Page 464 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

Chapter 36
Are We Creating the Achievement Gap?
Examining How Deficit Mentalities Influence

Indigenous Science Curriculum Choices

Jennifer Lance Atkinson

Chigeza and Whitehouse highlight a significant negotiation indigenous Australian
children face each day at school. The bridge between different languages presents
a challenge for the students to score well on standardized science assessments.
Rather than truly assessing students’ knowledge of science concepts, Chigeza and
Whitehouse provide a wealth of evidence, which supports that students may be
tested on the mastery of standard Australian English rather than science concepts
due to their home language being different than English. Chigeza and Whitehouse
recommend that science educators and researchers should develop more appropri-
ate classroom instruction to help students successfully navigate between languages
when learning science. Language is highly contextual and as Chigeza and
Whitehouse discuss, students are characterized by their language use. Despite their
science knowledge, indigenous Australian students are deemed deficient based
upon standardized testing scores because of their language.
While I agree that negotiating language differences between academic and home
environments is extremely important in preparing students for different discourses,
I see a more troubling problem associated with Chizega’s and Whitehouse’s study,
which reflects assumptions found in western society. My own experience as a sci-
ence teacher enables me to understand that students’ discourses between home and
school are rarely congruent in the science classroom. The vocabulary, style, rules
of argumentation, and structure of “science talk” is substantially different. Helping
students not only learn the language and concepts of science, but also having them
incorporate the ideals of science into classroom discourse is a constant negotiation.
I use an example of bridging different discourses from my classroom to illustrate
that successful teaching and learning can still produce an “achievement gap” when
standards are taught and the language negotiation is successful.
Consider the following lesson I taught concerning ecological succession to
secondary students. Believing that learning should have a rich and complex con-
text, the students and I hiked outside, drew pictures of the landscape, described

J.L. Atkinson
Washington-Wilkes Comprehensive High School

D.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism, 439
Cultural Studies of Science Education, Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_36,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010