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Narratives of Place: Teachers' Ideological Becoming Across Design Spaces and Place-Based Instruction

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Title

Narratives of Place: Teachers' Ideological Becoming Across Design Spaces and Place-Based Instruction

Abstract/Description

In this paper we examine teachers’ ideological becoming through their participation in a community-based design research project aimed at developing and implementing place-based science curricula. As Moje, Ciechanowski, Kramer, Ellis, Carrillo, & Collazo (2004) explain, "[s]cience particularly as enacted in school classrooms, is typically not about experiencing the world or expressing one's relationship to it, but about analyzing and changing it" (p. 45). This paper explores relationships to the natural world among early career American Indian science teachers involved in a community-based design research project. In recent years more attention has been devoted to both place-based science education (Barton, 2002; Cajete, 2000; Semken & Freeman, 2008) and teacher induction in community-based settings (Boyle-Baise & McIntyre, 2008; Butcher et al, 2003; Cooper, 2007; Garcia et al, 2010; Rogers et al, 2006; Seidl & Friend, 2002; Zeichner, 2010). However, there is very little work that integrates these two lines of research in the context of community-based science learning environments. Taking a close look at community-based learning environments opens spaces where practitioners and researchers alike can reexamine “diversity and reform in education” (Ball, 1995, p. 129). Adopting a situated and sociocultural lens, we examine community teachers’ navigation between contexts and diverse repertories of practice as they co-construct meanings of place and develop relationships with the natural world to build their teaching practice.

The data presented in this paper was collected over five years and is situated in a process we refer to as community-based design research (Bang et al, 2010; Bang & Medin, 2010). In our view, community-based design research opens up spaces where people engage in storytelling as a theorizing activity through which science pedagogy is developed (Marin & Bang, forthcoming), therefore we approached analysis with two overarching questions: (1) What stories do community teachers tell about their relationship to place, as well as past, present and imagined learning environments? (2) How do teachers adopt a position for themselves and others within and in relation to their stories?

For this paper, we draw on Bakhtinian theory to analyze teachers ideological becoming across settings and contexts. We analyze artifacts (transcripts and video) from the CBDR process and identify dialogic narrative chains or focal stories around teachers’ sense of place (Rogers et al, 2006). Within each focal story we examine the systems of ideas and pedagogies this group of teachers developed around place, science teaching and the social process of learning.

Preliminary analysis suggests that teachers involved in this project have come to a point where they utilize place as a vital teaching recourse. Positioning place as central tool for teaching moved teacher planning from a task-driven activity to a content-driven activity. In addition, the transition to utilize place as a teaching tool, opened up the space for teachers to engage in critical dialogues about the intersection between history and science.

At conference

AERA Annual Meeting

Place presented

Resource type

Research/Scholarly Media

Resource status/form

Presentation/Poster

Scholarship genre

Empirical

Citation

Kessel, A., & Marin, A. M. (2011). Narratives of Place: Teachers’ Ideological Becoming Across Design Spaces and Place-Based Instruction. AERA Annual Meeting 2011, New Orleans.

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Decolonizing Methodologies in an Urban Community: Ripple Effects of Community-Based Design Research [Session 49.068] Session

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