Leveraging curricular and students' resources to instigate and sustain problematizing

Abstract

Although existing literature suggests that teachers perceive, mobilize, and leverage resources to support ambitious instruction, less is known about how teachers and students jointly take up resources for co-constructing scientific knowledge. This study examines how teachersThere is a rich body of scholarship in educational policy, mathematics, and most recently, science education that has examined how teachers utilize resources to support and sustain ambitious instruction. Resources are the set of social, material, and intellectual tools that teachers use to support disciplinary learning in classrooms (Cohen et al., 2003;Lampert et al., 2011). Teacher-teacher interactions in professional learning communities or professional development sessions can become resources when they facilitate the exchange of new pedagogical ideas or support teachers use of new curriculum materials (Frank et al., 2004;Horn et al., 2020). Teacher's advice-seeking networks or district-level policies can also become resources when they help teachers build the social capital that is needed to sustain ambitious pedagogies within and across schools (Coburn et al., 2012). Policy documents, curriculum materials, or technological tools can stimulate teachers to re-examine what it means to know and understand a discipline, and bring their new knowledge about disciplinary inquiry into their classroom by experimenting with new discourse routines, texts, and tools (

Characterizing pedagogical decision points in sense‐making conversations motivated by scientific uncertainty

“…Sometimes, what is uncertain for an individual might not be productive for a classroom community to engage with at that time, leaving teachers to grapple with how much to attend to individuals' uncertainty as compared to the class's sense‐making (Colley & Windschitl, 2016). Furthermore, what is uncertain for students is likely to be at least somewhat settled by scientists and/or might not be a conceptual target for instruction (Ko, 2021; Manz & Suárez, 2018). Alternatively, students might not have sufficient resources to articulate a clear problem or make progress on it.…”

Responsive instructional design for students' epistemic agency: Documenting episodes of principled improvisation in storyline enactment

“…Therefore, a classroom community's science work can be understood as being convergent on, or divergent from, the planned curricular trajectory. By extension, teachers need the capacity to “open up” curricular materials to localize students' convergent science work and pursue their divergent science work (Ko, 2021; Ko & Krist, 2019). Taken together, this view of science work in curricular enactment provides a useful lens into how students act with epistemic agency in the context of curricular enactment.…”

“…Science teachers can draw on the planned trajectory of the curriculum to design and enact instruction for students' to act with epistemic agency (Ko, 2021; Ko & Krist, 2019). However, curricular enactments for epistemic agency require adaptation and improvisation of the materials (Drake, 2002; Heaton, 2000; Lampert, 1986).…”

How do secondary school students handle epistemic uncertainty during an ecological citizen science inquiry?

“…Thus, connecting the scientific inquiry with the everyday forms of relating to the world could allow the students to students engage in doing science in ways that are meaningful in their everyday lives (cf. Kervinen et al, 2020b;Ko, 2021).…”

“…The findings of this study also show how students reframed the uncertainty through the integration of their everyday experience in the inquiry processes. Integration of everyday forms of knowing in science teaching is essential to make it meaningful for the students (e.g., Archer et al, 2010;Ko, 2021), and it has been shown that the absence of a teacher in particular can enable such connections particularly well (Kervinen et al, 2020b). The present study extends the previous work by showing how the students used their everyday experiences and understandings of urban life as a resource to manage uncertainty that is meaningful not only for themselves but also regarding the production of new knowledge of the world.…”