Page 112 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

7 Engaging the Environment 89

and fostering a deep understanding of community values and cultural factors that
regulate localized ways of knowing and acting (political, cultural, economic, aesthetic,
religious, historical, to name a few). Increasingly, teachers ought to get the types of
authentic training and experience now needed within teacher programs that will
enable them to be successful in the roles you both describe. Furthermore, teachers
may possess unexamined “baggage” (ideologies) that will prevent them from enacting
these roles successfully. Cultural transmission models of university science (and
other disciplinary) knowledge and skill do not always allow for critical exploration
of deep-seated personal values and the equally important opportunities to decon-
struct “pure science” endorsed in universities.
Aikenhead (2006) points out that transformation of science knowledge as every-
day knowledge is highly demanding because the world is complex and involves
interdisciplinary knowledge, value judgments, and sociocultural elements of know-how.
Without this transformational experiential science knowledge, science remains
unusable for most people outside of the science classroom. Additionally, science
education methods courses seem to exert longer-term influences for how a science
teacher teaches when far fewer science teacher educators use lecture-based
approaches. One such approach is when science educators use didactic methods to
present interactive teaching strategies in their classes. Much more influential than
science methods courses are the student–teacher-mentorship relationships that
develop, where the cooperating mentor becomes a mediator for helping the stu-
dents emerge into the teaching profession. When the mentor negates embedded
science learning as an “ivory tower fantasy” within a standards-based reality, the
opportunity to practice with critical support will be spent on “ivory” or traditional
forms of delivery. Regardless of the community in which teachers will work,
practical teacher training could explicitly provide opportunities for teachers to
develop, practice, and reflect upon knowledge and skills that will help their
students apply science to a twenty-first-century world. But this innovation requires
a commitment to providing teachers and their eventual students with authentic
and multiple opportunities to do this. The place-based situations described by
Roth can be interpreted to do this very thing.
Roth describes his transformative experience from constructing “novel learning
sources” and experiences for his students, to adding value to the community and
concomitantly valuing community resources, to the “explicit use of the inhabited
world as a meaningful entity.” As a scholar and experienced teacher, Roth accesses
theory to inform his practice and enjoys the cognitive demands that come with theo-
retical and practical change. He also enjoys cultural tradition and skill. He is
confident in his content knowledge and pedagogical skill. Many teachers do not
possess this confidence and/or motivation to access and initiate tradition and
change in their teaching (on their own). In addition, school culture and power hier-
archies that pervade the K-12 arena do not always support teacher-identity formation,
as decision makers and agents of tradition and change.
My personal experience with school-based professional development is that it
perpetuates teacher-as-deliverer or “top down” curriculum instead of teacher-as-
professional who tries out, inquires, reflects, revises, takes risks, and shares ideas