No abstract

Science as a discipline has gone through many paradigm shifts, both in terms of scientific knowledge and science pedagogy. One recent trend is the movement of science courses into an online environment. While this shift started as supplemental instruction, a movement in education is to offer entire science courses, normally taught in a face-to-face format, online. Moving science instruction into this type of environment illuminates many challenges in science education to a different and critical level. These challenges include issues in equity, accountability, identity formation, and appropriate pedagogical practices. The authors explore these challenges in general for online learning and specifically for teaching science online. It is clear that these issues, while heavily researched in face-to-face science instruction, have not been seriously considered in the online format. Currently it appears that those teaching science online have simply ported their face-to-face course without considering the fact that instruction needs to be changed when teaching online.

One of the goals of science education is to ensure that the discipline of science is accessible to all individuals. By many organizations this has been termed “Science for All,” and those who promote this idea also advocate the connection to science literacy. Teaching science in the online environment has been one way to offer science content to many different individuals, who do not necessarily need to be in the same location. Discourse in the science classroom is framed under situated cognition theory, whereby interactions between individuals are part of the normal culture of the classroom. For science knowledge to be adequately constructed by a student these interactions must be meaningful ones. This is especially important in an online science course where typically learning occurs through interactions between the students and the instructor, the students with one another, and within the individual themselves. As part of these online interactions, good reflective practice includes the different forms of feedback and the quality of this feedback. However, even with quality reflective interactions, there are barriers to science concept construction in an online environment. These barriers are discussed, and future research directions are suggested based on this review.

No abstract

You can't guide your students to overcome challenges of social injustice if you cannot relate material to the lives of your students outside of the classroom. And in my opinion, the most important reason for a teacher to understand the challenges facing their students outside the classroom is so that the teacher can become motivated to promote social justice in their own daily life as well as within their classroom and to not be naïve to the problems that truly exist in our society.-Darren, pre-service teacher This article examines the implications and effect of the Community Analysis (CA) Project assignment that we utilize in the Multicultural Education (MCE) course 1 at New Mexico State University, located in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The CA enables pre-service teachers to critically examine, through a social justice lens, the manifestations and intersectionalities of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, language, ability, and religion in PreK-12 students' communities, which may be rejected and ignored, or embraced, serving to connect students' lives to learning contexts and opportunities in their schools. The CA compels pre-service teachers to analyze systemic inequities and inequalities in communities which impact the everyday lives of students. They discover organic knowledge possessed by students and families to bridge students' knowledge and the knowledge promoted within the school curriculum. Pre-service teachers also contemplate how their privileged or disadvantaged identity statuses intersect with their future students' privileged or disadvantaged statuses, or impact how they read communities.