Chemicals are contaminants too: Teaching appreciation and critique of science in the era of Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)

Abstract

This article examines the tensions that arose as teachers, scientists, youth, and community organizers worked to develop a curriculum that was responsive to community concerns and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Within the context of urban heavy metal contamination and building on previous critiques of the standards, we identified how the ideological commitments of the NGSS hinder their applicability to community issues. We examine latent ideological commitments in the performance expectations (PEs) and disciplinary core ideas as they relate to historical and present causes and consequences of urban heavy metal contamination. Whereas the scientific enterprise and chemical industry produce harms and benefits, the NGSS focus on benefits and ignore that both harms and benefits of science are unevenly distributed. Given the pressure on teachers to implement the NGSS, this paper presents examples from collaborative curriculum development efforts that meet PEs while pushing students to ask critical questions and engage with their communities to challenge the standards’ alignment with the chemical industry. Ultimately, we argue that the NGSS position teachers as promoters of the status quo of the scientific enterprise and we document possibilities for the role of science teachers in US schools that are more transformative.

The potential of “civic science education”: Theory, research, practice, and uncertainties

“…Unfortunately, some major trends in science education assume a technocratic view of science, largely neglecting some of these larger contextual matters. The Next Generation Science Standards have numerous positive attributes, but they make little mention of the harmful aspects of science, such as chemical contamination (Morales-Doyle et al, 2019) or the sociopolitical forces that may incentivize such harm. Nonetheless, it is possible to engage in the content of NGSS through a sociopolitical or even a social justice lens, examining how, for example, chemical contaminants have affected water supplies in Flint and elsewhere.…”

Embracing equity and excellence while constructing science teacher identities in urban schools: Voices of new Teachers of Color

“…CETs (in addition to RETs) could provide the authentic activity called for by Rodriguez's sTc framework, where new teachers apprentice in crafting relationships with communities and develop knowledge as they negotiate their insider and/or outsider identities vis‐à‐vis these communities with their teacher identities and create their own equity‐excellence unit of meaning. Working within community sites provides opportunities to reposition teachers and scientists as exclusive holders of knowledge, challenge settled science ideologies (Morales‐Doyle et al, 2019), and reframe coloniality in science and more generally in STEM (Rosa & Mensah, 2021).…”

Incorporating investigations of environmental racism into middle school science

“…Integrating social justice into science courses provides opportunities for students to make sense of issues impacting their own communities and raises issues around inequality and racism (Morales‐Doyle et al, 2019). Students might combine typical science ideas that help them interpret how an environmental phenomenon impacts people with social justice ideas that help them determine why the impacts are different across racial groups.…”