Agency is the power to act; to appropriate the structures of a field
 Appropriation implies intentions/goals plus capital to access and use resources for individual | collective interests
 Capital spiral (cutural<->social<->symbolic)
 Successful interactions chains produce webs of entrainment -- interactions are anticipated and appropriated by others

Teaching for success
 Identify and support the enactment of foundational culture (from in and outside of the school)
 Minimize disruptions (breaching/shut downs)
 Minimize the incidence and duration of unsuccessful interactions
 Maximize the incidence and duration of successful interactions

Emotional climate
 Minimize
 anger
 frustration
 boredom
 disappointment
 annoyance
 irritation
 dissatisfaction
 controlled
 failure
 “dissed, missed, pissed”
 Maximize
 enjoyment,
 happiness
 interest
 satisfaction
 freedom
 independence
 successful
 challenged
 respected
 valued

Challenges to culturally adaptive teaching
 Erase deficit perspectives in an EITHER-OR sense (deficit | capital)
 Recognize and encourage foundational culture
 Identify teaching culture that shuts down student production
 Produce teaching culture that affords student enactment and success
 Increase incidence of coteaching
 Increase evaluation by self, peer, and teacher
 Successfully interact across borders

Challenges to culturally adaptive learning
 Earn and maintain respect of peers
 Read and successfully interact with the culture of the teacher (i.e., learn to interact successfully across borders)
 Produce new identities through participation in science
 Appropriate structures to enact science

Toward a science community
 Mutual focus
 Synchrony
 Anticipation leads to fluent enactment
 Chains of successful interactions occur
 Increase in positive emotional energy
 Solidarity emerges
 Peer teaching
 Respect
 Got your back
 Individual | Collective
 All for one and one for all

Monitoring the Emotional
Climate of Urban Science
Classrooms
Kenneth Tobin
The Graduate Center of CUNY ktobin@gc.cuny.edu

General orientation to participant research
 Search for patterns and contradictions in relation to:
 the buzz and emotional climate of the classroom over space and time
 Interactions with others and materials
 Verbal
 Non verbal
 Obtain and learn from multiple perspectives of participants (honor diverse perspectives)

The background noise
 Is there a working buzz?
 Is there evidence of:
 Negative emotions?
 Positive emotions?
 Efforts to disrupt?
 Efforts to support?
 Efforts to disrespect?
 Efforts to show respect?
 Is there evidence of positive, negative or neutral emotional energy?

Interactions with materials
 Are participants interacting with materials to meet their goals?
 Do successful interactions with materials afford other interactions to occur and succeed?
 What emotions are associated with interactions with materials?
 To what extent are the interactions with materials “as intended,” anticipated by others, and affording of interaction chains occurring?

Interactions among participants
 In what ways are oral contributions picked up by others?
 Is there evidence of attentive listening?
 To what extent are utterances fluent?
 Are utterances anticipated by others?
 To what extent do utterances show evidence of verve?

Non verbal interactions
 Body orientation and movement
 Eye gaze and contact
 Head movements and orientation
 Smiles, frowns and facial expressions
 Gestures
 Pointing with fingers, hands and the body
(e.g., head)
 Are movements high or low energy?

Teaching and Learning
Science Across Social and
Cultural Boundaries
Kenneth Tobin
The Graduate Center of CUNY ktobin@gc.cuny.edu

Setting Up Cogenerative
Dialogues
 Dialogues among participants about shared experiences
 Size of group can vary but it is best to start with small groups containing 1-2 students
 Select student participants based on differences
 Invite other participants based on their participation

Goals of Cogenerative
Dialogues
 Improve the quality of learning
 Improve the quality of teaching
 Identify and resolve contradictions
 Arrive at consensus on changes needed in roles, rules, and classroom structures
 Collective responsibility for enacting changes

Rules for Cogenerative
Dialogues
 Listen attentively
 Try to understand others’ contributions
 Show respect for all participants (always)
 Address previous contributions
 Maintain focus
 Restrict time of utterances
 Do not interrupt or be a turn shark
 Strive for consensus

Outcomes of Cogenerative
Dialogues
 Learn to interact successfully across boundaries defined by race, ethnicity, class, age and gender
 Identity changes
 Synchrony
 Solidarity
 Mutual focus

Resources to support cogenerative dialogues
 Video tapes of classes, digital photos, artifacts, qualitative and quantitative data
 Invited peripheral participants such as school administrators, university teacher educators, former students, and parents
 Regular occurrence (1-2 times a week)
 Group size can vary along a continuum from one on one to whole class

Coteaching to improve the learning of urban science
Kenneth Tobin
The Graduate Center of CUNY ktobin@gc.cuny.edu

Coteaching scenarios
 Resident teacher with one or more new teachers
 Resident teachers from the same school or department
 Advisory teachers, administrators, teacher educators and researchers with resident teachers
 Many coteachers with many students
 Students adopting coteaching roles

Structuring coteaching
 Negotiate central and peripheral roles
 Stepping forward and stepping back
 Tutoring
 Huddles
 Cogenerative dialogues within an ongoing class
 Focus on the learning of students

Outcomes of coteaching
 Becoming like the other
 Responsive to forms of diversity
 Students experience much more teaching and are highly involved
 Can learn from others by being with them while enacting culture and also by stepping back to observe from the side (tracking another)

Policy Issues
 New teachers learning to teach
 Induction for newly hired teachers
(experienced and inexperienced)
 Learning subject matter
 Teaching out of field
 Teacher assessment and evaluation
 Expanding roles of students, parents and the community