Page 260 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

234 P.W.U. Chinn and D.D.M. Hana‘ike

teachers falter for lack of a clear analogy or explanation, for want of a way to connect a
Shakespearean text or a Darwinian concept to the experiences of California or Michigan
adolescents.
From a CHAT perspective, learning is not a simple matter of an individual process-
ing sensory input but the far more complex processing of a socially situated self-
processing input mediated by experiences, meanings, and tools. The fundamental
concepts of socially situated learning and division of labor foreshadow the highly
differentiated activities, tools, and knowledge of educational systems that mirror the
division of labor in society. These concepts provide powerful lenses for seeing and
interpreting the impact of uneven distribution of activities, expertise, and associated
social capital in schools and society as contributing to different subjectivities.
Given the diverse literacies students bring to school, how can teachers from dif-
ferent backgrounds become sensitized to literacies that lie outside their experience?
How do teachers translate awareness of cultural difference into practices that pro-
duce student academic success? In the following section, I (Chinn) describe how my
minority middle-school students connected race and student identity and relate a
minority woman engineer’s experiences with teachers, peers, and family.

Identity Formation, Schooling, and Multiple Literacies

Gee’s (2001) view of socially situated identity leads to his proposal that individuals
may be considered to have four aspects of identity, each socially defined and value-
laden: N-identity determined by biological or natural traits, I-identity determined by
institutions, D-identity based on participation in discourse of particular groups, and
A-identity based on self-selected affiliations. The following stories suggest how
identities are reproduced within and across cultures through day-to-day interactions
among people of unequal power and status.
I (Chinn) grew up in Hawaii, a neocolonial society that categorized people by
gender, race, economic status, and language. In my highly tracked public schools,
few of my ethnically diverse elementary classmates remained my classmates through
high school. Over time, the range of ethnicities declined until all except one were
White and Asian. Six months in India sensitized me to the ways social class, caste,
and gender affected opportunities in all aspects of life. I returned to Hawaii to teach
in a low-income middle school. As my low track Filipino and Pacific Islander stu-
dents and I walked past a classroom and glanced in, with a single comment, “all
[Asians], mus’ be smart class” a student showed he “read” the academic level of a
class using a single variable, ethnicity (Chinn 2005). Unspoken was the corollary
that those not belonging to this ethnic group were not smart.
Years later, a Native Hawaiian/Filipino engineering student said she thought this
process began (Chinn 1999) with elementary teachers’ ability and behavioral group-
ings. As a well-behaved student who spoke Standard English, she was placed with
“rowdy” children who looked like, but did not behave or speak like her. She persisted
in college track mathematics and science classes despite peers and teachers’ race-
related, demeaning comments. She thinks teachers’ ability groupings in the early years