Page 258 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

232 P.W.U. Chinn and D.D.M. Hana‘ike

Lave and Wenger (1991) and Cole (1996) expanded CHAT to include cross-cultural
considerations. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) research across diverse occupations
and cultures showed learning begins as situated peripheral participation in a
community of practice and develops through increasing responsibility and use of
more sophisticated tools. In their view, new selves and identities develop in asso-
ciation with the new complex of tools, practices, meanings, and knowledge.
Recognizing that individuals are located within activity systems with different
mediating systems, rules, tools, and values provides a conceptual framework for
understanding the underrepresentation of minorities in science as difficulties of
articulation between and among different cultural activity systems. Though
school and home communities value the goal of school success for all children,
tensions and contradictions within and across each system may interfere with
desired outcomes.
Capper and Williams (2004) view contradictions “as potential springboards for
learning, innovation and development.” They identify four sources of contradictions
in education:
• Within components of an activity system (e.g., changes in curriculum and
pedagogy)
• Between components of an activity system (e.g., between teachers and
administrators)
• Between activity systems (e.g., between schools and homes)
• Historical disturbance (i.e., establishing science content standards)
The history of members of an organization plays an important role in its ability to
address contradiction and disturbance. If teachers, students, and parents in the
activity systems connecting school and home successfully respond to these distur-
bances and contradictions, its members are viewed as learning. Learners in an
increasingly technological, multicultural, and globalized world potentially are able
to develop multiple identities and literacies as they participate in diverse activity
systems. Processes of active negotiation, contestation, and ongoing construction of
identity develop a concurrent personal sense of agency. Bandura (1989) describes
personal agency as emergent, interacting with environmental, cognitive, affective,
and personal factors and powerfully affected by people’s beliefs about self-efficacy,
the “capabilities to exercise control over events that affect their lives (p. 1). … The
more efficacious people judge themselves to be, the wider the range of career
options they consider appropriate and the better they prepare themselves education-
ally for different occupational pursuits” (pp. 4–5).
Gee (1992) holds that learning to use the relevant communication strategies and
activities related to particular social groups is a condition of acceptance as a mem-
ber. “If you have no access to the social practice, you don’t get in the Discourse,
you don’t have it” (p. 114). Gee (2004) views differences between “academic vari-
eties of language connected to content areas” (p. 19) and vernacular language of
home and community as barriers to knowledge. He thinks science education should
provide students with situated experiences so they “see acquiring a scientific variety
of language as a gain … because they recognize and understand the sorts of socially