Page 113 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

90 K. Love et al.

to develop curriculum. This leads to what my colleague Carol calls, “canvas bag
mentality,” where teachers attend popular practitioner-oriented conferences and
other professional development opportunities expecting to be told what to do, or
even better, to be given step-by-step activities modeled with “take home stuff” – ready
to use out of the box!! As most teachers know, these ready-to-use items rarely get
used when they get unpacked. Often this lack of use is because of the misappro-
priation of thought, reflection, and prior revision to meet the needs of their own
individualistic style of teaching and class context. Another related barrier to
authentic, sociocultural, or humanistic science learning, are the intellectual and
ethical developmental levels of the teacher. My experience in giving a survey to
over 600 teachers indicates that the majority of teachers are in late Multiplicity.
According to this level, teachers in this position will view knowledge as somewhat
certain with gaps to be filled in later. There is an appeal to Authority (with a capital
“A”), but if that Authority does not know the correct answer, all opinions become
equally valid. In other words, the teacher has the right to interject “the Truth.”
Teachers in this stage understand the role of evidence to support these truths, but
often base them on social norms. If individuals move into the next stage of the
scheme, namely, Contextual Relativism, they see knowledge in an entirely differ-
ent way – open to debate, analysis, evaluation, and contextually embedded.
Without support, however, teachers can easily move back into the lower levels of
this scheme including Dualism, or that knowledge is certain, and there is no need
for evidence – the world is dichotomous (right or wrong, good or bad).
These barriers to community, contextualized teaching, and learning emphasize
that not all teachers have the conceptual or professional self-identity to successfully
engage their students and the community in the type of meaningful science that
Roth describes (again, on their own). Roth cotaught a unit he piloted with local
teachers to keep the integrity of the teaching strategies, and he was able to develop
a sustainable system for cultural transmission that systematically involved including
the initial teachers he worked with, so they could work with subsequent teachers
that joined the program – a nice strategy that seems to work for Roth. He reminds
us that teachers’ experiences in authentic contexts are a necessary foundation from
which to draw upon when engaging in building skills in the development and
implementation of novel teaching methods.
My own research on cognitive development, from several perspectives, indicates
that a more concrete-to-abstract progression of thinking involving new information
and the negotiation of that information encourages meaningful development by
communities of teachers who are involved in that mode of learning. Recently, I
found myself in a large underfunded (soon to be unfunded) project that involved a
community environmental youth summit. The Youth Summit involved approxi-
mately 100 student delegates and their teachers from local schools who came
together to learn more about local environmental issues (twice a year). Experts
from the community and university were invited to come in and talk to the students
in breakout groups after which students would get together and talk about what they
learned. While Summit planners expected the students to “do something” before
the next Youth Summit, there was no explicit call for action or discussion about