Incorporating investigations of environmental racism into middle school science

Abstract

To promote a justice‐oriented approach to science education, we formed a research‐practice partnership between middle school science teachers, their students, curriculum designers, learning scientists, and experts in social justice to co‐design and test an environmental justice unit for middle school instruction. We examine teacher perspectives on the challenges and possibilities of integrating social justice into their standards‐aligned science teaching as they participate in co‐design and teach the unit. The unit supports students to investigate racially disparate rates of asthma in their community by examining pollution maps and historical redlining maps. We analyze interviews and co‐design artifacts from two teachers who participated in the co‐design and taught the unit in their classrooms. Our findings point to the benefits of a shared pedagogical framework and an initial unit featuring local historical content to structure co‐design. Findings also reveal that teachers can share similar goals for empowering students to use science knowledge for civic action while framing the local socio‐political factors contributing to the injustice differently, due in part to different institutional supports and constraints. Student interviews and a pre/postassessment illustrate how the unit facilitated students' progress in connecting socio‐political and science ideas to explain the impacts of particulate matter pollution and who is impacted most. Analyses illuminate how teachers' pedagogical choices may influence whether and how students discuss the impact of systemic racism in their explanations. The findings inform refinement of the unit and suggest supports needed for co‐design partnerships focused on integrating social justice and science.

A Framework to Identify Opportunities to Address Socioscientific Issues in the Elementary School Curricula: A Case Study from England, Italy, and Portugal

“…The IT curriculum does not include learning goals related with social conflicts and biases based on human diversity issues. However, introducing social conflicts and biases associated with both biological and socio-cultural diversity in science teaching may provide opportunities to promote awareness about inequalities prevalent in society, to develop a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding diversity and to actively contribute to decreasing inequality and discrimination in line with the goals for the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations (1,98,99). More specifically, exploring these issues may contribute to education for sustainability (4,5) by addressing gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls (SDG5), strategies to reduce inequalities (SDG10), and to promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, providing access to justice for all and building effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels (SDG16).…”