Recognizing the persistent science achievement gap between inner‐city African American students and students from mainstream, White society, this article suggests that the imposition of external standards on inner‐city schools will do little to ameliorate this gap because such an approach fails to address the significance of the social and cultural lives of the students. Instead, it is suggested that the use of critical ethnographic research would enable educators to learn from the students how science education can change to meet their aims and interests. The article includes a report on how a science lunch group in an inner‐city high school forged a community based on respect and caring and how this community afforded African American male teens the opportunity to participate in science in new ways. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 1000–1014, 2001

This study introduces a new group of students to the postsecondary science agenda: latecomers to science. Latecomers, who enter postsecondary science through alternative routes because they are missing prerequisites, are less likely to graduate than traditional science students. Challenges to latecomers' persistence are explored through two questions: (1) What trends in science identity trajectories are latecomers to science able to construct during their first year in a college science program? (2) How are latecomers' identity trajectories constrained by or improvised with the cultural models and associated resources available in the figured world of a college science program? These questions are investigated through an analysis of educational activities, reflective writings, and interviews of nine latecomers. We view identification as analogous to velocity and demonstrate how recurring forces exerted by figured worlds and cultural models within them create patterns of acceleration towards or away from science, thus supporting or hindering persistence as identity trajectories gain or lose momentum. Findings show that latecomers' persistence was greatly constrained by two cultural models from the science program: good science students follow a paradigmatic sequence of courses and consistently earn good grades. Occasionally, latecomers improvised to resist these constraints. We illustrate our findings through three cases exemplifying inbound, outbound, and peripheral trends, offering a method of representing trajectories that may lead to new understandings of persistence. We also suggest implications for better supporting latecomers and connect this research to recent developments in the theoretical and methodological use of identity trajectories in understanding access to science. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 50: 826–857, 2013

Culture has been commonly used in science education research, in particular to examine issues of equity for students from low-income, racial, and ethnic minority communities. It has provided a lens with which to appreciate science classrooms as cultural places and to recognize the importance of students' cultural ways of being as resources for science learning. Scanning the ways that ''culture'' has been used in recent publications shows that much science education research continues to draw from an older view of culture(s) as a bounded and coherent set of beliefs and practices associated with a distinct social world, referred to as a pluralizable or discontinuous view of culture. This view of culture has been critiqued on the basis of its assumptions of homogeneity of groups and as masking the role of systemic inequity in the marginalization of people from certain communities. This view of culture is often associated with a particular set of metaphors, such as cultural borders, gaps, mismatch, conflict, and tension. Despite increasing attention in science education research to an alternative view of culture as porous and emergent, these newer ways of thinking about culture do not yet seem to have been taken up in research around science teacher preparation. Recognizing the usefulness as well as the limits of the older view of culture as bounded and coherent social worlds, this paper points to other metaphors about culture-such as funds of knowledge, third space, and figured world-that might be more helpful in preparing science teachers. By exploring the metaphors we use to think about culture and how they structure the inferences and actions of teachers and researchers alike, we can envision new avenues of research and practice that will inform the preparation of science teachers for the complexity of our schools and classrooms. ß

The study examines the teaching and learning of science in an urban high school characterised by African American students from conditions of relative poverty. An interpretive study was undertaken involving a research team that included the teacher in the study and a student from the school. Despite the teacher's effort to enact a cmTiculum that was lransformative the students resisted most of his efforts to enhance their learning. The study highlights the difficulties of engaging students when they lack motivation to learn and attend sporadically. In an era of standards=oriented science in which all students are expected to achieve at a high level, it is essential that research identify ways to tailor the science curriculum to the needs and interests of students.

Science educators have yet to identify ways to enable inner city African American high school students to experience success in science. In this paper, we argue that understanding the ways in which cultural practices from fields outside of school mediate what happens inside classrooms and contribute to the learning of students is crucial to addressing current disparities in science performance. Specifically, we explore the significance of movement expressiveness dispositions to the lives and the learning of economically disadvantaged African American youth. These particular dispositions have been repeatedly observed in our research, and they can be important resources for the creation of individual emotional energy, collective solidarity, and heightened engagement in learning activities since they provide resources for the (re)shaping of identity. Thus movement expressiveness dispositions hold potential for transforming the teaching and learning of these students. Stop that tappingOne fall day in 2001, following our first summer of collaborative research, I called Shakeem, one of our student researchers, to see how tenth grade was going. He was not doing well-in fact, he was getting ''kicked out'' of classes often. As I engaged him in a conversation about what was going wrong, he gave