We analyse two narratives of teacher-facilitator teams producing elementary science curricula and disseminating them to their peers. We draw on these stories to interpret how teacher-facilitators position themselves with respect to other educators (e.g. peer teachers and development-team members), to real and imagined students and parents, to knowing and learning science, and to pedagogical practices and texts. We read these acts of positioning relationally and responsively. Teacher-facilitators position themselves and their work in highly complex ways to multiple political and social others. These multiple positions raise a range of anxieties and questions for the teacher-facilitators and shape their curricular and leadership roles. Our purpose is, first, to tease out these complexities of positioning and subjectivity, and second, to consider how teachers construct their roles as pedagogical and curricular leaders among their peers. This analysis illuminates thinking about how reform is enacted in schools and how leadership roles are constructed.

Despite the many hours students spend studying science, only a few relate to these subjects in such a manner that it becomes a part of their essential worldview and advances their education in a larger sense-one in which they make a connection to the subject matter so that it becomes a source of inspiration and occupies a formative position in their life. Using the hermeneutic/phenomenological sense of lifeworld as our "being in the world," we explore questions of identity in the teaching and learning of science. We suggest that by taking the notion of identity in science to include students' identities in their collective, inclusive of an orientation toward both who the student is and who he wants to become, we can enable this broader educative process. Science's link to lifeworld, identity, and self as well as the literature surrounding each are treated separately in the context of empirical case studies drawn from interviews with young college-aged migrant agricultural workers. This population of students is living within a distinct culture where ideological systems are spread across lines of ethnicity, class, and vocation that place this population of students at risk of dropping out of school. Given the nature of their circumstances and their desire to leave the life of migration behind, these students show how their perceptions of science are embedded within particular issues of lifeworld, identity, and self while illustrating their interrelationships.

No abstract

Journal of Curriculum StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:

I argue from an understanding of current feminist philosophy that a teacher's practice reflects changing experiences, knowledge, values, and identities, and as such can be productively thought of as a site for learning as much as a site for expounding upon what is known. This suggests a vision for what constitutes effective practice different from that commonly held in science. I argue that praxis proceeds from the personal epistemological standpoints of the teacher (defined as standpoint theory). This knowledge is only partially applicable to particular situations in the classroom. The hallmark of feminist pedagogy, if conceptualized as derivative from standpoint theory, is to “take everyday life as problematic” (Smith, 1991, p. 88). Implicit in such a conceptualization is that pedagogy starts from an explicit recognition of everyday life and both builds from and questions that beginning. This is true for students and also for the teacher, and is the root of my claim that through teaching, the teacher becomes a learner. The immediate circumstances in which teaching occurs present different and unique qualities from those in which the teacher's knowledge and value were created. As a teacher, I am therefore continuously confronted with the inadequacy of my knowledge. The circumstances and children's activities tell me that I need to do things differently. In this situation, the act of teaching as an assertion of knowing becomes a recognition of not‐knowing. Teaching becomes an occasion for learning about subject matter, children, and self. I recount an example of teaching in a first‐grade classroom to give this argument substance. This story is an example from my own teaching in which parallels between scientific theorizing and storytelling are drawn and capitalized upon as a vehicle for critical thinking in science. This became an occasion for reflecting upon the appropriateness of those values because of the multicultural qualities of the classroom. J Res Sci Teach 35: 427–439, 1998.