Collaborative Teacher Learning for Equitable Approaches to Science Education

Abstract

This dissertation examines how science teachers collaboratively learn to enact equity and justice-oriented approaches to science education within the day-to-day contexts of their professional work. In this study, I investigate how teachers navigate conflicting equity goals and develop pedagogical approaches that align with equity, sensemaking, and justice in science classrooms. Guided by situative theories of learning and pedagogical judgment frameworks, this qualitative study follows a group of public high school biology teachers engaged in professional learning over the course of eight months. Using a participant-observer design, data were collected through collaborative planning meetings, classroom observations, interviews, instructional artifacts, and analytic memos. Analysis focused on how teachers articulated equity goals, negotiated tensions among those goals, and shifted their instructional practices over time. I argue that the ambitious work of teaching social justice science issues using project-based units that position students with agency and expertise opened up a space for teachers to learn and attempt new approaches to instruction. Collaborative inquiry and iterations of a project-based climate change unit created conditions that supported meaningful instructional shifts. Over time, teachers moved toward more integrated conceptions of equity, increasingly foregrounding student agency, productive uncertainty, and justice issues relevant to their local community. These shifts were reflected in both classroom practice and teachers’ discourse about teaching and learning. While the teachers frequently experienced tensions among their equity-oriented goals, often reverting to traditional practices when uncertainty or competing demands emerged, they were able to navigate this conflict by prioritizing student agency and the instruction of complex social justice science issues. Implications are offered for the design of professional learning environments that support equitable and justice-centered science teaching, especially around teachers' need for support in recognizing the norms and routines of collaborative work that interfere with the complex work of pursuing multiple goals.