Science Education as a Pathway to Teaching - Sense Publishers

B O L D V I S I O N S I N E D U C A T I O N A L R E S E A R C H

Science Education as a Pathway to Teaching Language LiteracyAlberto J. Rodriguez (Ed.)San Diego State University

In this era of mandated high stakes and standardized testing, teachers and schools offi cials fi nd themselves struggling to meet the demands for improved student achievement. At the same time, they are also expected to teach all subjects as required by national and state curriculum standards. Because of these competing demands, science is not even taught or taught less often in order to make more room for mathematics and language arts “drill and practice” and “teaching to the test.” Anyone concerned with providing students with a well-rounded education should ask whether these drastic measures—even if they were to show improvement in achievement—justify denying children access to the unique opportunities for intellectual growth and social awareness that the effective instruction of science provides. Will these students have enough exposure to the science curriculum to prepare them to do well later in middle and high school? How is this current situation going to help ameliorate the pervasive achievement gap in science, and how is it going to motivate students to pursue science-related careers?

The authors of this book believe that instead of sacrifi cing the science curriculum to make more time for drill and practice in mathematics and language arts, what should be done is to connect current research on literacy and science instruction with effective pedagogy. Therefore, this volume provides fresh theoretical insights and practical applications for better understanding how science can be used as a pathway to teaching literacy, and hence, as a pathway to improving teachers’ practice and students’ learning.

B O L D V I S I O N S I N E D U C A T I O N A L R E S E A R C H

S e n s e P u b l i s h e r s B V E R 2 6

Science Education as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy

Alberto J. Rodriguez (Ed.)

S e n s e P u b l i s h e r s


Alberto J. Rodriguez (Ed.)

BOLD VISIONS IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH Series Editors Kenneth Tobin, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA Editorial Board Heinz Sunker, Universität Wuppertal, Germany Peter McLaren, University of California at Los Angeles, USA Kiwan Sung, Woosong University, South Korea Angela Calabrese Barton, Teachers College, New York, USA Margery Osborne, Centre for Research on Pedagogy and Practice Nanyang Technical University, Singapore Wolff-Michael Roth, University of Victoria, Canada Scope Bold Visions in Educational Research is international in scope and includes books from two areas: teaching and learning to teach and research methods in education. Each area contains multi-authored handbooks of approximately 200,000 words and monographs (authored and edited collections) of approximately 130,000 words. All books are scholarly, written to engage specified readers and catalyze changes in policies and practices. Defining characteristics of books in the series are their explicit uses of theory and associated methodologies to address important problems. We invite books from across a theoretical and methodological spectrum from scholars employing quantitative, statistical, experimental, ethnographic, semiotic, hermeneutic, historical, ethnomethodological, phenomenological, case studies, action, cultural studies, content analysis, rhetorical, deconstructive, critical, literary, aesthetic and other research methods. Books on teaching and learning to teach focus on any of the curriculum areas (e.g., literacy, science, mathematics, social science), in and out of school settings, and points along the age continuum (pre K to adult). The purpose of books on research methods in education is not to present generalized and abstract procedures but to show how research is undertaken, highlighting the particulars that pertain to a study. Each book brings to the foreground those details that must be considered at every step on the way to doing a good study. The goal is not to show how generalizable methods are but to present rich descriptions to show how research is enacted. The books focus on methodology, within a context of substantive results so that methods, theory, and the processes leading to empirical analyses and outcomes are juxtaposed. In this way method is not reified, but is explored within well-described contexts and the emergent research outcomes. Three illustrative examples of books are those that allow proponents of particular perspectives to interact and debate, comprehensive handbooks where leading scholars explore particular genres of inquiry in detail, and introductory texts to particular educational research methods/issues of interest to novice researchers.

Science Education as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy Alberto J. Rodriguez San Diego State University

SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM/BOSTON/TAIPEI

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-94-6091-129-3 (paperback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-130-9 (hardback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-131-6 (e-book) Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands http://www.sensepublishers.com Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 2010 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

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This book is dedicated to the students who participated in all the studies reported here. May their enthusiasm, honesty, openness and desire to be provided with meaningful opportunities for learning science continue to illuminate the work of researchers and teachers alike. And to Jhumki Basu—your commitment to improving the educational opportunities of disadvantaged students will always be an inspiration—we will miss you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword .................................................................................................................. ix Preface......................................................................................................................xv 1. Science, Literacy, and Video Games: Situated Learning......................................1

James Paul Gee Commentary on Gee’s Science, Literacy, and Video Games:

Situated Learning.................................................................................................14 Katherine Richardson Bruna

Play and the Real World: A Response to Katherine Richardson Bruna’s

Commentary ........................................................................................................18 James Paul Gee

2. Facilitating the Integration of Multiple Literacies through

Science Education and Learning Technologies...................................................23 Alberto J. Rodriguez and Cathy Zozakiewicz

Commentary on Rodriguez & Zozakiewicz’s Facilitating the Integration

of Multiple Literacies through Science Education and Learning Technologies........................................................................................................46 Tanya Cleveland Solomon, Mary Heitzman van de Kerkof and Elizabeth Birr Moje

Response to Solomon, van de Kerkhof, & Moje’s Commentary on

Facilitating the Integration of Multiple Literacies through Science Education and Learning Technologies .................................................................................52 Alberto J. Rodriguez

3. Ways with Words: Language Play and the Science Learning of Mexican

Newcomer Adolescents .......................................................................................61 Katherine Richardson Bruna

Commentary on Richardson Bruna’s Ways with Words: Language

Play and the Science Learning of Mexican Newcomer Adolescents..................81 James Paul Gee

Response to Gee’s commentary on Ways with Words: Language

Play and the Science Learning of Mexican Newcomer Adolescents. A 21st Century Niche for the natural ...................................................................88 Katherine Richardson Bruna

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4. Supporting Meaningful Science Learning: Reading and Writing Science .........93 Kimberley Gomez, Jennifer Sherer, Phillip Herman, Louis Gomez, Jolene White Zywica and Adam Williams

Commentary on Gomez, Sherer, Herman, Gomez, White, & Williams’

Supporting Meaningful Science Learning: Reading and Writing Science .......113 David T. Crowther

Response to Crowther’s Commentary on Supporting Meaningful

Science Learning: Reading and Writing Science ..............................................116 Kimberley Gomez, Jennifer Sherer, Phillip Herman, Louis Gomez, Jolene White Zywica and Adam Williams

5. When is a Detail Seductive? On the Challenges of Constructing and

Teaching from Engaging Science Texts............................................................123 Tanya Cleveland Solomon, Mary Heitzman van de Kerkhof and Elizabeth Birr Moje

Commentary on Solomon, van de Kerkhof, & Moje’s When is a detail

seductive? On the Challenges of constructing and teaching from engaging science texts .......................................................................................150 Alberto J. Rodriguez

Response to Rodriguez’s Commentary on When is a detail seductive?

On the Challenges of constructing and teaching from engaging science texts.......................................................................................................155 Tanya Cleveland Solomon, Mary Heitzman van de Kerkhof and Elizabeth Birr Moje

6. Science for English Language Learners: Research and Applications

for Teacher Educators........................................................................................163 David T. Crowther

Commentary on Crowther’s Science for English Language Learners:

Research and Applications for Teacher Educators............................................183 Kimberley Gomez, Jennifer Sherer, Phillip Herman, Louis Gomez, Jolene White Zywica and Adam Williams

Response to Gomez, Sherer, Herman, Gomez, White, and Williams’ commentary on Science for English Language Learners: Research and Applications for Teacher Educators ..................................................................191 David T. Crowther

About the authors ...................................................................................................197 Index.......................................................................................................................203

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FOREWORD

I am pleased to offer my remarks on this collection in the collegial spirit illustrated by the conversational format of Science as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy. Each of the contributors participated as chapter authors and commentators to a colleague’s chapter. This provided the opportunity to probe details, offer clarification and in some cases challenge perspectives. This exchange represented ideas as malleable–that is, co-constructed. I encourage the reader to read the original chapter, the collegial commentary, and the authors’ response in turn. Read in this way, one can virtually “listen in” on the conversation. In total, this text provides a comprehensive analysis of the intersection of science education and language learning (literacy). Meeting the instructional needs of diverse learners (including non-native English speakers), the development of rigorous school curriculum, and the integration of language/literacy skills are commitments I share with the authors of Science as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy. In my work, the Multiple Literacies perspective (Hollingsworth & Gallego, 1992) confronts the typical [English] language-centric manner of classroom instruction and advocates for varied modalities, methods, and practices (including but not limited to/by language) in teachers’ instructional presentations and students’ content knowledge expressions. We presented our research at conferences and engaged with others who promoted similar ideas. Subsequently, we invited colleagues to refine, expand, adopt, and adapt Multiple Literacies. This collaboration resulted in, What Counts as Literacy: Challenging a Single Standard (Gallego & Hollingsworth, 2000). During the editing, voters in California passed Proposition 227, thereby providing non-English native students educational accommodations for one academic year after which their English proficiency is mandated. These events made the language-centric nature of the school curriculum more apparent and ironically provided a genuine need for alternative instructional approaches. Although published a decade ago, the three overarching themes presented in the text have a strong affinity with the work presented in Science as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy. (1) Expand what counts as text – This theme is represented by instructional practices that build on other forms of communication (e.g., listening, visual, speaking, performance) to enhance students’ understandings of content presented through traditional reading and writing tasks. Gee’s notion of situated understandings underscores the influence of context in learning. In this case, video game learning capitalizes upon varied texts (visual, sound, tactile) that underscore, all learning is language learning. Rodriguez and Zozakiewicz describe their ambitious work with teachers to change their instructional practices to those that legitimate, acknowledge, and include students’ multiple literacies.

(2) Instructional Praxis – This theme represents the critique and questioning of traditional instructional norms as well as the best practices espoused by research. Blind deference to published research ignores the specific characteristics of

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classroom life that teachers must acknowledge in order to fulfill their ethical commitments to their students. Poised to listen to their own practice-based professional judgment along side “objective” empirical research findings, teachers understand both as useful frames of reference. Teachers’ healthy critiques of authority and the reclaim of teachers’ own authorities are found dispositions in chapters of Science as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy that offer distinct approaches to instructional praxis. For example, as a grand gesture of instructional praxis, Crowther (this volume) builds a case for improved science literacy and offers suggestions for teacher education toward this aim. Similarly, Solomon, van de Kerkhof, & Moje (this volume) report upon the surprising results of the use of science textbooks that were modified specifically to include items aimed to interest students. Relational Knowing is the ability to understand students in relation to their community and the acknowledgement of students’ “other” parts of selves. Maintaining others as partners along with the teacher, results in systems of shared power with parents, other teachers, and community members. In Science as a Pathway to Teach Language Literacy, Richardson-Bruna capitalizes on students’ “out of school” lives to connect everyday events with science learning. In the chapter written by Gomez, Sherer, Herman, Gomez, Zywica, & Williams, the authors explain how students’ other lives influence their understanding of science in the classroom. Working from a Vygotskian tradition, Davydov (1990) places practice in the privileged position within the theory/practice relationship. The ability to move beyond/above theoretical assertions, referred as “ascending to the concrete,” is critical to instructional innovation and to theory development. It is in practice that we afford (perhaps, are awarded) understanding of theory. The classroom examples provided in Science as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy illustrate sound theoretical frameworks while centralizing the material changes in classroom practice. I constantly reference the theory/practice relationship as a student teacher supervisor, because the mentorship and instruction of student teachers requires that I ascend to the concrete. Student teachers persistently ask for clarification of theoretical assertions, request interpretations of instructional mandates, and seek practical illustrations that are of use to them with students like theirs (struggling learners), within the high stakes testing constraints they experience. They ask, “What would [that] look (feel, smell, sound) like in my classroom?” Together we “ascend to the concrete.” My supervision assignments have primarily been in the elementary school setting, however this past academic year I joined a team of teachers, professors, and student teachers working in several middle and high schools. While I was initially concerned that my “rusty” content understanding (Physics, Economics, World History, Geometry or Algebra) would be insufficient and may hinder rather than help their professional development, I soon learned my concerns were unfounded. The student teachers were well prepared in their particular content areas/disciplinary knowledges. In fact, I found that my own content naiveté allowed me to assume the perspective of novice/student during my observation of their lessons. Building upon my own bi-literacy/bi-lingual research and teaching background, I supported student teachers’ integrations of literacy

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skills with science, integrations of literacy skills with economics, integrations of literacy skills with geometry, and so on. With special attention to non-native English speaking students, we created alternative student participation opportunities that included language based and non- language based forms of expression. Student teachers as well as mentor teachers like these will benefit from the excellent examples of rising to the concrete in Science as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy. Many colleagues have noted, including some of the contributing authors of Science as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy, that the instructional suggestions and ideas proposed are simply, “just good teaching” (c.f., Crowther, this volume,). Yet, great science instruction does not “just happen,” it is not simple. Teaching for real science purposes with real science outcomes is a challenging task for both teachers and students. The numerous examples found in these chapters attest “good teaching” is possible – but is not without risk. Unfortunately, in the current high-stakes testing educational climate, “good teaching” often goes unrewarded. Indeed, in some cases, good teaching is punished. Good teachers may be subject to sanctions for not keeping pace with the curriculum guide, for falling behind other science classes, for taking to much time, for using too many resources, for making content so concrete and comprehensible that students fail to recognize the “fake science” on the high stakes/standardized tests. Lastly, I would like to comment on the general teaching-curriculum/testing relationship. Having recently unearthed my rudimentary knowledge of algebra (while supervising a student teacher), I will use a simple math sentence to organize my comments. Let me make clear the oversimplification is deliberate. I do not minimize the importance of complex issues but rather seek to display in bold plainness the assumptions that link the instruction of science curriculum and the testing of science content. First, a few terms are defined in our simple math equation: The letter (a) represents the teaching/learning of science (curriculum/pedagogy) The letter (b) represents the [standardized] testing of science From this point we have three basic relationship options: a = b a > b a < b

The first option, the a = b expression, represents an equal/same relationship between the (a) science curriculum taught in schools is (b) tested on standardized test. Another way to say this is that the test is an accurate/adequate representation of the curriculum. Alternatively stated, teachers are teaching everything that is on the test (i.e., teaching to the test) and nothing else. In this way, quite literally the curriculum “equals” or is the same as the test, no more no less. The second relationship, the a > b expression, also represents an inequality. In this case the school curriculum (a) exceeds or is greater than what is on the standardized test(s) (b). What is being taught (and presumably learned) is greater than the standardized test. What is taught/learned exceeds the content tested. That is, the test is a subset of the curriculum. The third relationship statement, the a < b expression represents that

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(a) the school curriculum and the test (b) are not equal. The expression states that the school curriculum is less than the standardized test. In this case what is being taught (and learned by students) is less than what is being tested on standardized measures (b). This statement can be understood in terms of quality (less than) but in most cases we would assume that the “less than” also refers to the scope (quantity) of the information and instruction. In some cases, one could make a case for when one expression may be more desirable than the other. However, there is no doubt that in the current NCLB era; (b) is what matters, (b) is what counts, (b) is what is important. In literacy lingo; when (a) and (b) go walking, (b) does all the talking. If (b) indicates acceptable scores then no further examination of (a) is warranted (or of b/testing). However, when (b) indicates unacceptable scores, everyone listens! Everyone agrees something is wrong. The initial interpretation is (a) needs “fixing.” Using our math sentences, we assume the problem is (a) that a < b. That is, the science curriculum/pedagogy is less than. It is this interpretation, a < b, that leads us to constant educational reform— a state of perpetual repair, fix and remediate. Researchers work with teachers to create curriculum and inquiry projects that elevate science learning into science doing. We make sure (in some cases actually police) teachers use research-based strategies. I advocate educational reform as I understand it—as a verb (continued research and its application observed lead to re-theorizing our collective understandings), rather than as a noun (a destination point) as it is commonly understood by the general public. While a < b, may be the most predicable response to unacceptable (b) scores, it is not the only explanation. That is, if we concentrate our efforts exclusively on (a) classroom instruction, we ignore the potential that low (b) test scores may be the result of the limitations of the tests themselves. I believe our decisions about “What’s Worth Teaching?” (Brady, 1997) cannot/should not be dictated by decisions regarding “What is worth testing?” or “What is possible to test?” I quote Crowther who reminds us that, “Science standardized tests record students’ performances/ understandings of standardized science test items this does NOT equate students’ performances/understandings of science.” (this volume). The importance of useful testing is underscored by Rodriguez (commentary on Solomon, van der Kerkhof, & Moje’s chapter; this volume), who proposes that we ask better questions both in our teaching of content (classroom pedagogy) as well in testing. While some may continue to debate who and how testing questions be deemed most relevant, the influence of test scores and test-like questions is powerful. To realign the a = b relationship, teachers often maximize instruction efforts toward the goal of higher test scores. Ultimately, classroom questions begin to resemble test questions while potentially resulting in short term benefits. This approach is wreaking havoc with long-term goals including true scientific understanding and thus, undermines scientific innovation and development. I would like to borrow a concept used by chapter authors’ Solomon, van der Kerkhof, & Moje, (this volume). These authors use the term seductive details to describe textbooks that include items and topics of interest to students that nonetheless lead them “off task.” In this way, the most interesting textbooks actual seduce the students away from the main idea (as determined by the author/test maker, etc.). The notion of seductive details is apt for

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describing the potential seductive nature of science curricular reform. We may indeed develop science curriculum with items and ideas that are of interest to students (and teachers), e.g., doing-science (a > b) but nonetheless be “off task” if (b) outcomes do not measure up. If not taken in the broader educational testing context, the work of science curriculum/literacy language techniques, strategies, becomes itself a seductive detail. Of course we must continue to enrich classroom experiences and science curriculum as the chapters in Science as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy provide excellent examples. However, we must concurrently work to challenge the rigid nature of science testing and its inappropriate use. Perhaps we can collectively create a situated understanding between science learning and science testing that enriches both teaching and evaluation. Perhaps, as Rodriguez (commentary, this volume) has suggested, high quality teaching questions found in progressive classroom instruction can serve to influence test makers to “ask better questions.” That is, “can (a) influence (b)?” The chapters in Science as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy provide an excellent start. Margaret Gallego Professor, School of Teacher Education San Diego State University

REFERENCES

Brady, M. (1997). What’s worth teaching?: Selecting, organizing and integrating knowledge. New York: State University of New York Press.

Davydov, V. V. (1990). Soviet studies in mathematics education. Type of generalization in instruction: logical and psychological problems in the structure of school curricula (Vol. 2). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Gallego, M. A., & Hollingsworth, S. (Eds.). (2000). What counts as literacy?: Challenging the school standard. New York: Teachers College Press.

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PREFACE

Consider this excerpt from the State of Education Address given by California State Superintendent of Schools Jack O’Connell (February 6, 2007):

Now, let’s imagine the likely futures of those students, given the state of education today. If the child is white, Asian or Filipino, the chances of that child being academically successful are better than two in three. But [what are] the statistical chances of success for the 19 students sitting right next to them who are Hispanic or African American? Only slightly better than one in three. If graduation rates are not improved, odds are that of the 16 Hispanic students, six [37.5%] will not graduate. And while statistics tell us that the Filipino and nearly all of the Asian American students will graduate, two of the nine white students will not [22.2%], and one in three African Americans will not [33.3%]. Yes, this class is imaginary, but the disparities are real. This is the achievement gap.

Now, some have suggested this has nothing to do with race, that it is simply an issue of poverty. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, when you look closely, say in English language arts, you find 23% of the African Americans in poverty are proficient, yet 39 percent of whites in the same poverty subgroup are proficient. For Hispanic Students in poverty, only 24% are proficient. So while poverty is a key factor, it is simply not accurate to suggest it is the only factor. (http://www.cde.ca.gov/eo/in/se/yr07stateofed. asp).

This is the first time that I ever heard a high-ranking government official in education acknowledge that “race” (ethnicity) is one of the many factors that impact the achievement gap. How do Superintendent O’Connell’s claims compare to what may be happening in your own state (or country)?

In the United States of America, the student achievement gap is widespread, and the current national policy on education (the No Child Left Behind [NCLB] Act) is compounding this situation. In fact, due to the punitive accountability mandate of the NCLB Act, teachers and school officials find themselves struggling to meet the demands of standardized testing by further compartmentalizing the already content-heavy curriculum. As a result, subjects like science and social studies are not even being taught or taught less often in order to make more room for mathematics and language arts “drill and practice” and “teaching to the test.” This approach is obviously not working because even though many school districts have desperately chosen to sacrifice the science (and social studies) curriculum, the student achievement gap continues to be wide and alarming. But, even if these drastic measures were showing actual gains on standardized language arts and mathematics tests, are we really prepared to deal with the consequences of denying elementary school students the unique opportunities for intellectual growth and social awareness that the effective instruction of science provides? Science is usually taught only in Grade 5 because that is the grade often selected by school

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districts to meet the testing requirements according to the NCLB Act. Is this enough exposure to the science curriculum to prepare students to do well later in middle and high school? How is this current situation going to help ameliorate the pervasive achievement gap, and how is it going to motivate students to pursue science, mathematics, engineering, and technology-related careers?

The authors in this book believe that instead of sacrificing the science curriculum to make more time for drill and practice in mathematics and language arts, what should be done is to connect current research on literacy and science instruction with effective pedagogy. This is not an easy task, and teachers, as well as teacher educators, would welcome some guidance and suggestions. To this end, this volume seeks to provide a pathway to link the language arts and science curricula.

In the next sections, I briefly describe how the authors came together to collaborate on this project, as well as how the book is organized.

A MODEL FOR INTENSIVE AND FOCUSED SCHOLARLY COLLABORATION: THE INSTITUTE ON SCIENCE EDUCATION RESEARCH

Words are like mirrors—the meaning we take from them are a reflection of our sense of place—of our sociocultural and academic locations in our current context. In order to provide readers with richer opportunities for engaging with this volume’s authors’ insights and research, we are following the same format used during the first Institute on Science Education Research (ISER I). That is, we invited a group of emerging and eminent scholars for a full day of intensive and focused scholarly collaboration. During the ISER II, each author also presented a paper based on his/her current research. Each presentation was then followed by a commentary prepared by another of the ISER II’s presenters who had read the paper in advance. After each commentary, the floor was then opened for a full discussion that included institute participants, as well as audience members. Thus, this book is based on the collection of revised papers and commentaries. As we did during the ISER I, in order to enrich the dialogue initiated at the ISER II, each of the chapter commentaries is also followed by a response written by the original chapter author(s). We hope that this type of scholarly conversation amongst the authors will enable readers to further appreciate the complexity of the issues addressed here and the need to continue and expand transformative research in our schools. The theme for the ISER I was on agency and science education in urban school contexts, and this institute produced the volume, The Multiple Faces of Agency: Innovative Strategies for Effecting Change in Urban School Contexts (2008). Now with a focus on the effective integration of language arts with science education, and after undergoing several revisions during the last year, the papers, commentaries and responses associated with the ISER II are compiled in this volume. Distinguished Professor James Gee takes the lead in Chapter 1 by bringing to our attention and problematizing taken for granted assumptions about language literacy. He cleverly accomplishes this by deconstructing how children are able to

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successfully engage with the complex language demands, rules, and symbols associated with playing video games. Professor Gee argues, “learning is always about learning a ‘language’ (a representational system).” Thus, to learn in the science classroom involves not just learning science content but also the “language” of science—science literacy. His chapter begs the question, if children (at various ages) are able to decode and apply the complex language literacy required to be successful while playing video games, why cannot the same students also be successful in the science and language arts classrooms and successful on the corresponding standardized tests for these subjects? Professor Gee proposes that how children gain “situated understandings” from playing video games could generate valuable lessons for those of us interested in improving students’ deeper understandings of science concepts. In the next chapter (Chapter 2), my colleague Zozakiewicz and I build on Gee’s insights by revealing the multiple literacies elementary (grades 4-6) children must deploy to successfully integrate high end learning technologies with language literacy and inquiry-based, socially relevant science activities. To guide our efforts, we use sociotransformative constructivism (sTc) as a theoretical framework that merges multicultural education tenets (as a theory of social justice) with social constructivism (as a theory of learning) [Rodriguez, 1998]. For this project, we conducted a longitudinal, intervention study in collaboration with teachers and their students that sought to help teachers transform their practice. In this chapter, we only share Modeling and Demonstrating as one of several strategies we implemented to manage the challenges we encountered. Drawing on multiple quantitative and qualitative data sets, we provide evidence for how students’ multiple literacies could be effectively activated through various activities and pedagogical strategies. In Chapter 3, Associate Professor Richardson Bruna takes us more specifically inside the classroom of a rural school to describe how newcomer Mexican English-learning adolescents use language play and humor as tools to construct meaning. The students also use this metalinguistic ability to tie the science curriculum to their everyday rural contexts and cultural experiences. Using multiple videotaped classroom observations as a primary data source, Richardson Bruna suggests that we could learn more about English Language Learners’ culture and prior conceptions of science knowledge by paying more attention to how they use language play in their interactions with their peers and/or with their teachers.

Continuing the focus on adolescents, in Chapter 4, Kimberly Gomez and her colleagues describe findings from a research project involving several culturally diverse urban high schools. They used a specially designed environmental science curriculum to investigate the impact of a set of “reading-to-learn tools” on students’ achievement. Gomez and her colleagues define the reading-to-learn tools as modified strategies commonly used in the high school English classroom for application in science learning contexts. These types of specific pedagogical strategies and activities are essential, Gomez et al argue, if we are to better assist students enhance their abilities to read and comprehend scientific text.

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Solomon, van de Kerkhof, & Moje, in Chapter 5, also report on students’ meaningful engagements with scientific text. However, this time, Solomon and her colleagues conducted a study with culturally diverse middle school students. These authors tackle an interesting and challenging topic, “what makes a detail seductive” in scientific text? In other words, Solomon et al investigate what “seductive details” in selected text samples may prevent middle school students from correctly extracting the main idea. Considering the importance of identifying the main idea (or the expected main idea from the assessor’s point of view) after reading expository text, Solomon and her colleagues’ work is much needed, and in their chapter they provide multiple practical suggestions for teachers, teacher educators, and test developers to help address this issue. Finally, in Chapter 6, Associate Professor David Crowther provides a comprehensive discussion of research on strategies used to assist all students—including English Language Learners—improve their science literacy. He only reports on those pedagogical strategies that intercept inquiry-based, hands-on approaches with a strong emphasis on language literacy development. Therefore, Crowther’s review complements well the other pedagogical strategies and activities reported in the previous chapters. And, as mentioned earlier, the commentaries and responses that follow each chapter should provide readers with richer opportunities to reflect upon the various ways in which they could implement and expand on the authors’ insights.

One thing we know for certain is that remaining idle and/or trying the same approaches is not working. In recent years, several authors have clearly articulated that while teaching literacy is teaching to make sense of everything else, teaching science must involve teaching the language of science, thus making the teaching of science also teaching about literacy. Bakhtin (1981) makes this point succinctly when he stated that “the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his word!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people contexts, serving other people’s intentions: It is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own” (p. 293). Thus, the contributing authors provide fresh theoretical insights and practical applications for better understanding how science can be used as a pathway to teaching literacy, and hence, as a pathway to improving teachers’ practice and students’ learning.

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Rodriguez, A. J. (1998). Strategies for counterresistance: Toward sociotransformative constructivism and learning to teach science for diversity and for understanding. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 35, 589–622.

A. J. Rodriguez (ed.), Science Education as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy, 01–22. © 2010 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

JAMES PAUL GEE

1. SCIENCE, LITERACY, AND VIDEO GAMES

Situated Learning

INTRODUCTION

This paper will talk about science education by talking about games, card games like Yu-Gi-Oh (also a series of video games), and video games like SWAT4 or Civilization 4. Yu-Gi-Oh is an immensely complicated, technical, and strategic card game, played by children as young as seven, as well as by older children and adults (see http://www.pokezorworld.com/yu-gi-oh/yugioh_game_rules.htm for a summary of the rules and information on the game). The game is clearly as complex—or more so—than what many young children today see in school during their science and math instruction. I want to talk about science education through talking about games because I take a particular perspective on learning in science or any other area. Learning is always about learning a “language” (a representational system) and real learning—learning that leads to understanding and the ability to apply one’s knowledge—is always “situated understanding”. Situated understanding involves being able to associate images, experiences, actions, and dialogue with words and other symbols.

It turns out that certain sorts of games in popular culture today do an excellent job at producing situated understandings. Further, they do so in ways that, I believe, hold out lessons for those of us interested in science education. In the end, in my view, science education is always about “literacy” (representational competence) and efficacious literacy is always about situated understandings in some domain (science, math, literature, video games, or what have you), not language, literacy, or understanding “in general” about nothing in particular. Even “general” aspects of literacy (e.g., knowing when to use a complex nominalization as the subject of a sentence versus a simple noun phrase, as in “Hornworm growth displays significant variation” versus “Hornworms vary a lot in how well they grow”) flow from situated understandings in a particular domain (from playing a certain type of “game”) and, later, from the ability to compare and contrast situated understandings across different domains (games). Yes, too, the same thing is true, I believe, of even knowing where to put a comma versus a semicolon, though that is a story for another day. Finally, let me say that I don’t distinguish between written language and oral language. Both are representational systems that vary across different domains and which are closely tied to each other in specific domains. Once we go beyond

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vernacular oral language (a gift of our biology in any case), different specialist or technical varieties of language (whether the language of chemistry or Yu-Gi-Oh) have to be learned and there are very often oral and written forms (so “Hornworm growth displays significant variation” can be said or written and people with situated understandings usually know how, when, and where to do both). “What Everyone Needs to Know” & the Content Fetish—It is common these days to point out the powers of “informal learning”—for example, children learning to play a complex card (and video) game like Yu-Gi-Oh—in comparison with “formal learning” in school (Gee 2003, 2004). It is often assumed, however, that this division (informal/formal) is inevitable. School is a place where everybody is supposed to learn the same things, the things that “everyone needs to know”. Some form of formal regimentation and standardization appears, then, to be necessary within framework. Outside of school, different people play different games. However, despite—perhaps even because of—this “what everyone needs to know” philosophy, in the United States today we live in a society in which more than half the population believes in astrology, but not in evolution, and the level of “science literacy” is small (Gross 2006). The “what everyone needs to know” philosophy has an additional problem. In our schools today, it is based on a “content fetish”, the idea that a branch of science, for example, is composed of “facts” (information). If one has mastered the facts (in a textbook or on a test, say) then one has mastered the science or, at least, become “literate” in it. Let’s apply this “content fetish” perspective to Yu-Gi-Oh. Imagine we thought everyone should know about Yu-Gi-Oh, so we taught everyone the names and properties of some of the 10,000 Yu-Gi-Oh cards, as well as the basic rules of the game. This seems pretty silly. After all knowing facts and rules doesn’t come close to ensuring you can play the game or even really understand the point of the game. Surely, we would suggest that if we wanted people to know Yu-Gi-Oh we would have them play the game. Surely we don’t think Yu-Gi-Oh is first and foremost a set of facts, rather than a set of activities and strategies for solving problems in a distinctive domain. Yu-Gi-Oh facts are just tools for carrying out these activities and strategies. Surely the same thing is true, as well, of any domain of science. But on this alternative view—the “let’s play the game” anti-content fetish view—problems appear to arise as well. Someone is sure to say something like: “Well, if we should be teaching distinctive domains (‘games’) composed of activities and strategies for solving problems, surely not all students can engage with all the relevant domains”. People say this because, of course, they believe everyone should know all the same things and they are confronted with the fact that there are lots and lots of possible stuff to know. When we put the emphasis on activities and strategies, and not just facts, the situation seems to get worse. There is too much stuff to know, too many games to play, too little time to do it all in.

Another problem: Someone will also surely say, “Most kids are not going to become scientists of any sort, so why argue that they should engage in ‘playing the game’ rather than just mastering some facts? Isn’t it a waste of time, especially since most of them will never play the game “for real” or at the level of a “real scientist?”

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Well let’s go back to Yu-Gi-Oh. Let’s imagine again that you thought Yu-Gi-Oh was something that it was important for people to understand in the way in which I (and you) think biology is. We would, of course, concede that not everyone will get really good at Yu-Gi-Oh and not everyone needs to. What we would want is for people to understand Yu-Gi-Oh as an enterprise—as a “form of life”—a distinctive way of being/doing/valuing with other people. You would want Yu-Gi-Oh to make sense for people as a meaningful enterprise. You would want them, as well, to have choices about going further with Yu-Gi-Oh should they ever wish to and to be able to learn more later on if and when they had to or wanted to. Ditto with biology or a branch of biology. You would go further. You would probably realize that, given there are lots of card games of the Yu-Gi-Oh sort, not to mention other types of more or less related games, that it might be ok for some people to start with Magic the Gathering, some with Yu-Gi-Oh, and still others with Pokemon, and others still with yet other games. There are deep “family resemblances” among these games (because, in fact, they are historically related), so at the level of learning about a “form of life” (the distinctive meaningfulness of a human enterprise) they will each work. You might even go further and argue that once some people have learned Yu-Gi-Oh and others Magic the Gathering, they could discuss and reflect on the family resemblance, gaining a somewhat more abstract perspective. Going yet further, they could, perhaps, eventually discuss and reflect on yet higher order family resemblances among Yu-Gi-Oh like card games and games like chess. Things could go even further. But it would all be about forms of life and family resemblances, not facts. Soon people would become veritable philosophers of games. Ditto with biology and science. But then we may have to abandon the “what everyone needs to know” philosophy. We may have some people playing some games—engaging with some domains of science—and others with others. We may even see it as a strength that they might later get together and talk about family resemblances. The content fetish—and the “what everyone needs to know” philosophy—has something else going against it. If you teach people facts, they usually cannot actually do anything with them (just write them down on a test) and they don’t even retain the facts very long (Gardner 1991). If you engage people with a domain as activities and strategies (and with facts as tools), they can, at some level, play the game/domain and, more important, understand what the game/domain is all about as a human endeavor (Shaffer 2007). They will, then, even retain the facts or many of them.

Situated Understandings—There is an important distinction to be made between two ways of understanding a word or concept (Gee 2004, 2005). A word or concept can be understood in a largely verbal way or in a situated way (or both, of course). When people understand a word or concept verbally they can phrase its meaning in other words in a dictionary-like way. When they have a situated understanding of a word or concept they can offer not just words for words, but associate the given word or concept with images, actions, feelings, experiences, and dialogue, making different associations for different contexts of use. Kids who

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play Yu-Gi-Oh understand technical terms in Yu-Gi-Oh (of which there are a great many) in a situated way. They don’t just have definitions; they have images, actions, feelings, experiences, and dialogue. They associate the words with physical moves and dialogical arguments in and around the game. That is also how a physicist understands a word like “work”, not just in terms of other words, but in terms of images, actions, feelings, experiences, and dialogue and, importantly, relations among them, for different problem solving contexts. That’s why the Yu-Gi-Oh player and the physicist can use their technical words as tools with which to see the world in a certain way and to solve problems of a certain sort (including debates/arguments with others). Let me give an example of situated meaning at work in an area where we will all understand it and see it clearly. I am old enough to have been in many relationships in my life. In one case, a woman broke up with me by saying “Relationships shouldn’t take work” (and this one does). In another case, a woman broke up with me saying, “Relationships are hard work” (and you aren’t doing any). You have no trouble understanding these sentences and you can even easily give them meanings in terms of which they do not contradict themselves. But think about what you do to understand them. You call up images, experiences, feelings, values, dialogues—you consider family resemblances among the meanings “work” can have in other sorts of situations—you run something very like a simulation in your mind—you situate these sentences and the word “work”, you don’t just substitute other words for “work”. In fact, only after you have run the simulations and situated the meanings, different ones for each situation, can you offer rough paraphrases if you were asked to do so (e.g., “Relationships should not feel like a job that one does just to make ends meet” and “Relationships require effort of the sort that we experience when we have worked hard on a task we want to accomplish and accomplish well”). Additionally, you also know when you are doing this situating process that you should not start calling up images, experiences, and dialogue from physics, since the word “work” works very differently in that domain (think about what “works” now means here as a verb!). You can engage with the situating process in the relationship sentences because—and only because—you have had experiences in the world and/or heard about such experiences (e.g., having people like me as a boy friend). Meaning works just the same way in Yu-Gi-Oh and in biology or any other domain, though in technical domains like Yu-Gi-Oh and biology certain forms of “explicitness” (e.g., in argumentation) are part of the form of life (part and parcel of certain activities and strategies). But explicitness (at the verbal level) does not save you from the need to situate. I, for one, know verbal definitions of the word “work” in physics, but do not know how to use the word to solve problems or even really why physicists define it the way they do. For me it is just like a technical term in Yu-Gi-Oh that I cannot associate with any actual (successful) move in the game. A physicist sees how a concept like “force” operates in a variety of specific situations (problems) and sees the family resemblances across the situations, as well. The physicist can also give (or look up) a very explicit definition of the word “force”. Knowing the definition is almost useless for enabling one to see how force operates as a feature


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of different situations or problems in relation to other features. Seeing how it does so (after a lot of practice) is, however, a great way to learn the definition and remember it. Though, of course, the verbal meanings can sometimes guide as to what to look for in specific situations. Lucidly Functional Situated Meanings—I want young people in and out of school to learn, for some important domains of science, some of the words and concepts of that domain in a situated way, to have situated understandings. Only then can they appreciate those domains as meaningful human enterprises. I will say more about this below. But, for now, I want to introduce the notion of what I will call “lucidly functional situated meanings”. Situated meanings are cases where people can associate a word with specific images, experiences, or dialogues (as in the contrast between “The coffee spilled, go get a mop” versus “The coffee spilled, go get a broom”), not just other words. In lucidly functional situated meanings, the image/action/dialogue with which the word is associated mediates between the word and a particularly clear and apparent “function” (a specific goal, purpose, or task). To see an example of lucidly functional situated meaning, consider the material below printed on a Yu-Gi-Oh card:DCR-011 Cyber Raider Card-Type: Effect Monster Attribute: Dark | Level: 4 Type: Machine ATK: 1400 | DEF: 1000 Description: “When this card is Normal Summoned, Flip Summoned, or Special Summoned successfully, select and activate 1 of the following effects: Select 1 equipped Equip Spell Card and destroy it. Select 1 equipped Equip Spell Card and equip it to this card.” Rarity: Common “Normal Summoned”, “Flip Summoned”, “Special Summoned”, “equipped”, and “destroy” here are all technical terms in Yu-Gi-Oh (and just as explicit as terms in science). They have formal definitions and these can be looked up in Yu-Gi-Oh rulebooks on line (which read like PhD dissertations or legal treatises). But children know what these terms mean in a situated way because they associate them quite clearly with specific actions they make with their bodies in the game (placing cards in certain areas, turning them over, pointing or naming opponent’s cards), actions that have specific functions in the game. They also associate these terms with specific argumentative moves or strategy talk, in which they can engage with others, moves and forms of talk that also often have clear functions (e.g., as a guide in selecting a deck good for a specific set of strategies). The child associates “Flip Summoned” with a well-practiced (physical, embodied) move in the game and that move has a very clear point or function (accomplishes a specific goal within the rules of the game). Ties between words, actions, and functions are all lucid. Everything is situated, but still explicit and technical (and even, in a sense, abstract). In this way, a very arcane vocabulary becomes lucidly

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meaningful to even small children. I cannot pass up the urge to ask why we cannot do something similar and as well in science and math instruction in school. Lucidly functional situated meanings are set up for learners when someone (a teacher or game company) has gone out of their way to render the mappings between words and functions clear by showing how the meanings are spelled out as “moves in a game” (where “move” is both a physical act and a semiotic outcome). Lucidly functional situated meanings go beyond situated meanings in that people are clear on how the images, actions, experiences, or dialogue they associate with a word in a specific situation ties to a clear function, goal, accomplishment, “move in a game”.

What to Teach—From what I have said thus far, it may well sound as if I advocate “hands on”, activity-based, “inquiry” in science classrooms. But situated science instruction is, in my view, neither “anything goes” immersion in activities without much direction or direct telling without immersion. When young people learn Yu-Gi-Oh, no one just lets them muck around and “inquire” on their own; nor, of course, does anyone try to tell them all they need to know before they can play. Rather, learners enter a group that already contains lots of knowledge. The player is immersed in practice, but also guided and directed down certain paths and not others. Direct instruction is given “just in time” or “on demand”. People learn best—if the goal is not just facts, but situated understandings—not via abstract calculations and generalizations, but through experiences (Barsalou 1999a, b; Clark 1997; Hawkins 2005; Kolodner 2006) So, of course, immersion in necessary (but not sufficient). People store these experiences in memory—and human long-term memory is nearly limitless—and use them to run simulations in their minds to prepare for problem solving in new situations (precisely because these simulations lead to situated understandings). These simulations help them form hypotheses about how to proceed in the new situation based on past experiences (Glenberg 1997; Glenberg, Gutierrez, Levin, Japuntich, & Kaschak 2004; Glenberg & Robertson 1999). However, there are strong conditions experiences need to meet to be truly useful for learning. Immersion alone is not enough (Kolodner 1993, 1997, 2006; Schank 1982, 1999). While I follow Kolodner closely here on how experiences can be made more meaningful for learning, I am not endorsing a view that the mind “stores” experiences or “cases” as word and sentence like descriptions or verbal networks (see Gee 2004). First, experiences are most useful for future problem solving if they are structured by specific goals. Second, for experiences to be useful for future problem solving, they have to be interpreted in the sense that the learner thinks—in action and after action—about what sorts of reasoning and strategies worked and did not work to reach goals in the situation. Third, people learn best from their experiences when they get immediate feedback during those experiences so they can recognize and assess their errors and see when and where their expectations (predictions, hypotheses) succeeded or failed. It is important, too, that they are encouraged to explain why their errors and expectation failures happened and what they might have done differently.


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Fourth, learners need ample opportunities to apply their previous experiences—as interpreted—to new similar situations, so they can “debug” and improve their interpretations of these experiences, gradually generalizing them beyond specific contexts. Fifth, learners need to learn from the interpreted experiences and explanations of other people, including both peers and more expert people. Being able to compare and contrast their experiences and explanations with those of others seems crucial. So goals, interpretations, practice, explanations, debriefing, and feedback are some of the elements of good learning experiences. But here is the rub: Where do these come from? How, for instance, does a learner know what is a good goal? How does the learner know what, after having taken an action, is a good or bad outcome? How does the learner recognize a fruitful interpretation, good reasoning, and an effective strategy? A helpful explanation? How does the learner know what to make of feedback and how to respond to it? After all, the learner is a beginner and can’t make this stuff up all by him or herself. These elements—goals, interpretations, practice, explanations, debriefing, and feedback—flow from participation in a social group of some sort, a group who has over time developed conventions (values, norms) about how things are done and what they mean. If there are no conventions there are no goals, interpretations, explanations, debriefing, and feedback that count for or as anything other than a “private language” (Wittgenstein 1958). And conventions are connected to organized groups of people. Another way to put this matter is this: What we might call a “social identity” is crucial for learning. To see the importance of a social identity, consider, as an example, learning to be a SWAT team member. The sorts of goals one should have in a given situation; the ways in which one should interpret and assess one’s experiences in those situations; the sorts of feedback one should receive and react to; the ways in which one uses specific tools and technologies, all these flow from the values, established practices, knowledge, and skills of experienced SWAT members. They all flow from the identity of being or seeking to become such a person. Good learning requires participation—however vicarious—in some social group that helps learners understand and make sense of their experience in certain ways. It helps them understand the nature and purpose of the goals, interpretations, practice, explanations, debriefing, and feedback that are integral to learning. Conventions are like rules of a game. They are discovered and used in joint practice with people whose conventions they are. The conventions of a SWAT team are clear (though, of course, always changing and adapting to new circumstances), clear enough for learning. So are the conventions in various branches of science. They are not always at all clear in classrooms. We can always argue about conventions—dispute them even—but not if there aren’t any or we have no idea what they are.

The Situated Learning Matrix—I want to take up now one example of how the content fetish can be overcome in a pedagogy that stresses situated understandings. This “pedagogy” is embedded in some modern video games, not classrooms. However, I hope to make it clear that the principles behind the pedagogy are applicable far more generally than to video games alone. I will call this pedagogy the “situated learning matrix.”

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So, let’s start with content. Any learning experience has some content, that is, some facts, principles, information, and skills that need to be mastered. So the question immediately arises as to how this content ought to be taught? Should it be the main focus of the learning and taught quite directly? Or should the content be subordinated to something else and taught via that something else? Schools often these days opt for the former approach, good video games for the latter. To see what I mean, let’s take a concrete case, the game SWAT4. There is lots of content to be mastered in learning to be a SWAT team member, some of which is embedded in SWAT4. This content involves things like how a team should form up to enter a room safely, where to position oneself in an unsafe environment, how to subdue people with guns without killing them, facts about the range and firing power of specific weapons, ammunition, and grenades, and much else. But the game does not start with or focus on this content, save for a tutorial that teaches just enough of it so the player can learn the rest by playing within the situated leaning matrix that is the game itself. Rather, the game focuses first and foremost on an identity, that is, being a SWAT team member. What do I mean by calling this an “identity.” I mean a “way of being in the world” that is integrally connected to two things: first, characteristic goals, namely, in this case, goals of the sort a SWAT team characteristically has; and, second, characteristic norms composed of rules or principles or guidelines by which to act and evaluate one’s actions—in this case, these norms are those adopted by SWAT teams. In some games—and this is true of SWAT4—the norms amount, in part, also to a value system, even a moral system (e.g., don’t shoot people, even if they have a gun, until you have warned them you are a policeman; don’t ever enter a room in a way that unduly risks the safety of your team or innocent people in the room; secure any situation before moving on; never lag in vigilance). Without such norms one does not know how to act and how to evaluate the results of one’s actions as good or bad, acceptable or not. Of course, norms and goals are closely related in that the norms guide how we act on our goals and assess those attempts. In a game like SWAT4, I am who I am (a SWAT team member) because I have certain sorts of goals and follow certain norms and values that cause me to see the world, respond to the world, and act on the world in a certain way. To accomplish goals within norms and values, the player/learner must master a certain set of skills, facts, principles, and procedures: must gain certain sorts of content knowledge. However, in a game like SWAT4, players are not left all alone to accomplish this content mastery. Rather, they are given various tools and technologies that fit particularly well with their goals and norms and that help them master the content by using these tools and technologies in active problem solving contexts.

These tools and technologies mediate between—help explicate the connection between—the players’ identity (goals and norms), on the one hand, and the content the player must master on the other. The SWAT team’s doorstop device is a good example (it’s just a rubber doorstop, nothing special). This little tool integrally connects the team’s goal of entering rooms safely and norm of doing so as non-violently as possible with the content knowledge that going in one door with other


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open doors behind you can lead to being blindsided and ambushed from behind, an ambush in which both you and innocent bystanders may be killed. Of course, the SWAT team has many pieces of equipment and technology more sophisticated than the doorstop, but the doorstop is, nonetheless, a “teacher” and “mediator”. Latour (1999) calls a speed bump a “concrete policeman” and we might call the doorstop a “rubber SWAT team member.” Let me be clear, though, what I mean by tools and technologies. I am using these terms expansively. First, in SWAT4 tools and technologies include types of guns, ammunition, grenades, goggles, armor, light sticks, communication devices, door stops, and so on and so forth. Second, tools and technologies also include one’s fellow SWAT team members—artificially intelligent NPCs—to whom the player can issue orders and who have lots of built in knowledge and skills to carry out those orders. This allows players initially to be more competent than they are all by themselves—players can perform before they are fully competent and attain competence through performance. Further, it means that the NPCs model correct skills and knowledge for the player. Third, tools and technologies include forms of built in collaboration with the NPCs and, in multiplayer versions of the game, forms of collaboration, participation, and interaction with real people, peers at different levels of skill. These forms of collaboration go further when the player enters web sites and chat rooms, or uses guides, as part of a community of practice built around the game. Thus, I am counting NPCS as smart tools and real people as tools, too, when we can coordinate ourselves with their knowledge and skills. So, tools and technologies, in all these senses, mediate between identity and content. rendering that content meaningful. As a player/learner I know why, for instance, I need to know about open doors behind me. This knowledge is not just a matter of isolated and irrelevant facts. It’s a matter now of being and becoming a good SWAT team member. And I have the tool to connect the two: the doorstop.

But this mediation means, of course, that players always learn in specific contexts. That is, they learn through specific embodied experiences in the virtual world (the player has a bodily presence in the game through the character or characters he or she controls). And, indeed, one hears a lot these days about learning in context. However, contexts in a game like SWAT4 are special. While they are richly detailed and specific, they are, in reality, not just any old contexts, but richly designed problem spaces containing problems that fall into a set of similar, but varied challenges across the levels of the game. Context here, then, means a goal-driven problem space. As players move through contexts—each containing similar but varied problems—this helps them to interpret and eventually generalize their experiences. They learn to generalize—but always with appropriate customization for specific different contexts—their skills, procedures, principles, and use of information. This essentially solves the dilemma that learning in context can leave learners with knowledge that is too context specific, but that learning out of context leaves learners with knowledge they cannot apply. Players come to see specific solutions as members of more general types of approaches.

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Models—SWAT4, like many good video games, also incorporates a particularly important type of knowledge building and knowledge transforming tool, namely “models” (diSessa, 2000; Lehrer & Schauble, 2000, 2005, 2006; Nersessian, 2002). I will be using the word “model” here in an extensive sense, so let’s start with familiar territory. Consider a child’s model airplane. Real planes are big, complex, and dangerous. A child can safely play with the model plane, trying out things, imagining things, and learning about planes. Of course, models are always simpler than the thing they model and, thus, different types of models capture different properties of the thing being modeled and allow different sorts of things to be tried out and learned. Even a child’s toy plane may be more or less detailed.

Model planes can be used by engineers and scientists, as well. They can use the model plane in a wind tunnel, for example, to test things that are too dangerous or too expensive to do with real planes. They can make predictions based on the model and see if they hold true for the real thing in real life. They can use the model to make plans about how to build a better real plane. The model plane is a tool for thought, learning, and action. Models are just depictions of a real thing (like planes, cars, or buildings) or a system (like atomic structure, weather patterns, traffic flow, eco-systems, social systems, and so forth) that are simpler than the real thing, stressing some properties of the thing and not others. They are used for imaginative thought, learning, and action when the real thing is too large, too complex, too expensive, or too dangerous to deal with directly. A model plane closely resembles the thing it is modeling (a real plane). But models can be ranged on a continua of how closely they resemble the thing they are modeling. They can be, in this sense, more or less “abstract”. One model plane may have lots of details. Another may be a simple balsa-wood wings and frame construction, no frills. Even more abstractly, the blue print of the plane, on a piece of paper, is still a model, useful for some purposes (e.g., planning and building) and not others. It is a model that resembles the plane very little, but still corresponds to the real plane in a patterned way. It’s an abstract picture. We can go even further and consider a model of the plane that is a chart with all the plane’s different parts listed down a set of rows and a set of numbers ranged along the top in columns. The intersection of a part and number would stand for the amount of stress each part is under in flight. For each part we can trace along the row and see a number representing how much stress this part is under in flight. No resemblance, really, left here, but the chart still corresponds to the plane. We can still map from pieces of the chart to pieces of the plane. The chart still represents some properties of the plane, though this is a very abstract picture of the plane, indeed, and one useful for a narrow purpose. However, this type of model—at the very abstract end of the continuum of resemblance—shows us another important feature of models and modeling. It captures an invisible, relatively “deep” (that is, not so readily apparent) property of the plane, namely how parts interact with stress. Of course, we could imagine a much more user-friendly picture (model) of this property, perhaps a model plane all of whose parts are color coded (say in degrees of red) for how much stress they must


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bear in flight (Tufte 2006). This is more user-friendly and it makes clear the mixture of what is readily apparent (the plane and its parts) and what is a deep (less apparent) property, namely stress on parts. These are very basic matters. Models and modeling are basic to human play. They are basic to a great many other human enterprises, as well, for example, science (a diagram of a cell), architecture (model buildings), engineering (model bridges), art ( the clay figure the sculptor makes before making the real statue), video and film (e.g., story boards), writing (e.g., outlines), cooking (recipes), travel (maps), and many more. In facts, models are one of the many signs of the deep connections between play and science. Models are basic to video games, as well. There are, in fact, games in which modeling is the main point of the game. In a game like Civilization, for instance, the depictions of landscapes, cities, and armies are not very realistic. For example, a small set of soldiers stands for a whole army and the landscape looks like a colorful map. However, given the nature of game play in Civilization, these are clearly meant to be models of real things stressing only some of their properties (to see how game play works in Civilization, see videos at: http://media.pc.ign.com/media/ 620/620513/vids_1.html). They are clearly meant to be used for quite specific purposes in the game, for example, modeling large scale military interactions across time and space and modeling the role of geographical features in the historical development of different civilizations.

In a game like SWAT4, the player is very well aware that it matters how and why the designers modeled the SWAT team members, their equipment, their social interactions, and the sorts of environments with which and in which they interact. This is, after all, a “toy” SWAT team in very much the way a model airplane is a toy. But it is more than a toy team—just as a model airplane can be more than a toy—since it models aspects of SWAT teams that are pretty serious and interestingly complex. The game models not just objects, but behaviors, as well, in support of the articulation of values. However, even in games where, at the big picture level, modeling is not integral to game play in terms of their overall virtual worlds—games like World of WarCraft or Half-Life—very often models appear ubiquitously inside the game to aid the player’s problem solving. For example, most games have maps that model the terrain (and maps are pretty abstract models) and allow players to navigate and plan. The bottom of World of WarCraft’s screen is an abstract model of the player’s abilities and skills. Lots of games allow players to turn on and off a myriad of screens that display charts, lists, and graphs depicting various aspects of game play, equipment, abilities, skills, accomplishments, and other things. SWAT4 throws (immerses) the player in simulated experience. However, it helps the player to generalize from this experience in two ways. One way is that the player has multiple experiences in different situations and so can begin to generalize by comparing and contrasting them. The other way is through a myriad of models built into the game. Different screens organize and display much of the content in the game—personnel, skills, weapons, environments—in diagrams that model important aspects of these phenomenon, leaving out less important features.

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In fact, before starting a scenario, players must make choices about personnel, technology, and equipment based on these more abstract representations. At the end of a session of play they are shown numbers and tables that map out and evaluate their performance at quantitative and abstract level. All these models (used as part of play, inside it, not just outside it or by and in themselves) encourage players to engage in strategic planning and reflection in and after action, to think more abstractly about situations and environments in the game, to begin a process of theorizing one’s play. So, why, in the end, are models and modeling important to learning? Because, while people learn from their interpreted experiences—as we have argued above—models and modeling allow specific aspects of experience to be interrogated and used for problem solving in ways that lead from concreteness to abstraction (diSessa, 2004; Lehrer & Schauble, 2006). This is not the only way abstraction grows—we have already seen above that it grows, as well, from comparing and contrasting multiple experiences. But modeling is an important way to interrogate and generalize from experience. Indeed, these two forms of understanding can constantly interact with and feed off each other.

REFERENCES

Barsalou, L. W. (1999a). Language comprehension: Archival memory or preparation for situated action. Discourse Processes, 28, 61–80.

Barsalou, L. W. (1999b). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 577–660. Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press. diSessa, A. A. (2000). Changing minds: Computers, learning, and literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press. diSessa, A. A. (2004). Metarepresentation: Native competence and targets for instruction. Cognition

and Instruction, 22, 293–331. Gardner, H. (1991). The unschooled mind: How children think and how schools should teach. New

York: Basic Books. Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York:

Palgrave/Macmillan. Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling. London:

Routledge. Gee, J. P. (2005). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (2nd ed.). London:

Routledge. Glenberg, A. M. (1997). What is memory for? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 20, 1–55. Glenberg, A. M., Gutierrez, T., Levin, J. R., Japuntich, S., & Kaschak, M. P. (2004). Activity and

imagined activity can enhance young children’s reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 424–436.

Glenberg, A. M., & Robertson, D. A. (1999). Indexical understanding of instructions. Discourse Processes, 28, 1–26.

Gross, L. (2006). Scientific illiteracy and the partisan takeover of biology. PLoS Biol, 4(5), e167. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040167.

Hawkins, J. (2005). On intelligence. New York: Henry Holt. Kolodner, J. L. (1993). Case based reasoning. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Kolodner, J. L. (1997). Educational implications of analogy: A view from case-based reasoning.

American Psychologist, 52, 57–66.


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Kolodner, J. L. (2006). Case-based reasoning. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the learning (pp. ). place: publisher.

Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lehrer, R., & Schauble. (2000). Modeling in mathematics and science. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Advances in instructional psychology: Educational design and cognitive science (Vol. 5, pp. 101–159). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Lehrer, R., & Schauble, L. (2005). Developing modeling and argument in the elementary grades. In T. Romberg, T. P. Carpenter, & F. Dremock (Eds.), Understanding mathematics and science matters (pp. 29–53). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Lehrer, R., & Schauble, L. (2006). Cultivating model-based reasoning in science education. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (pp. 371–387). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nersessian, N. J. (2002). The cognitive basis of model-based reasoning in science. In P. Carruthers, S. Stich, & M. Siegal (Eds.), The cognitive basis of science (pp. 133–155). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shaffer, D. W. (2007). How computer games help children learn. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan. Schank, R. C. (1982). Dynamic memory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schank, R. C. (1999). Dynamic memory revisited. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tufte, E. (2006). Beautiful evidence. Cheshire, CN: Graphics Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Basil

Blackwell. James Paul Gee Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ

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KATHERINE RICHARDSON BRUNA

COMMENTARY ON GEE’S SCIENCE, LITERACY, AND VIDEO GAMES: SITUATED LEARNING

A MOTHER AND MULTICULTURAL TEACHER EDUCATOR’S REFLECTION

As mother to an eleven-year-old boy, I have spent the last seven years in Pokemon denial. I do remember the day my son, then four, in a birthday party favor bag, was given a solitary Pokemon card. I regarded it with the same amusement and smug pride that I did the first time, earlier that year, he was given a candy bar and did not know what to do with it. A practitioner of alternative parenting, I had limited his exposure to junk food, disposable diapers, stereotypical gender roles (my partner was a stay-at-home Dad), and screens (television and computer). So I was proud of how little impressed he was with this novelty of a Pokemon card. I knew it represented an element of popular youth culture to which he would be increasingly exposed with his public schooling (we could not, after all, afford a Waldorf education), but at that time viewed it as just one among a number of challenges that would present themselves in the course of my “mindful” parenting. Seven years and who know how many hundreds of Pokemon cards (and candy bars) later, the denial takes a different form. I do not deny him the game, but I do as much as I can to avoid having to play it with him. I just do not get it. He begins to talk about Pokemon and my brain just shuts off because it is so bewildered by the new language and culture he knows so well and I so little. I have recognized it as a gulf between us, and quite honestly, as a fault in my parenting that I have not had the patience to let him teach me (as he has so earnestly wanted and tried). So imagine what it did to my “Guilty Mom” complex to read Gee’s paper (after all, it is Gee) in which he claims that “the game is nearly as complex – or more so—than what many young children today see in school during their science and math instruction.” I do, as part of my alternative identity, of course, believe in karma. So, here it was. My Pokemon avoidance had come back to plague me. My Pokemon parent guilt would not go away unless I, in full Pokemon fashion, was able to evolve. To begin to tackle the task before me, I did what many others do. I consulted an expert. My son was thrilled when, with interview questions and video camera in hand, I marched into his bedroom and told him I needed some information about Pokemon. His answers to my questions, including his reactions to some of Gee quotes in the paper, were, to say the least very illuminating. I left convinced of two things: 1) There is more to playing Pokemon (and other card and video games) than meets the eye; and 2) James Gee must be spending a lot of time working hard at such play. My son is a probable candidate for an ADD/ADHD diagnosis. In the words of his teachers, he is “impulsive,” an “underperformer,” one who suffers from “quality of work” issues. But listen to what he says in responding to Gee’s quote about the


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complexity of gaming compared to math and science instruction: “School is just plain annoying. Stuff ’s getting harder and boringer and I just don’t think it’s useful.” He goes on to criticize the repetitive nature of schooling – “You basically go over stuff …. You go over it and then we go over that again and go over that again and then go over that again.” His Pokemon game, on the other hand, “is more complex because if you don’t know how to play, you like have no clue what’s happening.” Whereas “school is easy once you get a hold of it and get to know it after awhile,” my son’s Pokemon game, he is saying, ensures his continuous interest-driven learning. In his chapter, Gee accounts for my son’s enthusiasm for Pokemon, and his disinterest in school, by explaining the inherent situatedness of learning in gaming. Card games like Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh or video games like SWAT4, he argues, are particular domains of practice. To be an effective participant or player in these domains, one must master particular sequences of moves and communicate about those using particular sets of technical terms. The meaning of these moves and terms only becomes clear as the play unfolds; it would be impossible, as I know from the bewildering experience of listening to my son talk Pokemon, to comprehend these moves and terms by simply being told about them. Their meaning is situated within the gaming practice. Thus, my son, after describing the information contained on the favorite Pokemon card he is holding, a Rayquaza (this includes its “HP” or “Hit Points”), when further asked what that information means, leans forward and puts the card down. He must put the card into play, so to speak, in order to answer the question. He has, as Gee calls it, a “lucidly functional situated meaning” of his Rayquaza card. As he talks, his movements simulate play, illustrating how his Rayquaza’s HP is really only meaningful when being attacked by or attacking another Pokemon; that is, his card’s meaning is dependent on another card’s meaning (the HP of each card will go up or down in interaction with the other) and for that reason the information contained on the card itself does not mean much of anything until the card is put into play. Therefore, in order to learn Pokemon, you have to play the game, not just be familiar with the isolated properties of the cards. Gee refers to the fixation in schooling on learning isolated properties or facts as a “content fetish.” It is this fact fetish of formal learning that my son describes when he says they go over it and then “go over that again and go over that again and then go over that again.” And, importantly, it is precisely the repetitive nature of fact learning that my son says makes school, as a fifth-grader “harder and boringer.” The boringer the learning my son is required to do, the harder it is for him. What would make school less “annoying” is if there were more times, it seems, when my son had “no clue what’s happening.” The unpredictability of what next move the play will require is an unpredictability absolutely predicated on interaction with another player. This is what generates the complexity Gee attributes to these games. Given what my son has said, it is also what makes them so easy, quite ironically, to learn. Such easy complexity is then what is missing in the schooling experience of my son. It is what is missing, Gee asserts, in science teaching and learning. While student-centered, inquiry-based science classrooms are a step in addressing the learning malaise my son’s comments describe, what is needed, states Gee, is an understanding of the science classroom as a “goal-driven problem

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space,” a situated learning matrix in which talk and activity is always intimately linked to functions and outcomes valued by members in the community of practice. That space of learning, to be maximally effective, would be structured by specific objectives, consist of activities that lead to and are useful for future problem solving and that provide immediate feedback, present opportunities to apply knowledge gained in new, yet similar, situations, and ensure the educative potential of peer and expert (teacher) experience. Gee’s wish list here sounds strikingly familiar. In contrasting the traditional education he sought to dismantle with the “new education” he sought to develop, Dewey (1938) says “To imposition [of learning] from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill, is opposed acquisition of them as means of attaining ends which make direct vital appeal” (p. 19). There is, Dewey insisted, “an intimate and necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education” (p. 20). It is this relation that creates “the most important attitude that can be formed [which is] that of the desire to go on learning” (p. 48). Without it, education is, in Dewey’s words, “mis-educative,” or “arresting,” or “distorting” (p. 25). Or it is, in my son’s words, “annoying.” Of course, Dewey’s “new education,” nearly seventy years later, is still yet-to-be and thus we still have need of educational philosophers, like Jim, who argue against the “greatest of all pedagogical fallacies,” the idea that “a person learns only the particular thing he [sic] is studying at the time.” Collateral learning, a term that Dewey uses to describe unintended or secondary learning outcomes, gets at the idea of an axis of intersecting learning dimensions that Gee similarly evokes with his image of a learning matrix. The formal learning dimension of school, with its content fetish, constrains productive collateral learning by reducing all meaningful learning to just one plane – that characterized by the memorization of the routine of talk and activity. Informal learning, like that exhibited by gaming, in contrast, thrives on collateral learning. This is precisely because of the interaction-driven unpredictability of game moves and movement. Envisioning science teaching and learning as a goal-driven problem space helps remind us of the presence, and importance, of collateral learning because of the way it encourages the building of instructional models that, in containing multiple pathways to mastery, never just teach students only one particular thing. So, in referring back to my son’s experience, there would never be the chance of complacently “getting a hold of it” because there is, in essence, no one “it” to be gotten a hold of. What keeps gamers hooked is the challenge of beating the next level. The addictive additive momentum of gaming rests on the success by which these games help the players project and propel themselves into their future game learning. This kind of momentum in schooling is desperately needed. Dewey (1938) was, above all, concerned that schools should prepare students to take up educated action in a democracy. I doubt Gee would disagree. Yet I cannot help puzzle over the implications of looking at gaming as the model by which we strive to configure situated learning experiences to help students “play” at this


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learning-for-democracy goal. If I have learned one enduring truth from my research on the language- and science-learning of newcomer Mexican immigrant youth, it is that teaching is enriched when it draws upon real world experiences. So, what does a goal-driven problem space, a situated learning matrix, in real science look like? When simulated in a classroom environment, how could the talk and activity of a real science domain in some way prepare students for democratic life? I am sure that if we followed the work of scientists, we would arrive at important answers to these questions, answers that could be greatly illuminated by using Gee’s knowledge about systems and modeling. I am less certain we will arrive at those answers, however, by knowledge about systems and modeling, about gaming, alone. While it is true that, in gaming, you learn to play by playing, it is also true that, in gaming, the ethical consequences of your play are relatively inconsequential. My son has now taught my daughter, aged seven, to play Pokemon and he invariably takes advantage of her limited understanding of the game to the bend the rules in his favor. Aside from some verbal outbursts and card-throwing, his behavior has little impact on her because it is on the level of fantasy only. At the level of reality, however, there are consequences, grave ones, to unethical behavior in science. The design of a goal-driven problem space, a situated science learning matrix, would need to be informed by such scenarios. What we need then is a model that not only theorizes science “play” through a process of interrogation and generalization of science-learning experience, but one that humanizes and democratizes it as well. Without that, science learning will still take place in a vacuum, void of its social and ethical context. Without science students playing the game that way, they will never, as Gee himself and my son so persuasively illustrate, take their learning, and I argue, their living, to another, higher, level.

REFERENCES

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience & education. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. Katherine Richardson Bruna, Iowa State University

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JAMES PAUL GEE

PLAY AND THE REAL WORLD: A RESPONSE TO KATHERINE RICHARDSON BRUNA’S COMMENTARY

Katherine Richardson Bruna brings up a problem: I have talked about games, but what about the “real world”, a much harsher and less forgiving reality? And there is another problem, one that she is kind enough not to mention: one thing that has been unfortunately missing in my work on games is the fact that video games are a form of play. I have certainly not treated video games as work or even “serious”, but I have often stressed learning without mention of play (though I have talked about pleasure, see Gee 2005). But video games are play and they recruit learning in the service of play as much or more than they recruit play in the service of learning. But, then, this seems to leave out the “real world” again. Nonetheless, before getting to the real world (I myself have never liked it that much), let me talk about play. So I want to discuss just one aspect of play, admitting there are many others, some of which fit video games and some of which do not. The aspect of play in which I am interested is connected to “discovery”. To make clear what I mean, consider cats. When cats play, they go around and explore and probe the world. All of sudden—and you can readily see it when it happens—they discover something that intrigues and surprises them. They have seen something new, even in an old place. They are aware of new possibilities—and sometimes they can use these new possibilities to their advantage. Little children seem to do the same thing. So, sometimes, do some scientists. When cats are wandering the house exploring and probing, they may well have goals. They are not, I think, just moving around randomly. But as they push and pull on things and the world talks back to them, their goals change. They are open, from the outset, to new possibilities. They appear, to me at least, to be looking for and open to discoveries. I am, then, going to use the term “discovery” in just this simple way. I will deepen the term a bit below, but not much. I don’t think it needs a lot more deepening. I will also later add another type of cat play to the mix. I want to use the game Portal to develop a particular perspective on games, learning, and play, play in the sense of “discovery” that I have just delineated via cats. Let’s start with the following remark from a Valve website advertising the game:

The game is designed to change the way players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment … [http://orange.half-life2.com/ portal.html-11/22/07]

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How does Portal do this—”change the way players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment” (and doesn’t this sound a bit like cats at play?)? Portal is a game developed by Valve (a developer famous for the game Half-Life and its sequels). The game was released in a bundle package called The Orange Box for PC and Xbox 360 on Oct. 10, 2007 and for PlayStation 3 on Dec. 11, 2007. The game is set in a 3D world and driven by a minimal but fascinating story. The player has a “portal gun” and can make a blue portal and an orange one. If the player goes through one portal, she comes out the other (your avatar in the game is a female). The portals obey a law of conservation of momentum, so if the player goes in one fast, she comes out the other one equally fast and can, thus, fly across large spaces if the second portal is, for example, high up. The player must navigate complex environments—sometimes with hazards like lasers, electrical beams, and toxic waste—with just this tool (the portal gun can also pick up crates and place them on switches). For example, you often have to make portals to redirect electric beams so they hit specific targets that operate platforms. In the game, someone appears to be testing both you and your intelligence and by the end you realize they intend to kill you. As with the classic Half-Life, a minimal ending gives you just a glimpse of what is going on. Portal is a “problem game” set in an interesting world. You solve one specific class of problems with a specific tool, but in a world that sets up a “real world” like environment built to enhance and facilitate just such problem solving with just such a tool. Portal makes clear in a very overt way how the “fun” of a game is learning to solve problems and eventually gain some degree of mastery over both the problems and the tools that help solve the problems.

Portal gives the player a new “tool”—the portal gun—that allows the player to probe and explore the virtual world in new and specific ways that can lead to discoveries. Players discover things that intrigue and surprise them. They see something new. They are aware of new possibilities. And they use these new possibilities to their advantage in different ways in order to play the game and “win” it. It just so happens that a number of these discoveries are, in fact, discoveries about physics, though physics as “content” in no way defines the game. Rather, it is physics as possibilities for action that define game play in Portal.

This sense of play and discovery in Portal is not irrelevant to how knowledge is built in the real world. There is a world out there: the “real world”. People who want to produce knowledge—academic or otherwise—often find the real world too complex to take on all at once. To solve this problem they use tools that operate on the real world to solve certain specific types of problems. The tools they use cause them to look at the world in a certain way, sometimes in a new way. They learn to look at the world in terms of the affordances of the tools they have, what the tools are good for. These tools are “… designed to change the way players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment.”

Knowledge tools (like microscopes, models, geometry, or a pair of birding binoculars) cause us to foreground and pay attention to certain aspects of the world and to background other aspects. In that sense, knowledge tools always create

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“virtual worlds”. The real world is turned into just the aspects of it that our tools can leverage for powerful problem solving of a certain sort. Cats’ very agile front paws and keen sense of smell, as well as their other marvelous “tools”, cause them to probe the world in certain ways and to see the world in certain ways. When I say “see the world in certain ways”, I mean to “surmise the possibilities in their environment”—what can be done and can be made to happen—in certain ways. Humans can create or be given tools that “change the way [they] approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment.” Of course, my point about tools—like the portal gun—that they change the way people approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment could be exemplified with many examples from science as new technological tools change how we look at and act on the world to gain new knowledge. The point, in that sense, is obvious. But, then, for some people science is work not play (though, in my experience, many scientists and scholars would deny this). So let me tell a different story, one about a young girl at play. A young, working class girl who was quite disaffiliated with school became part of a club that was working to help girls become “tech savvy” (Hayes, in press). The girl loved to play the Sims, the best selling video game in history. In the Sims, the player builds and sustains houses and buildings, families, and whole neighborhoods and communities. The girl wanted badly to turn real clothes into virtual clothes for her Sims (her virtual humans) in The Sims. The people running the club told her that they though this could probably be done using Adobe Photo Shop, but they didn’t know themselves how to do it. The girl found a version of Photo Shop and spent many highly focused hours learning how to take pictures of clothes she liked in stores and turn them into virtual clothes. The process is technical and complex. To do this the girl had to gain understanding of concepts like texture, layering, mesh, hue, perspective, and design. The girl made (and re-designed) clothes for her Sims and continued to work over months on perfecting the process. Eventually, the girl gave the virtual clothes she designed away to her friends—girls who also played and loved the Sims—who came to admire greatly her skill and taste. She then discovered that she could upload her virtual clothes for strangers to use and soon had over 400 people using and praising her clothes. Her status and her self-concept rose greatly, as she made clothes for her local friends and her global audience. There are people who say that the Sims is not a game, because it has no “win state.” They call it a “sand box” or even—a phrase I dislike—a “doll house.” However, clearly the Sims gave this girl a set of tools with which to see new possibilities for action. One of the possibilities she saw was the idea of turning real world clothes into virtual clothes. Then she got a new tool, Adobe PhotoShop. This allowed her to approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a new environment, now the real world and the virtual world mixed, matched and melded.

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One of the new possibilities she surmised was this: When asked what she had learned from her experience, what it made her think about her future, she said she had decided that she would like to go on in life and “work with computers”—ironically, perhaps, not clothing design. She said that she had discovered that computers could make you feel “powerful”. She had surmised new possibilities in computers and in life and had done so out of play, not school. This young girl is an example of what is becoming a leitmotif of our age. At the same time as schools engage in test prep, skill-and-drill, and “the basics,” we live in the age of “Pro-Ams” (Anderson, 2006; Leadbeater & Miller, 2004; Toffler & Toffler, 2006). Pro-Ams are people who have, as amateurs, become experts at whatever they have developed a passion for. Many of these are young people who use the Internet, communication media, digital tools, and membership in often virtual, sometimes real, communities of practice to develop technical expertise in a plethora of different areas such as digital video, video games, digital storytelling, machinima, fan fiction, history and civilization simulations, music, graphic art, political commentary, robotics, anime, fashion design (e.g., for Sims in The Sims), and nearly every other endeavor the human mind can think. These Pro-Ams have passion and go deep rather than wide. In fact, it seems that developing such a passion is a sine qua non of deep learning that leads to expertise. At the same time, they are often adept at pooling their skills and knowledge with other Pro-Ams to bring off bigger tasks or to solve larger problems. These are people who don’t know what everyone else knows, only how to engage with other Pro-Ams to put knowledge to work to fulfill their intellectual and social passions. The young girl is fast on her way to being a Pro-Am. She has not yet sold her clothes, only given them away. She has become a classic example of what the Tofflers (Toffler & Toffler, 2006) call a “prosumer”, a consumer who produces and transforms, not just passively consumes, for off-market status and as part of a community of like-minded experts. As the Tofflers point out, such prosumer activity often eventually impacts on markets when people like this little girl eventually sell their goods or services—and, indeed, this little girl recently opened a store in Second Life and now sells her clothes for Linden dollars, the currency of Second Life which can be exchanged for “real money” (if you consider the worth of the current U.S. dollar “real”). In fact, the Tofflers believe such activity, though unmeasured by economists, is a big part of the global economy and will be a yet bigger part in the future. Is this girl learning something “serious?” What she is learning is not a school subject or defined by an academic label or the name of an academic discipline. Nonetheless, it seems “serious” to me. Of course, the girl finds what she is doing engaging because she has a passion for it and the word “serious” probably does not come to her mind. What she is doing is certainly not trivial and is much more deeply relevant to both her future and the global world than is much of what she is doing (or ignoring) in school. We have come full circle; play has become “serious”, impacting on futures, work, and the global economy—serious, indeed. And this reminds me of another

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aspect of cats at play. Cats use play to practice and perfect skills they will use for “real” if they have to hunt and defend themselves and their territories. The young girl is playing at what are, in fact, 21st century identities and skills. School work, for the most part, today leads to no such thing for most young people. And, thus, we return to the “real world.”

REFERENCES

Anderson, C. (2006). The long tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more. New York: Hyperion.

Gee, J. P. (2005). Why video games are good for your soul: Pleasure and learning. Melbourne: Common Ground.

Hayes, E. (in press). Girls, gaming, and trajectories of technological expertise. In Y. B. Kafai, C. Heeter, J. Denner, & J. Sun (Eds.), Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New perspectives on gender, games, and computing. Boston: MIT Press.

Leadbeater, C., & Miller, P. (2004). The Pro-Am revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our society and economy. London: Demos.

Toffler, A., & Toffler, H. (2006). Revolutionary wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives. New York: Knopf.

James Paul Gee Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Arizona State University

A. J. Rodriguez (ed.), Science Education as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy, 23–59 © 2010 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

ALBERTO J. RODRIGUEZ AND CATHY ZOZAKIEWICZ

2. FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION OF MULTIPLE LITERACIES THROUGH SCIENCE EDUCATION AND

LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES1

INTRODUCTION

It is daunting to think about the recent turn that science education has taken in the United States. When Sputnik put the former Soviet Union on the top of the space race food chain in 1957, the United States Government scurried in multiple directions to make science education a priority in our schools. It seems, however, that since then we have been in a perpetual state of “education reform” that continues to be (mis)guided by national education mandates. These federal laws are characteristically more based on political slogans than they are on sound educational research. President Bill Clinton’s Educate America Act (1994), Goals 2000, for example, stated that by the year 2000, the high school graduation rate was to be at least 90%, the student achievement gap was to be completely eliminated, and US students were going to rank first in achievement in mathematics in science in the world. Although well intended, we all know that we fell rather short of meeting these goals. From the Clinton era, with a national education act driven by zealous optimism, we have now moved to the Bush era, with an educational act driven by punitive accountabilism – the No Child Left Behind Act (2001). One of the casualties of this new education act is the science curriculum. In fact, in the current curriculum food chain, science has now become the “endangered species” due to its “not tested in every grade; therefore less worth teaching” status.

The current 180-degree turn that the science curriculum has taken in the shadows of No Child Left Behind has caused teacher and science educators like ourselves to bring into the open the old love affair we have always had with Language Arts. In other words, in our view teaching science has always involved the teaching of the multiple literacies required to deeply understand: science content knowledge (e.g. define chloroplast); the process of doing science (e.g. write a hypothesis to test …); the laboratory skills to do science (e.g. describe how to prepare a wet mount of epithelial cells); and to deeply understand the importance of being a critical consumer/producer of science knowledge (e.g. explain your views on stem cell research). However, when we were recruiting teachers to participate in a project that involved the integration of culturally/socially relevant science teaching with learning technologies, we became aware that there were fewer and fewer teachers actually teaching science at the elementary school level.

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In addition, those who were actually teaching science were under increasing pressure not to do so in order to make more time available for teaching literacy and mathematics—the twin curriculum sisters favored by No Child Left Behind. We were fortunate to strike an agreement in one of the few schools we visited in which the least favored curriculum stepsister—science—was being taught every week. We also managed to secure the full participation of all of the grade 4 through 6 teachers in a typically economically disadvantaged and urban school in our area. The key to our partnership was—as the school principal put it—”to ensure that we would be helping the teachers learn how to integrate language arts into the science curriculum.” Therefore, in this chapter we share some of the specific ways in which we sought to assist teachers in better integrating the multiple literacies required to effectively teach science in diverse schools contexts. We also discuss how socio-transformative constructivism (Rodriguez, 2002, 1998)—the theoretical framework guiding our study—enabled us to establish a community of practice in which we could explore the challenges and successes of implementing this intervention study. Herein, intervention is defined as a teacher-centered approach to professional development by which the researchers and teachers collaboratively explore areas in need of improvement (e.g., pedagogy, content knowledge, curriculum, etc.) and take steps to systematically evaluate and address the identified areas. Therefore, instead of a top-down and decontextualized approach to professional development, we collaborated with teachers to address the science curriculum areas they thought were in most need of attention at their school site first. In short, in this chapter we will share only a small fraction of the findings originating from the Integrating Instructional Technology into Science Education (I2TechSciE) Project. We start below by presenting a brief review of the literature on the integration of language literacy and science education. This is followed by a discussion on the importance of integrating learning technologies in the science classroom—an area that has its own and constantly evolving form of literacy. Finally, sociotransformative constructivism is discussed as the conceptual compass that enabled us to navigate through the various frameworks being proposed out there and that gave our project more focus and direction. We close with some suggestions that should assist other researchers, administrators and teacher educators who may be interested in investigating and/or implementing similar intervention and transformative professional development projects.

Linking Science and Language Literacies

Consider the following paragraphs,

First, I’m going to microwave some popcorn then I’m going to watch a show on the greenhouse effect. I’m so glad that my VCR is fixed now and I had a chance to record the show. I wish I could just go all digital and be able to TiVo everything.

FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION

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Anyway, I don’t know why I am so hooked on these science shows. I should feel good about myself because it’s not my fault that the hole in the ozone layer is getting bigger. I drive a hybrid.

It is not difficult to imagine that a student could be reading this excerpt from a novel or even overhearing a conversation between two peers at school. To be able to make sense of this passage, one has to be able to comprehend the following: Microwave (used as a verb); green house effect; record (used as a verb); VCR (videocassette recording); “go all digital” (an expression); TiVo (used as a verb); ozone layer; hybrid. These are terms, verbs, adjectives, and new expressions all originating from advances in scientific research. An example of how the discourse of science and of scientists eventually influences everyone’s discourse in daily life.

Whether teacher educators or teachers choose to integrate literacy education with science education in their classrooms, their students are already doing this in their everyday discourse. If we start by acknowledging this reality, then we can move to tackle a more complicated issue. What steps can we take to more effectively engage teachers and their students in the pursuit of a more critical understanding of science? We know that there are many institutional factors (e.g. standardized testing, tracking, etc) and sociocultural factors (e.g. low SES, language ability, etc) that influence what and how teachers teach and what and how students learn (Rodriguez, 2004). However, in order to focus the discussion in this chapter and to address the above question, we need to explore in more detail how the convergence of multiple literacies must be enacted by students if meaningful learning is to take place. The role of the teacher in this case then goes beyond being a dispenser of knowledge (transmissive approach) or a facilitator of knowledge (constructivist approach). The teacher must also become more aware of how to set up a learning environment that is more conducive to triggering students’ critical engagement with the official knowledge, its applications and its sociocultural relevance.

Jay Lemke (2004) provides a good example of the multiple literacies a student must activate in the science classroom. In this case, the student (John) is in a chemistry class, and within this period he was expected to interpret: – A stream of rapid verbal English from his teacher – The writing and layout information on a overhead transparency – Writing, layout, diagrams, chemical symbols, and mathematical formulas in the

open textbook in front of him – The display of his hand-held calculator – Writing, layout, diagrams, symbolic notations, and mathematics in his personal

notebook – The action and speech of other students, including their manipulations of

demonstration apparatus (39). Lemke (2004) adds, “John quite often had to integrate and coordinate these

semiotic modalities either simultaneously or within the span of a few minutes” (39). One can only imagine how much more complicated and demanding these semiotic modalities could be if the student were a second language learner.


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Thus, a teacher who is aware of the multiple literacies required to learn science for understanding would take purposeful steps to implement a variety of pedagogical strategies to maximize students’ engagement and learning. Unfortunately, when we share these ideas with practicing teachers and student teachers, we often hear in response, “How am I going to find the time to fit more activities in my curriculum?” or “I have so much to cover, I don’t have time to add anything else.” These responses point to need to better articulate the message—teaching science (or any other curriculum subject) is not just a decontextualized package of official and culture-less knowledge to be transmitted to students through lectures and laboratory exercises so that it can then be neatly tested. Teaching and learning are a lot more complicated than that. However, in an era of punitive accountability, teachers often feel that they have little power over these situations. This is one of the issues we address in our study by helping teachers become more aware of how they can more purposefully integrate multiple literacies while teaching science. In essence, what were attempting to do is not new. For instance, the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996), the revised PreK-12 English Language Proficiency Standards in the Core Content Areas (TESOL, 2005) and the English Language Arts Standards (California State Board of Education, 1997) all clearly highlight the importance of students being able to make accurate observations and note details; compare and contrast; predict; identify the logical sequence of events; take an informed position and defend it; draw conclusions; interpret data; represent knowledge in different ways (draw a figure; write a report; make a table, etc). In addition, several studies have reported that students are more engaged in science and perform better on the subject when they receive language literacy support simultaneously (Their & Daviss, 2002; Echevarria, Vogt, Short, 2004; Moje, Collazo, Carrillo, & Marx, 2001). In short, we have a very challenging conundrum. On one hand, we have the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act driven by a politics of punitive accountability. This policy forces many teachers to teach to the test (i.e., mainly using a transmissive, drill and practice pedagogy). The same policy also forces many teachers to avoid teaching science altogether unless it is tested (e.g. in California, science is only tested at grade 5 in elementary schools). Now, on the other hand, we have national standards for every subject (including science, language arts, technology and English language learners) urging teachers to implement pedagogical approaches that are in direct opposition to what they NCLB Act is forcing them to do. We find that the theoretical framework we used to guide this project is particularly suited to manage and investigate these kinds of challenges because of its dialogic, grassroots, and responsive approach. This framework is discussed next.

Using Sociotransformative Constructivism to Link Multiple Literacies in the Science Classroom

Sociotransformative constructivism (sTc) is a theoretical orientation to teaching and learning which affirms that knowledge is socially constructed and mediated by cultural, historical, and institutional contexts (Rodriguez, 2002, 1998). However,


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this orientation goes beyond this affirmation by creating praxis with the participants to collaboratively deconstruct the structures of power that sustain the ruling education hegemony. sTc is an orientation that draws from multicultural education (as a theory of social justice) and social constructivism (as a theory of learning). For us, it makes good sense that if we wish teachers to learn to teach for diversity and for understanding, we must use a theoretical framework that merges multicultural education tenets with a sociocultural theory of learning. In our work, learning to teach for diversity means learning to use more gender inclusive and socially relevant teaching strategies; learning to teach for understanding involves learning to implement more critically engaging, inquiry-based, and intellectually meaningful pedagogical strategies. Therefore, through sTc, learning to teach for diversity and for understanding can be accomplished by enacting four interconnected components: The dialogic conversation, authentic activity, meta-cognition, and reflexivity. Due to space constraints, these terms will only be explained briefly below.2 According to Bakhtin (1986; 1981), the dialogic conversation involves engaging in a deeper kind of exchange through which the goal is to understand not just what is being said, but the reasons (emotional tone, ideological and conceptual positions) the speaker chooses to say what he or she says in that particular context. Thus, developing trust amongst the project participants was paramount to establishing a productive exchange of ideas and a fruitful community of practice. Authentic activity involves hands-on, minds-on activities that are also socio-culturally relevant and tied to the everyday life of the learner. This implies that it was not enough for us to highlight the importance of more gender or culturally inclusive curriculum in—for example—space exploration. We also needed to model how this curriculum could be enacted, by engaging teachers in authentic activities and providing support for them to link language literacy with science content knowledge. The third element of sTc is metacognition. This term is defined as the “knowledge, awareness, and control of one’s own learning” (Baird 1990, cited in Gunstone, 1994). As such, teachers and students should be encouraged to ask questions about the purpose for and the reasoning behind certain activities. In this way, the learner could become more reflective about his/her preferred learning patterns and how they interact in preventing or assisting her/him in learning new concepts. The final element, reflexivity, involves becoming critically aware of how one’s own cultural background, socioeconomic status, belief systems, values, education, and skills influence what we consider it is important to learn. Through reflexivity, one becomes more aware of how issues of power determine who has access to education and to better opportunities in life, and the role each one of us plays in maintaining or disrupting the status quo. Thus, through sTc, students (and their teachers) are supported to activate multiple literacies in order to engage more critically with the prescribed content knowledge. We investigated this approach by using a mixed method research design that is summarized below.


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Integrating Learning Technologies with Science and Language Literacy Education—We recognized that having a clear theoretical framework to guide the study was not enough to effect change in the economically disadvantaged schools in which we worked. Therefore, our project provided the equipment, materials, and laptops necessary for integrating learning technologies with the science curriculum. This is an important aspect of our study because we were again seeking to address the issues typically identified in the literature as obstacles for advancing teacher professional development. For example, it has been reported that when it comes to learning technologies, these factors prevent long-lasting change: the lack of technical support (Cuban, 2001; Nellen, 2002; Pflaum, 2004), unreliable technologies and regular upkeep (Cuban, 1999; Nellen, 2002) the provision of teacher time for development (Becker and Riel, 2001; Pflaum 2004), limited content and technical knowledge (Lee, 2003; Pedersen & Yerrick, 2001), misalignment of technology use with intended curriculum (Peck, Cuban, & Kilpatrick, 2002; Yerrick & Hoving, 1999), and commitment of administration to long term change (Cuban, 1986 & 2001). Perhaps the most influential of all factors affecting the use of computers in classrooms are the accountability structures imposed on today’s teachers to stress basic literacy skills (Becker & Riel, 2000; Cuban; 2001). In light of these pressures, it is no wonder that many teachers perceive the accommodation of new technologies and pedagogies as a risky venture with few rewards. As a result, teachers are slow to modify their practice—even when learning technologies are available tools that have great potential for fostering a constructivist transformation in their classrooms (Cuban, 2001; Pflaum, 2004). We took these issues to heart and consequently addressed them in the design of our study to ensure that teachers were provided with on-going, responsive and on-site support (Rodriguez & Zozakiewicz, 2005). By avoiding the pitfalls identified by others, we sought to focus our energies on investigating the challenges and successes associated with implementing this intervention study.

Methodology

Design of the I2TechSciE Intervention Project—Integrating Instructional Technologies with Science Education (I2TechSciE) was a three-year longitudinal professional development research project that took place in the Pacific Southwest of the United States. I2TechSciE was collaborative partnership formed between one local K-6 school, which served a culturally diverse student population and three university faculty members at a local state university. The principal researchers of the project are university professors with extensive experiences in multicultural education, teacher education, science education and learning technologies. As teacher educators/scholars, we bring different cultural and gender identities to this research study: one professor is an Anglo woman, one is an Anglo male, and one is a Latino who is bilingual in English and Spanish. The participating teachers included all the fourth, fifth and sixth grade


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teachers on-site at the school, including the special education, bilingual and regular education teachers. Ten teachers were involved: 2 Latinas, 3 Latinos, 1 Anglo male, and 4 Anglo females, with varying years of teaching experience from 2–15 years3. The I2TechSciE school site has a culturally diverse population of students including 56.5% Latino/a, 5.6% African-American, 18.8% Anglo students, 2.6% Asian, 0.6% First Nations and 16% Other (Such as bicultural). Each year, on average, the school population is 37% English Language Learners, with 37% of students being eligible for free lunch. Recruitment and selection of this school was also based upon the commitment of all the teachers to work collaboratively throughout the entire three years of the project. During year one, teachers helped the research team recruit a representative sampling of twenty students from each grade 4, 5 and 6, participating classroom to be followed each year through grade 6. Each consecutive year the I2TechSciE students in grade level focus groups were placed in classrooms with the participating teachers to ensure continuity and to study the longitudinal influence the project had on the students’ attitudes toward and achievement in science.

I2TechSciE Professional Development Experiences—Professional development experiences were continuously offered throughout the I2TechSciE Project. These included providing two-week professional development institutes each summer for the participating teachers. Each summer institute was collaboratively planned with the participating teachers and was designed to meet their professional needs based upon our on going conversations, classroom visits and written pre-institute surveys. The institutes centered upon modeling science learning activities that were sTc in orientation and focused on the integration of science content with literacy and learning technologies. During the institute, teachers developed sTc science curriculum units that were implemented in their classrooms during the following year. In addition, during the regular school year, teachers attended and actively participated in monthly meetings to share the classroom activities they were implementing with their project colleagues and to reflect on how such activities were impacting their students. These meetings were also used to troubleshoot any challenges that arose in meeting the goals of the grant, and provided the opportunity for additional professional development experiences. Teachers received financial stipends for their professional time during both the summer institutes and yearly participation in the project. The budget for the project allowed for the purchase of state of the art learning-technology equipment that could be housed for easy access at the participating school site. This instructional technology included a cart of nine I-Books with an Airport station that allowed any classroom to become an Internet ready computer lab, printers, digital and digital video cameras, CD burners, scientific probes with software to collect and analyze scientific data, a school-wide subscription to Brain-Pop (a live website that displays informational movies on all subject areas specifically designed for public school teachers and students), and a variety of science-related computer software.


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Two very unique facets of I2TechSciE as an intervention project were its longitudinal 3-year design and its responsive, on-site and on-going support (Rodriguez & Zozakiewicz, 2005). Research staff made regular classrooms visits to provide on-site support, such as: helping with classroom instruction, modeling learning activities with students, collaboratively planning with teachers, and supporting teachers and students in the implementation of a variety of learning technologies. When we visited classrooms, we acted as both teacher supporters and researchers, helping with the teaching and learning process, and gathering data to better understand how the science integrated with multiple literacies learning activities and technology being implemented were impacting students’ participation and achievement in science. This unique part of the design also allowed us to see, first hand, what challenges and struggles emerged for the teachers as they were working to change their science teaching practices.

Data Collection and Analysis—We collected multiple data sets during year one and two of the project. To begin, the participating teachers were interviewed two times during the first year and 3 times during the second year of the project. These interviews were videotaped in order to capture the nonverbal nuances of communication in addition to the verbal transcripts. Beyond the teacher interviews, we held 2 same-gender focus group interviews with the 4th, 5th and 6th grade students during each year of the project, one at the end of the fall semester and one at the end of spring semester. During year two, we had follow-up interviews with the same focus group of students, though now in new grade levels with different teachers (who were also participating in the project). In addition to such data sets, we completed and collected on-going surveys, transcripts and video clips of monthly meetings, classroom activities, field notes, district documents, and various school assessment artifacts. Finally, for each grade level, we collected lesson plans, assessment artifacts, and pre and post concept maps that were completed as tests at the beginning and end of each science unit. For this paper, we are concentrating on several sections of analysis within the larger research project that occurred during year one and two of the project. Our interest here is in sharing the analysis of the interviews, artifacts, concept maps and field notes that directly pertain to the strategy of Modeling and Demonstrating, that emerged during year one and two of the project, particularly that data that are evidence of how science and literacy were being integrated in the teachers’ classrooms and the impact of those practices.

Using an ethnographic approach to data gathering and analysis (Lincoln &

Guba, 1985; Spradley, 1979), all concept map data, interview and meeting transcripts, classroom artifacts, videos and photographs, and classroom field notes were reviewed multiple times by each member of the research team. As themes emerged, the team ascertained their validity and strength by triangulating surfacing claims across multiple data sets. Since multiple data sources and all three members of the research team reviewed all data (Erickson, 1986), we were


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able to draw relevant insights about the impact this intervention project had on the participating teachers and researchers’ efforts to learn to teach for diversity and understanding with the integration of learning technologies and science and literacy during the first two years of I2TechSciE. We were also able to determine what strategies were emerging that proved beneficial to the participants as we were all collaborating toward making classrooms more culturally gender inclusive, and inquiry-based (sTc) learning spaces for science with the inclusion of learning technologies. One set of strategies that emerged as being particularly useful for our project teachers and their diverse students was Modeling and Demonstrating.

Findings

Within the larger research project, overall data assured us that all of the participating teachers’ beliefs were ideologically congruent with the equity and multicultural goals of this project, and most of the teachers made significant progress toward the project’s goals. However, as the project continued, it became clear that the level of progress being made and the degree of change that was occurring in each teacher’s science practice differed in amount and pace. This resulted in a set of challenges emerging during the first year of the project, as we worked side by side with the participating teachers in their school contexts to support them in meeting the project goals. The challenges that emerged included: teachers following through with their stated professional development goals; establishing a professional community of practice; and managing our own (the researchers’) patience and sense of urgency to effect change (see Figure 1). As explained earlier, this project was an intervention project that was guided by a sociotransformative constructivist framework with specific goals for collaborating with teachers to integrate multiple literacies in the teaching and learning of science. Therefore, as challenges arose, we took steps to systematically address them. We enacted three broad strategies to manage these challenges: 1. Modeling and demonstrating; 2. Prompted praxis; and, 3. Students as change agents (see Figure 1). In a separate manuscript (Rodriguez, Zozakiewicz, & Yerrick, 2005), we explain how the strategy, Prompted Praxis, was implemented. Similarly, in a book chapter (Rodriguez, Zozakiewicz, & Yerrick, 2008), we explain how the strategy, Students’ as Change Agents, was put into practice. For this chapter, we focus our discussion on the first intervention strategy, Modeling and Demonstrating.

Modeling and Demonstrating

This intervention strategy involved activities in which the principal investigators worked closely with teachers in multiple contexts to illustrate how science practices could include the teaching of multiple literacies, using learning technologies, while still meeting the state science content standards. The strategy Modeling and Demonstrating includes five action components. Action components


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Challenges

Following through with Professional Development

Goals

Patience & Managing Our Own Sense of

Urgency to Effect Change

Modelling & Demonstrating

Prompted Praxis

Pre- & Post Concept Maps

Students as Change Agents

Student Agency

Tech Wizards

Tech Coaches

Sharing Students' Artifacts

Sharing Preliminary

Analysis

InterventionStrategies

Action Components

Summer Institute

On-Site, On-Going,& Responsive Support

Team Teaching

Unit Collaborative Planning w/

Concept Maps

Designing & Implementing sTc Activities

Before Teaching

During Teaching

After Teaching

Establishing a Professional Community

of Practice

Monthly Meetings

Students Leading Parents' Night

Figure 1. Strategies and their respective action components used to address the challenges encountered.

are the set of steps taken during the project to enact the various aspects of the intervention strategy. These included: 1. Unit collaborative planning with concept maps; 2. Summer institutes; 3. On-going, on-site and responsive support; 4. Team teaching; and, 5. Monthly meetings (see Figure 1). Our analysis indicates that all the action components had a positive impact on the participating teachers’ practices. Given space constraints we cannot explicate each action component here. However, since the focus of this chapter is on the integration of multiple literacies in the


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science classroom, we will highlight below two major themes that cut across the various action components we implemented within the Modeling and Demonstrating intervention strategy. These themes are: 1. Using learning technologies to represent knowledge through narrative writing; and 2. Using learning technologies to represent knowledge through model building. Table 1 explains four examples of the kinds of integrated science/literacy (SCILIT) activities that were developed, modeled and implemented in teachers’ classrooms during the first two years of the project. Next, an example is discussed for each of the themes to provide more detail on how SCILIT activities were enacted within the project, as well as evidence for their impact on teachers and their students.

I. Using learning technologies to represent knowledge through narrative writing—In response to the project teachers’ needs and requests to infuse more literacy into the science curriculum, we began to develop activities that would allow students to represent their science content knowledge through different forms of narrative writing. When possible, we also included the use of learning technologies, such as software programs, to support these science/literacy activities. One example of such an activity was developed for the 5th grade teachers within their science unit on Water. Here, students were asked to write a narrative story about the water cycle using the software program called Inspiration (www.inspiration.com). This software allows students to develop concept maps (Novak & Gowin, 1984) that can also include symbols, clip-art images, and narrative text to represent their understanding of science concepts and their interrelationship (hierarchical knowledge). The lesson involved students—working in small groups– reading about the water cycle in their science textbooks, watching a short informational video about this topic on BrainPop (a live website that displays informational movies on all subject areas specifically designed for public school teachers and students; www.brainpop. com), reviewing the phases of the water cycle in a whole group discussion that lead to diagramming and labeling of the cycle using key science terms on the front board, and modeling the use of the software program, Inspiration. It is important to note that teachers were encouraged to pay close attention to gender, language ability, and other special needs and/or cultural background when assigning students to a group. The literature on gender inclusion suggests that same gender grouping may offer more opportunities for girls to have access to manipulate equipment and participate more fully in science activities (Clewell, & Campbell, 2002). Similarly, placing second language learners with peers who are already bilingual provides multiple opportunities for support (Garcia, 2005).

To address different learning modalities, a handout was also created to guide the

students through this SCILIT (Science/Literacy) activity. The handout asked the students to first define some of the key science terms that would need to be utilized in meaningful ways in their story of the water cycle (such as precipitation,


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condensation). Next, the handout gave an example of a possible first scene in the water cycle story, where students were to imagine they were drops of water, and write about their journey through the water cycle from the drop of water’s perspective. Modeling supports the introduction of the handout and assignment, as well as discussing how the water cycle happens all around us. The excerpt from the water cycle handout below illustrates the narrative sample shared with students on the handout to get them started:

A Drop of Water Meets Mr. Big Foot

I’m a drop of water (in liquid form), and I was just hanging out with my brothers and sisters in a little pool of us—you know, a pool of water (collection)— when all of a sudden, Mr. Big Foot comes by!!! This guy doesn’t look where he is going, so he steps on the pool and sends my brothers and sisters splashing all around. Lucky for me, I held on to that tiny, little space between the sole of the shoe and the heel. I hid there quietly while Mr. Big Foot kept on walking as if nothing happened. He walked and he walked and I was getting hotter and hotter. I was so hot that I evaporated (gas form) right off his shoe. I started to float up and up the air and Mr. Big Foot got smaller and smaller as I floated higher and higher into the blue sky. On my way up, I started to see all my brothers and sisters floating up around me. I was so happy to see them. We smiled and waved at each other. As we floated higher, more and more friends in gas form showed up. It also began getting colder and colder. We started to come together, as the air got more and more crowded, and we were shivering from the cold. When all of the sudden, we all began to condense (condensation) back into water droplets. We were all huddled together and formed a big gray cloud. We started to get very heavy and we could not just hang on to each other anymore…. All of a sudden, poof!! There it went down Joe and Patricia, followed by my uncle Bob and my cousin Tina, we all started to fall down (precipitation) and as we fell on the surface of things we…. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? How do the water droplets go back where they started?? Use the science terms you learned.

Several scenarios starting places were given as options for the students to choose, such as a drop of water in the bath tub, or a drop of water at the local beach, or students could come up with one of their own, to help them make a connection to the social relevance of this topic. In addition, during the preparation steps, students were reminded about what a strong narrative entails, and how to include lots of descriptive words and sensory details in their story. Before students were allowed to use Inspiration and the laptops to create electronic concept maps of their narratives, they had to story map their scenes and script the narrative on the handout and have it checked by a teacher to make sure it is addressed all the required criteria. Once given teacher approval, students moved to transfer their story maps into concept maps on Inspiration, complete with images from either the bank of clip art available within the software program, or photographs or images they found on the Internet and transferred into Inspiration and then their concept maps.


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Within the text of their water cycle stories, key science terms had to be utilized and underlined to set off their use in the text. In order to make the activity more culturally relevant (or sTc), students were encouraged to bring elements that represented their cultural backgrounds into their stories. Similarly, they were encouraged to include socially relevant connections by demonstrating what they have learned about water and environmental issues, such as water pollution, conservation, water rights, and so on. Once the concept maps were completed on the laptops, students shared their water cycle story maps with the whole class by projecting the image with a LCD projector or a big screen TV. The students in the audience were required to look for inconsistencies and/or inaccurate use of scientific terms related to the water cycle and ask questions of the presenters. One can see how this activity required the activation of multiple literacies to successfully complete the task. More specifically, in this case the actual standards covered for the State of California English Language Arts Standards (1997) were: 1. Writing- Create a narrative text (show setting and events) utilizing information gathered from expository text; and 2. Research & Technology- Create documents using electronic media and features (see Table 1).


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Table 1 (continued)


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Analyses of focus group interviews with students and of our field notes from multiple classroom visits, indicated that students found these types of hands-on, minds-on and collaborative activities more engaging—and they actually started to request more of them. We actually took advantage of the students’ enthusiasm and interest in learning technologies and in integrating multiple literacies by exploring how they themselves could be agents of change in teacher professional development. This turned out to be another strategy we used to manage the challenges we encountered (see Figure 1), and we discuss these findings in a different manuscript (Rodriguez, Zozakiewicz, & Yerrick, 2008). Below are some examples of quotes from student interviews that demonstrate how students were interested in not just “reading out of textbooks” in science, but wanted the opportunity to do more projects, use more learning technologies, and do more hands-on activities with what they were learning. One student even shared that teachers should make what we do in the science classroom relate to them, or become more socially and culturally relevant. These responses are from focus group interviews where students were asked to share what helped them learn the most in science and what they wished their teachers did differently in science to help them as learners.

Instead of reading out of the book, we should do projects. We should be able to do something with what we read ().

I also liked the PowerPoint. We did research on the Internet and used pictures. And we had a choice of how many slides to use().

Computers help me learn a lot. It’s better when I’m doing projects and stuff than just reading out of a book().

Make it more interesting [instead of just] reading out of book. That puts me asleep. Make it…so that kids could actually relate to it().

These quotes demonstrate some of the patterns that emerged across focus group interviews with the students. These also show just how articulate and aware 4th–6th graders are about what helps them as learners in school. What is clear from these quotes, and the interview data overall, is that these students felt that being able to manipulate information and create projects or artifacts with the knowledge they were reading in texts or researching on the Internet, be it in Inspiration such as stories about the water cycle, or PowerPoint presentations on the social uses of magnets, helped them as learners of science content and literacy. It also gave them a sense of empowerment, because they had the opportunity to make choices about what to include, how to relate it to their lives, and then had the chance to create their own projects and present it to their peers, instead of being read to, or given information by their teachers. They preferred being actively involved in the doing of learning (that word shows up several times in the quotes above), in the constructing of knowledge, rather than being passive consumers of it, and in connecting new knowledge to everyday life through more authentic activities.


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II. Using learning technologies to represent knowledge through models—This theme involves having students use information they are researching and learning about science content and then either build or work with models that represent the new knowledge they have acquired. Again, this theme occurred across the grade 4–6 project classrooms and within each science unit in those grades levels. Also, learning technologies were utilized in different ways in the building of these models depending on the science content involved. At times, the technology utilized was a part of the model itself, while other times the technology was used as the medium the students used to present the model they had built to the rest of the class. The example we discuss in this section involves technology being a part of the model itself.

One example of how multiple literacies was enacted in the teaching of complex science concepts in the project involved the creation of a problem-solving scenario and model building (see Table 1) with grade 5 students based on the Solar System and Space Exploration California Science Standards and the National Science Standards. More details on this activity and on how to implement it can be found on the project website at http://edweb.sdsu.edu/i2techscie/. This website also has short video clips that explain how the activity is multicultural and socially relevant (sTc). Learning about the solar system can be very tedious and complex given the vast amount of information and scientific terms students are expected to learn according to the standards. One strategy we used to make this content more engaging and accessible (especially to second language learners and girls) was to create a problem-solving scenario in which students got to participate in an authentic simulation. In this scenario students were placed in small groups of 3 or 4 as described above. Once students were grouped, they were to represent members of a team of scientists and engineers who were competing for a contract with NASA to develop a solar body exploration rover. Their task was twofold: First, they had to prepare a presentation that clearly articulated what solar body NASA should explore; and second, they had to draw a rover design (with all the labeled components) that they hoped to use for exploring their chosen solar body. Students were given some time to gather some preliminary information about solar bodies by using, web-based learning sites (e.g. BrainPop), electronic encyclopedias (e.g. Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe, DK Publishing, World Book), and/or a variety of specially selected web sites and other resources. Students were encouraged to select a solar body that they found interesting and wished to further explore, in this way they had ownership over the learning process (the topic, the format for presentation, and the information sources were left to the students). Findings from this study have consistently showed that if students are given some ownership over the learning process and that if learning technologies are made available for them to manipulate that knowledge (i.e. cut and paste text, add graphics, sound, music, create models, QuickTime movies, etc), students participate more fully and perform better on tests.


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Students also expressed during interviews that these were the kinds of activities that they most enjoyed and had the greatest impact on them during the school year. These types of activities are also more gender and culturally inclusive because they allow the students to more freely express whom they are as individuals and learners. For example, the quote below is from a fifth grade student who shared what activities in science helped him learn the content the best, during an end of Year I focus group interview:

The rover and boundary [projects] helped me because you got to show what it is instead of someone telling you. You get to show them (Jose, Interview 2A, Year I, 8).

Providing copies of the texts and electronic encyclopedias in Spanish also supported second language learners. In addition, the activity sheets were written with scaffolding strategies and vocabulary lists to assist students in gradually acquiring key terminology and applying it in the relevant context. In order to make this activity more sociotransformative constructivist, students were required to rotate to a learning center in which they get to learn about the contributions of women to outer space exploration. At this center, students watch videotapes and read relevant materials in order to determine which woman—in their opinion is/was the most influential and why. Students’ answers were compiled in the form of a “digital patches” (a printed document with text, photos and/or graphics) that was later used to make a “digital quilt” exhibit in the classroom. Students were also encouraged to reflect and discuss why–in their opinion–it took so long for NASA to allow the participation of women in space exploration. Similarly, students were asked to critically evaluate their required textbooks and to discuss why there were so few female scientists and scientists who looked like them represented in their textbooks. Another strategy used to make the content and activity more culturally relevant was to require each student to include elements of their cultural background in the design of their rover in terms of the decoration, for example, items that would remind them of home (e.g. if you could take only one item into a spaceship that reminds of your home, what would it be?). The goal here was that as students got to learn from one another about solar bodies and space exploration, they also learned about themselves as individuals with cultural differences as well as similarities. After students had completed their research and answered a series of key content-related questions in addition to the ones they chose to investigate, they were required to present their rover design and rationale for exploring their chosen solar body. The class and the teacher then become the “NASA Board of Directors” in charge of selecting the best rover design and solar body on the basis of the most convincing arguments and most plausible and authentic design. After the students completed the first tasks (research, design and presentation), they were provided with another socially relevant problem scenario in which they got to use an actual miniature model of a rover to explore an “unknown” solar body – the simulation activity. As a way to further integrate


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the use of learning technologies, we built a model of a remote controlled rover that included: a wireless remote color, video mini-camera, a magnetometer probe, a temperature probe, and a functional robot arm. The magnetometer and temperature probes were hooked up to iBook laptops via Vernier LoggerPro data gathering units. Again students were grouped according to gender, language skills, and abilities to maximize collaboration and peer support. Once students were assigned to the “Mission Control” phase of the activity (i.e., a pair of students monitored the magnetometer readings, another the temperature, while another pair controlled the rover)4, the rover is placed in a hidden scenario. This means, students were only able to see the images the rover sends via the wireless remote camera to a TV monitor in the classroom. In this way, the students got a very authentic sense of how difficult it was to control a planet exploration rover through remote control. As students then took turns maneuvering the rover and manage data collection, they were asked to apply what they had learned from their peers’ presentations in order to identify the solar body being explored by the rover. Magnets and hot/cold spots were strategically hidden from plain view and distributed at key places in the landscape of the scenario in order to provide clues to the students about the unknown solar body. Needless to say, this activity generated a great deal of interest and discussion amongst students who eagerly debated their theories about what the unknown solar body might be. We have been impressed with the level of scientific discourse students often used with one another to support their positions regarding this activity, as well as the level of sophistication in their thinking to critique our rover design. They often offered better ideas for building and placing the robot arm or for maximizing the maneuverability of the rover. Thus, if the teacher allowed the time, we provided students with the materials and equipment to build a rover of their own. To this end, and to provide more access to learning technologies, we designed a Web Quest (see project website: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/i2techscie) that includes all aspects of this activity so that parents can do the activity at home and/or learn how to build a rover with their children. The activation of multiple literacies were again necessary for students to be able to successfully participate in and complete the tasks involved in this problem solving scenario and model building space exploration activity. The English Language Arts Standards included in these activities are: 1. Reading: Compre-hension and analysis of grade-level appropriate informational text; 2. Writing: Create expository text utilizing science information gathered from expository texts and Analyze media as sources for information; and 3. Listening/ Speaking: Deliver coherent presentations (See Table 1). This example effectively demonstrates how all the pieces of the grant goals could come together into one powerful learning experience for students, one that integrated multiple literacies with authentic science work, while integrating in the use of learning technologies, as well as multicultural and gender-inclusive science teaching practices. In addition, the responses from the students to such activities, to represent knowledge through learning technologies and models, proved to be very positive. Analysis of the interview data provided strong evidence of this. The voices of the students


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themselves make this point loud and clear when they are asked to describe either the activities that helped them learn science content they best, or what they wanted their teacher to do more of in science, in order to help them as learners:

Like with boundaries, how we used i-Photo and i-Movie. I think instead of reading out of books, it’s easier because we make like movies out of it. You could actually see what convergent boundaries are. And like in movies, they move so you can see how they work (Omega, Interview 2B, Year I, 9).

The rover was helpful because we had to control it behind the TV like scientists. It helped us learn about the different things on Mars (Zane, Interview 2A, Year I, 12).

The rover because it was fun and it helped you learn at the same time. And you could experience what scientists felt, like when they go to Mars (Maria, Interview 2B, 11).

The students’ own voices demonstrate that they appreciated getting the opportunity to do what “scientists do” and work with learning technologies to learn about the solar system or plate tectonics. They found the use of models to represent knowledge through technology, with the integration of literacy, not only “fun” but also “helpful” in their own science learning process. Again, this idea of being active participants in their own learning process is a theme that is important to them as learners of the multiple literacies of science.

CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS

In U.S. schools, due to federal education laws that emphasize literacy skills in isolation from specific content areas, and then attach high stakes standardized tests to those decontexualized literacy skills, science teaching and learning is becoming an endangered species in our K-8 schools. As a result, one way teacher educators and science scholars are gaining access in teachers’ classrooms is by more purposely integrating language literacy with science education. As both the English Language Arts and Science education literature attests, multiple literacies have always been an intricate part of the teaching and learning of science. As we demonstrated in this paper, we utilized this connection to recruit a school to be part of a professional development project designed to help teachers in transforming their science teaching practices to make them more culturally relevant, social constructivist and infused with learning technologies. One of the reasons all the grade 4–6 teachers at our participating school and principal agreed to become a part of the project was because we were willing to provide science activities that included the integration of reading and language arts, which was a focus of professional development for the school. Using insights gathered from the literature review (Borko, 2004; Lee, 2003; Lee, Hart, Cuevas, & Enders, 2004) and our previous work with teachers, we designed an intervention study that integrated the use of learning technologies to enhance teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogical skills. We used sociotransformative


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constructivism (sTc), which is the merging of multicultural education tenets and social constructivism as the theoretical framework to guide our intervention efforts. Given the continuing calls for science and teacher education reform (Glenn Commission, 2000; The Mendoza Commission, 2000; The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996), we find that sTc is a framework particularly suited to assist teachers interested in learning about how to teach for diversity and understanding. While it has been well established that multiple challenges influence any kind of teacher professional development programs–especially when the integration of learning technologies is added to such programs—(Becker and Riel, 2000; Cuban 2001), what has not been as well established is how to manage these challenges in everyday school contexts. As we worked with the project teachers during the first two years of the grant, we encountered context-specific challenges that led us to develop innovative strategies to manage them as part of the ongoing, responsive and onsite design of the project. These challenges and strategies are highlighted in Figure 1. However, for this chapter, we focused upon one of the strategies used to address the challenges, Modeling and Demonstrating. Analyses of multiple quantitative and qualitative data lead to two themes within Modeling and Demonstrating that pertained to the integration of literacy and science activities as part of the project. These themes included: 1. Using learning technologies to represent knowledge through narrative writing; and 2. Using learning technologies to represent knowledge through model building. Although our claims are limited by the fact that we worked in only one school, and with only a small group of grade 4–6 teachers and their students (+/-240 per year), we feel that these participants are representative of teachers and students in this very culturally diverse district. Since we involved all of the grade 4 and 6 teachers from one school, and not the just the select few of outstanding teachers from different schools or teacher leaders hand-picked by administrators, the participants of this study are a more representative sample of the regular teacher and student population found in urban and diverse school contexts. Finally, we argue that the insights gathered from this study should prove useful to those interested in establishing similar intervention studies in diverse school contexts. There is a need to pursue more intervention studies of this nature in order to better understand how the activation of multiple literacies in the teaching of science with learning technologies impact students’ learning and attitudes toward this subject.

NOTES 1 This project was sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation (Grant #0306156). The

perspectives and findings shared in this chapter, however, were constructed by the authors alone, and do not represent the position of the funding agency.

2 For more details on sTc, the reader is encouraged to see Rodriguez, (2005, 2002; 1998). These manuscripts also include more examples of how sTc was applied in elementary, high school and college-level classroom settings.

3 By the end of year I, two teachers left the school. One chose early retirement and the other decided to leave teaching in order to open a business.

4 The students’ roles were switched often during the simulation.


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Alberto J. Rodriguez, Cathy Zozakiewicz, San Diego State University San Diego, CA

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TANYA CLEVELAND SOLOMON, MARY HEITZMAN VAN DE KERKOF AND

ELIZABETH BIRR MOJE

COMMENTARY ON RODRIGUEZ & ZOZAKIEWICZ’S FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION OF MULTIPLE

LITERACIES THROUGH SCIENCE EDUCATION AND LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES

CHAPTER SUMMARY

Rodriguez and Zozakiewicz (this volume) report on a multi-dimensional, longitudinal intervention designed to integrate language literacy into 4–6th grade science instruction using learning technologies at one elementary school. The researchers employed a pedagogical approach called sociotransformative constructivism (Rodriguez, 2002; 1998), which undergirded all aspects of the intervention. Sociotransformative constructivism (sTc) is a theoretical framework that moves teacher practice away from models of transmission and facilitation to a more critical orientation. This critical approach employs inquiry and pedagogical strategies that incorporate authentic activities in which students question the purpose or reasoning behind activities, exchange ideas, reflect on phenomena experienced, and examine how the phenomena relate to their own lives. In this way, sTc encompasses teaching for social justice and diversity. The intervention also included collaborative and responsive professional development that brought teachers and researchers together in the creation of curricular units and activities. These units critically engaged students in the multiple literacies important to learning science, e.g., the practices of writing explanations and engaging in hands-on activities. Continuous institutional support throughout the duration of the project in the form of researcher modeling and teaching, as well as technological innovation, assisted the teachers in their initial attempts at integrating language literacy in their science instruction. The teacher-researcher team worked to overcome the challenges of implementing the intervention over the three-year period. They developed three strategies in response to the challenges that arose in the teachers’ attempts at integrating literacy in science. The authors presented findings from the first two years of their three-year project on the strategy of Modeling and Demonstrating to support teacher practice, particularly in integrating multiple literacies into science classrooms with diverse students.

STRENGTHS OF THE CHAPTER

We focus the commentary on three particularly strong aspects of the chapter. First, the authors situated the sociotransformative constructivism (sTc) framework in relation to other constructivist pedagogies and then described how they used sTc to


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structure the design of their intervention. The sTc approach has four components: the dialogic conversation, authentic activity, metacognition, and reflexivity. These components work together to engage students and teachers in the authentic activities and processes of scientists within a community of practice. Rodriguez and Zozakiewicz also established links between the sTc framework and the design of professional development and connected the sTc framework to the national and state standards for English learning and science used to structure the curriculum. Evidence of these connections appear throughout the chapter as the authors discuss the components of sTc, and describe how the learning activities both embodied the sTc components and satisfied language literacy and science education standards. Second, the collaborators described the instruction that critically engaged students in activities that supported multiple literacies using both firsthand (hands-on) and secondhand inquiry (textual) practices (Palincsar & Magnusson, 2001). The curriculum engaged students in hands-on activities designed to support their learning and help them apply the things that they read about in class. The authors argue that the authentic activities in which students participated include the multiple literacies in which scientists engage. For example, in a lesson on narrative writing, students read scientific texts, watched informational videos, worked collaboratively in small groups, defined science terms, and created concept maps. By incorporating these various literacies, students constructed and represented their knowledge in multiple ways. Last, the authors outlined the challenges they faced as they implemented the intervention. These challenges included teachers not following through on their professional development goals, the establishment of a professional community of practice, and the researchers’ struggle to remain patient and manage their own sense of urgency to effect change. Through the intervention, the authors developed three strategies to address their challenges, one of which they introduce as the focus of this chapter – the Modeling and Demonstrating strategy. In the next section, we present our commentary on the paper overall, with a specific focus on the strategy called Modeling and Demonstrating used to address these challenges.

COMMENTARY

Like the research that Rodriguez and Zozakiewicz present in this chapter, our work focuses on developing scientific literacy using multiple literacies; we, however, work with middle school teachers and students in urban schools. Because of this, we discuss topics that we found to be compelling and thought-provoking aspects of the chapter, of interest to the field, and factors that we must also consider in our research. These topics are the challenges related to sTc framework adoption, teacher mediation of strategies incorporating multiple literacies, and ways that researchers represent teacher learning. We pose these topics in the form of questions.

How did the teachers react to the framework when introduced in PD?

The sTc framework is a comprehensive model, in that it takes into account the content knowledge, pedagogical strategies, and dispositions needed to teach science for diversity while incorporating multiple literacies. Rodriguez and

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Zozakiewicz state in their chapter the following about the sTc framework: “to teach for diversity means learning to use more gender inclusive and socially relevant teaching strategies; learning to teach for understanding involves learning to implement more critically engaging, inquiry-based, and intellectually meaningful pedagogical strategies.” Teaching science within a sociotrans-formative constructivism framework requires that teachers are familiar with not only the content knowledge and pedagogical strategies, but with their students and the types of knowledge students bring to the table. It is a challenge for teachers to be good at any one of these, and previous studies have found three areas in which elementary teachers tend to struggle with beliefs that could constrain their adoption of sTc practices. This includes beliefs about the domain of science and their role in it (Levitt, 2001), beliefs about diversity issues (Bryan & Atwater, 2002), beliefs about how diversity relates to content-area instruction (Milner, 2005), and beliefs about integrating multiple literacies into science instruction.

Research on Teacher Beliefs

We address research on teacher beliefs in four areas. First, elementary teachers’ beliefs about science and their role as “dispensers of scientific knowledge” often influence their teaching of science, if they teach it at all (Levitt, 2001). Teachers feel as though they do not have the time to teach science properly, they need to have specific knowledge and materials to teach science, and/or that their students may not be ready for science instruction. This results in reluctance by some elementary teachers to adopt inquiry-based instruction that features hands-on activities, and reliance on the traditional teaching practices with which they learned science (Yilmaz-Tuzun, 2008). Second, Bryan and Atwater (2002) report that teachers have negative beliefs in three areas—student characteristics (e.g., their intelligence and inevitable “failure” to acquire science knowledge), external influences on their learning (e.g., parental involvement, family background, and the communities in which they live), and the behaviors appropriate in the classroom. Third, research also shows that pre-service teachers tend to separate issues of diversity from their content area instruction because many students going into teacher education come from monocultural schooling experiences, and because teacher education programs do not provide teachers with multiple opportunities to engage in dialogue and confront issues of diversity (Milner, 2005). Given this research and our own experience of teachers having stable beliefs that shape their practice, we wondered: What were teachers’ initial responses to the sTc framework? Did they experience changes in their beliefs related to diversity and science instruction over the three-year intervention? How did their science practice change relative to their belief changes? Fourth, teachers’ beliefs about literacy and science teaching as being separate and distinct make the integration of multiple literacies into content area instruction difficult for many teachers (Douville, Pugalee, & Wallace, 2003; O’Brien,


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Moje, & Stewart, 1995). Douville et al. (2003) found that elementary teachers often use trade books and vocabulary as ways to integrate literacy into science. They tend to emphasize these textual resources over scientific concepts and activities, and do not often think about the strategies needed to connect resources and concepts when integrating literacy into science instruction. We found similar challenges in our work with middle school teachers (Sutherland, Moje, Cleveland, & Heitzman, 2006; The Textual Tools Study Group, 2006). In a yearlong study of the use of textual tools with teachers, we presented various literacy strategies in professional development. As a teacher-researcher team, we then decided upon a group of strategies to incorporate into a 10-week science unit. We found that the middle school teachers, though knowledgeable in the content area and with the curriculum unit, desired specific assistance with scaffolding/mediating literacy integration into their science instruction. One of the challenges we faced in our own work was helping middle school teachers understand that literacy is not an addition to their content-area instruction; it is already embedded in the practices they engage in daily. We questioned whether this was also an obstacle Rodriguez and Zozakiewicz faced with the elementary teachers, and how they dealt with it. Particularly we ask the question: Can we as teacher educators enhance the integration of literacy teaching into science curriculum by making teachers more aware of the inherent literacy demands of all scientific practices? In addition, even after exposure to professional development structured to build teachers’ knowledge of literacy strategies, we found that time constraints, their knowledge of literacy strategies, and their beliefs about student abilities (e.g., that they required remediation of literacy skills) shaped how teachers integrated literacy strategies into their science teaching (Sutherland et al., 2006). Because our study was designed as a yearlong experiment, we did not measure the growth in teachers’ abilities to scaffold multiple literacies over time. One of the strengths of the Rodriguez and Zozakiewicz study is its longitudinal nature. As we read this chapter, we wondered: How did teachers mediate the introduction of multiple literacies in classrooms that did not typically focus on science, and with teachers who were not knowledgeable in science and in literacy instruction? Were teachers able to enact much of the curriculum by themselves? How much researcher input did teachers require to incorporate multiple literacies, and did this change over time?

How did the Modeling and Demonstrating strategy address the challenges teachers faced when teaching from a sTc framework? Rodriguez and Zozakiewicz define Modeling and Demonstrating as a strategy that, “…involved activities in which the principal investigators worked closely with teachers in multiple contexts to illustrate how science practices could include the teaching of multiple literacies…” (p. 18). Earlier in the chapter, the authors described modeling curriculum enactment with teachers as part of the second dimension of the sTc framework – authentic activity. They also described how researchers modeled science-learning activities in the professional development summer institutes for teachers.

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The authors did not articulate a direct link between the challenges experienced and the intervention strategy of Modeling and Demonstrating. However, one can find the link in the chapter’s text. The authors described the “action components” of the Modeling and Demonstrating strategy: Action components are the set of steps taken during the project to enact the various aspects of the intervention strategy. These included: 1. Unit collaborative planning with concept maps; 2. Summer institutes; 3. On-going, on-site support; 4. Team teaching; and, 5. Monthly meetings” (p. 18). They then provided a figure that shows the connections between the challenges faced by the teacher-researcher team and the strategies and action components used by the team to overcome them. Based on these descriptions, it would seem that the Modeling and Demonstrating strategy indirectly addressed the challenges of teachers actively pursuing their professional development goals and but most directly addressed the establishment of a professional community of practice (two of the three challenges discussed by the authors). We are intrigued by the evidence Rodriguez & Zozakiewicz provide to document students’ experiences with activities that integrated multiple literacies, and wonder what kinds of evidence might be available to document teacher learning and the development of a community of teachers as learners. For example, how did the researchers and teachers interact in the modeling and demonstrating of the narrative writing and model-building activities, and how did that change over time? What types of discussion did the teachers and researchers have before and after the enactment of modeling and demonstrating strategies? What types of difficulties did teachers reflect upon in interviews, or what types of support did teachers require to facilitate each activity? What types of training did teachers need in order to manage the various textual and technological tools provided in the curriculum? Did the teacher-researcher team establish structures to support an on-going community of teacher learning at this school? These questions lead us to the following question: How do we document or represent the kind of growth in teachers and students that we see as important, particularly to represent their learning qualitatively? While reading this chapter, we wanted to understand more about the learning process of the elementary teachers over the course of the project. The longitudinal nature of the study and the various data sources provide the authors with the opportunity to express the growth in teachers learning over time in rich and complicated ways. Wilson and Berne (1999) suggest one possible representation – the creation of stories or cases. The development of cases could illustrate the challenges faced and the learning experiences the teachers had in vivid and concrete ways that other data sources may not. Rodriguez and Zozakiewicz also provided vivid examples of student engagement in the chapter. It is important to report and disseminate this information in ways that result in the improvement of learning environments. For example, knowing which activities students enjoy gives us information about ways to motivate and engage them. Additionally, instructional approaches like sTc that incorporate attention to diversity provide us with information useful for culturally relevant curriculum adaptation, a desired goal of science instruction for all students (cf. Atwater, 2000).


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We believe that the type of study Rodriguez and Zozakiewicz undertook provides fertile ground to think about these issues and to pave the way for research that attempts to address these questions in ways that are thoughtful and comprehensive.

REFERENCES

Atwater, M. M. (2000). Equity for Black Americans in precollege science. Science Education, 84, 154–179. Bryan, L. A., & Atwater, M. M. (2002). Teacher beliefs and cultural models: A challenge for science

teacher preparation programs. Science Education, 86, 821–839. Douville, P., Pugalee, D. K., & Wallace, J. D. Examining instructional practices of elementary science

teachers for mathematics and literacy integration. School Science and Mathematics, 103, 388–396. Kyles, C. R., & Olafson, L. (2008). Uncovering preservice teachers’ beliefs about diversity through

reflective writing. 10.1177/0042085907304963. Urban Education Online First, 0042085907304963. Levitt, K. E. (2001). An analysis of elementary teachers’ beliefs regarding the teaching and learning of

science. Science Education, 86, 1–22. Milner, H. R. (2005). Stability and change in U.S. prospective teachers’ beliefs and decisions about

diversity and learning to teach. Teacher and Teacher Education, 21, 767–786. O’Brien, D. G., Stewart, R. A., & Moje, E. B. (1995). Why content literacy is difficult to infuse into the

secondary school: Complexities of curriculum, pedagogy, and school culture. Reading Research Quarterly, 30, 442–463.

Palincsar, A. S., & Magnusson, S. J. (2001). The interplay of first-hand and second-hand investigations to model and support the development of scientific knowledge and reasoning. In S. Carver & D. Klahr (Eds.), Cognition and Instruction: Twenty-Five years of progress. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Rodriguez, A. J., & Zozakiewicz, C. (2007, April). Facilitating the integration of multiple literacies through science education and learning technologies. Presented at the Second Institute on Science Education Research (ISER-II), Chicago, IL.

Rodriguez, A. J., Zozakiewicz, C., & Yerrick, R. (2005). Using prompted praxis to improve teacher professional development in culturally diverse schools. School Science and Mathematics Journal, 107, 352–362.

Rodriguez, A. J. (2002). Using sociotransformative constructivism to teach for understanding in diverse classrooms: A beginning teacher’s journey. American Educational Research Journal, 39, 1017–1045.

Rodriguez, A. J. (1998). Strategies for counterresistance: Toward sociotransformative constructivism and learning to teach science for diversity and for understanding. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 35, 589–622.

Sutherland, L. M., Moje, E. B., Cleveland, T., & Heitzman, M. (2006, April). Incorporating literacy-learning strategies in an urban middle school chemistry curriculum: Teachers’ successes and dilemmas. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA.

The Textual Tools Study Group. (2006). Developing scientific literacy through the use of literacy teaching strategies. In R. Douglas, K. Worth, & M. P. Klentschy (Eds.), Linking science and literacy in the K–8 classroom (pp. 261–285). Washington, DC: National Science Teachers Association.

Wilson, S. M., & Berne, J. (1999). Teacher learning and the acquisition of professional knowledge: An examination of research on contemporary professional development. Review of Research in Education, 24, 173–209.

Yilmaz-Tuzun, O. (2008). Preservice elementary teachers’ beliefs about science teaching. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 19, 183–204.

Tanya Cleveland Solomon, Mary Heitzman van de Kerkof and Elizabeth Birr Moje, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan

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ALBERTO J. RODRIGUEZ

RESPONSE TO SOLOMON, VAN DE KERKHOF, & MOJE’S COMMENTARY ON FACILITATING THE

INTEGRATION OF MULTIPLE LITERACIES THROUGH SCIENCE EDUCATION AND LEARNING

TECHNOLOGIES

We appreciate Solomon, van de Kerkhof, Solomon, & Moje’s comprehensive review of our chapter. They raise many excellent questions, some of which we have either answered in more detail in previous publications based on data from this project, or are in the process of addressing in current manuscripts. As the authors point out, our study was a complex and longitudinal project involving multiple school sites and multiple participants. We have indeed gathered a rich database using quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and it is going to take several manuscripts to describe our findings. This is why we chose to focus the discussion in our chapter on only one of the several strategies we implemented to assist teachers transform their practice. In other manuscripts (e.g., Rodriguez, Zozakiewicz, & Yerrick, 2005, and/or in progress), we provide more details about some the challenges we encountered. For this reason, I have chosen to collapse and reframe some of the questions presented by Solomon et al in an effort to provide as much clarification as possible given the space constraints. I respond to the questions in the order in which they were posed. Readers are encouraged to review previous publications cited below, contact us for copies of manuscripts in progress, and/or visit our project’s website at http://edweb.sdsu.edu/i2techscie (click on the conferences or publication links) for more information.

How did the teachers react to the sociotransformative constructivist framework when this was introduced in the professional development summer institutes/workshops?

The research team took a considerable amount time recruiting teachers who were willing to meet the following criteria: (a) All teachers in grades 4 through 6 from the same school must be committed to participate for 3 years, (b) All teachers must be interested in improving their science practice and in integrating learning technologies, and (c) All teachers must be committed to making their science practice more culturally/socially relevant and inquiry-based. Needless to say, we had to visit many schools and have multiple meetings with the few interested participants we found in order to meet the selection criteria. The literature on teacher professional development (TPD) extensively documents the challenges


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associated with establishing effective TDP programs. One of these challenges is the resistance that some teachers and their administrators display toward the implementation of much needed pedagogical and/or curriculum change. Some of us have been focusing on investigating ways to counter this resistance by better understanding the multiple factors that obstruct teachers’ desire for professional growth and for improving their students’ opportunities to excel (Rodriguez, 2008; Rodriguez & Kitchen, 2005). In this particular study, we sought to work with teachers who were already committed to teach for diversity (i.e., in more culturally and socially relevant ways) and understanding (i.e., in more inquiry-based and social constructivist ways). Therefore, in lieu of working with teachers demonstrating overt resistance to teaching for diversity and/or for understanding (as we have done in other studies) or instead of working with just a few committed teachers here and there from different schools, we carefully chose our participants based on the criteria stated above. This selection criteria was an essential part of the design aspect of our project. Thus, to answer the question posed by Solomon et al more directly, the participating teachers were more receptive to the theoretical framework guiding this project from the start because of our multiple conversations about the goals of the study and how those goals intercepted with their professional needs. This is not to say, of course, that we did not encounter any challenges or that the participating teachers completely embraced sociotransformative constructivism. We describe these challenges and the strategies we implemented to move the project’s goals forward in related publications (see for example http://edweb.sdsu.edu/i2techscie).

How did the teachers’ science practice change in relation to changes in their teaching practice as a result of participating in this project?

For this study, we used quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the project’s impact on teachers’ pedagogy and on students’ learning. For the quantitative aspect of the project, we used specially designed unit concept maps as pre- and post instruction tests. These tests were collaboratively developed with a teacher or team of teachers for each grade. We also used the unit concept maps as professional development and planning tools because it enabled us to have rich discussions with the participants about what curriculum to cover, where to integrate learning technologies, and how to make the unit more inquiry-based and culturally relevant. The qualitative methods used included student focus group ethnographic interviews, ethnographic interviews with teachers, multiple classroom visits and field notes, and the collection of artifacts from each classroom. Our data analysis indicated significant growth amongst all participants (teachers and students), but we continued to notice a dissonance between some of the teachers’ espoused beliefs and goals and their beliefs in action. In other words, some teachers actively integrated the goals of the project with their espoused interest for professional development; whereas, some other teachers displayed a slower pace of integration. As shown in Figure 1 of our chapter, one of the intervention strategies we used to help us manage this challenge was Prompted Praxis. Given the on-site, on-going, and responsive design of our study, we were in a privileged position to offer

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professional development support before, during and after instruction. All teachers indicated, in both formal interviews and informal conversations, that they found this strategy very helpful in their efforts to make their science practice more culturally relevant and inquiry-based. We provide a full description of this strategy in Rodriguez, Zozakiewicz, and Yerrick (2005). We do not claim that Prompted Praxis, or any other strategies employed in our study, completely changed a teacher’s practice. Our claim is that the intervention strategies we used in our study had a positive impact. We also argue that due to the multitude of factors that may influence any one teacher’s commitment to professional development goals, projects such as ours—with its longitudinal, on-site and responsive design—may help shed more light on effective strategies for teacher professional development. It has been my experience that the “one size fits all” model is not appropriate: especially, when some teachers—like some of our participants—are not aware of the dissonance between their espoused beliefs and their beliefs in action until the issue is discussed either before, during and/or after instruction or in formal or informal interviews. Prompted Praxis, for example, was an effective way to encourage teachers to reflect about where their practice and their espoused commitment to improve their pedagogy collided or converged. Our analysis and observations were also corroborated during the students’ focus group interviews. That is, students from the low integration classrooms often stated that they wanted to “use the laptops and other technologies more often” and wanted to “do more projects like in [the active integration teacher’s classroom]”. At this particular school, classrooms were connected with one another through doors, so it was easy for students to see us rolling the wireless computer cart from one classroom to another. They often came up to us with a smile on their faces and eagerly asked if we were going to do an activity in their classrooms that day. They looked disappointed when we explained that it was a teacher other than their own who had asked us to help in his/her classroom. As mentioned in our chapter, since this was an intervention study guided by sTc, we explored ways to take advantage of the students’ eagerness to participate in the project. We encouraged them to become more actively involved in the professional preparation of their teachers: to become agents of change in their own education. This intervention strategy and its various action components are shown in Figure 1 of our chapter, and they are explained in more detail in Rodriguez, Zozakiewicz, and Yerrick (2008). Through this strategy, we found that all teachers increased the use of the learning technologies in their classrooms and sought to more actively enact the goals of the project. However, for most of the participating teachers the improvement was associated only with the units we collaboratively developed. Only 2 out of the 8 teacher participants from the first school (described in the chapter) and 3 out of the 6 teachers added in the third year of the project (not described in the chapter) could be identified as actively integrating the project’s goals. By active integration, we refer to teachers who implemented the pedagogical strategies and learning technologies as agreed upon during the collaborative planning (using the unit concept maps), as well as those who went beyond this planning and started to develop activities on their own. The developing integration teachers, as mentioned


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before, showed significant and varying degrees of progress, but were moving at a pace that created one of the most difficult challenges we face: Managing our own sense of urgency to implement change (see Figure 1, our chapter). This sense of urgency became even more pressing when statistical analysis of the students’ pre- and post concept map unit scores demonstrated a significant improvement in students’ achievement when a developing integration teacher moved from developing to active integration. In addition, contrast analyses conducted between two teachers who taught the same curriculum unit to demographically similar students from different schools revealed a statistically significant difference in student achievement between the active integration vs. the developing integration teacher. For example, on a grade 6 unit on energy, students from a developing integration class average score was 24.8%; whereas, students from an active integration class scored an average of 66.9% on the same unit concept map tests. (Note that dependent t tests for each class were conducted). The results of these pre- and post unit concept map tests are corroborated further in students’ focus group interviews, in which they eagerly explain what they found helpful about an inquiry-based approach to content using learning technologies. The results of these case studies are currently being written, Since the review process of manuscripts by research journals takes so long, draft copies of these papers are posted on the project’s website (http://edweb.sdsu.edu/i2techscie). In short, we observed different degrees of improvement in the participating teachers’ practice, and we sought to implement intervention strategies throughout the study that could assist all participants to better integrate their espoused beliefs with their beliefs in action.

Can we as teacher educators enhance the integration of literacy teaching into science curriculum by making teachers more aware of the inherent literacy demands of all scientific practices?

Yes. I believe that teacher educators should start by exposing more purposely the various strategies they use to integrate literacy teaching into the science curriculum. As we mentioned in our chapter, the integration of language literacy has always been hand-in-hand with the work we do in our classes and in our research, but it was the appeal from the principal of our first school, right at the beginning of our project, that made us become more aware of the need to make our own practice more explicit. In addition, the focus on integrating literacy with science instruction and learning technologies became a “hook” to help us gain access to teachers who were concerned about their students’ standardized tests scores.

How did the teachers mediate the introduction of multiple literacies in classrooms that did not typically focus on science, and with teachers who were not knowledgeable in science and literacy instruction?

Most participating teachers, as seems to be the case across the nation, felt more confident with teaching language literacy than teaching science. In fact, Weiss, Banilower, McMahon, & Smith (2001) conducted a survey study with almost

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6,000 K-12 teachers from 1,200 schools across the U.S., and they found that “while roughly 75% of elementary teachers feel very qualified to teach reading /language arts, approximately 60 percent feel very qualified to teach mathematics, and about 25 percent feel very qualified to teach science” (p. 30). Since we were fortunate to recruit elementary school teachers who were really committed to teaching science (something that is increasingly harder to find these days), our challenge consisted more in finding standard-based activities that could demonstrate how to integrate inquiry-based science, learning technologies, and culturally/socially relevant issues with the established language arts curriculum. Table 1 in our chapter illustrates some of the activities we collaboratively developed. We actually found the teachers to be more enthusiastic and engaged when we worked on developing and implementing these integrated activities than those that seemed to have a more science content focus. We are not sure about this, but we attributed this observation to the fact that elementary school teachers are more comfortable and confident with teaching language arts as indicated in the survey above. In addition, many teacher preparation programs—like ours—offer more instruction in language literacy instruction than any other curriculum area.

Were the teachers able to enact much of the curriculum by themselves? How much researchers’ input did teachers require to incorporate multiple literacies: Did this change over time?

One of the unique aspects of this project was its ongoing, onsite and responsive design. This meant that it was not enough to provide 2-week summer institutes and to have monthly meetings with the participating teachers to address their concerns and interests. We knew that teachers were going to need additional hands-on support in the implementation of sTc-related activities along with the learning technologies provided by the project. However, given the transformative framework guiding the study, it was essential that teachers demonstrated progress and willingness to implement newly gained knowledge and skills on their own. Therefore, we designed the project to provide onsite and responsive support for a whole semester after the completion of the summer institute. This meant that we planned lessons and activities during part of the summer institute and then assisted teachers in the implementation of some of these new activities during the fall semester. The goal was for them to more independently develop and implement similar activities that integrated language literacy and learning technologies during the spring semester, using the pedagogical strategies and activities we co-developed and/or demonstrated as models. In this way, our roles in their classrooms moved from that of co-teaching to more of teacher’s aid or technology assistance while we gathered field notes. This professional development approach—modeling and demonstrating—worked very well with most of the teacher participants in our study in that it significantly increased their use of inquiry-based pedagogy and learning technologies. However, as indicated above, we classified the teachers into two groups, active integration and developing integration, according to how well they were connecting their espoused beliefs and the project’s goals with their beliefs in action.


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Given the incredible demands on teachers’ professional and personal lives, it was not surprising that some teachers were unable to follow through with their commitments and stated goals (e.g. we asked them to share with us their goals for professional development at each interview and to tell us how we could assist them accomplish these goals throughout the semester). Since this was an intervention study guided by a transformative theoretical framework, we also engaged in dialogic conversations that sought to encourage teachers to honestly reflect and act on the contradictions between their espoused beliefs and their actual practice. We felt that we had some success as some teacher participants moved from developing integration to more active integration However, other teacher participants remained satisfied with lower levels of integration. For us, this represented a significant research methodology conundrum, which I think relates to Solomon et al’s next question.

How do we document or represent the kind of growth in teachers and students that we see as important, particularly to represent their learning qualitatively?

If the results of our study were based on the interviews with teachers alone, our results would be very skewed toward the positive end of the spectrum. In other words, all of the participating teachers found our collaboration helpful and appreciated having access to the learning technologies and equipment the project made available to them. Before joining the project, most of the participating teachers rarely integrated learning technologies in their lessons, and mainly taught science as a separate subject in traditional, teacher-centered ways (e.g. worksheets). It is evident from our findings that even the developing integration teachers showed significant professional growth. However, one of the challenges we faced was our sense of urgency to effect change. From our point of view as researchers/teacher educators, and from the point of view of the students (as revealed in many focus group interviews), we could have been doing more and/or making progress at a faster pace. We shared this concern with the participating teachers, and in fact, one of the ways we enacted the strategy of Students as Change Agents (Rodriguez, Zozakiewicz, & Yerrick, 2008) was to share preliminary analysis from student focus interviews with the teachers (making sure, of course, that the students’ anonymity was protected). This strategy did have a positive impact on developing integration teachers who, for a time, employed a hybrid pedagogical approach: blending elements of their traditional practice (e.g. worksheets or teacher-centered lecture notes) with the new pedagogical approaches encouraged by the project (e.g. language literacy activities, labs or inquiry-based projects using learning technologies). However, the impact was temporary. We noticed that when some of the low integration teachers got busier with their personal lives (e.g. two of them were enrolled in a master program) and/or with their professional lives (e.g. time-consuming school functions; such as preparation of reports cards, parent/teacher conferences, and so on), they tended to revert back to familiar pedagogical approaches. These observations raise interesting research methodological questions because in this case, all of the teacher participants expressed a desire to improve their practice by learning to teach for diversity and for understanding, and by

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integrating language literacy and learning technologies across their science curriculum. There was no overt resistance to the goals of the project (as we have encountered in other studies). However, resistance occurred nonetheless. The espoused beliefs of some of the teacher participants were often contradicted by their beliefs-in-action. When these contradictions were addressed through dialogic conversations and sharing the preliminary analysis of students’ interviews, the developing integration teachers either maintained that they were making good progress or passively acknowledged that they could be doing more. For example, some responses were: “Well, I know I need to push harder,” “I’m going to make sure to sign for the computer cart more often,” “I’m going to follow the unit concept map more closely,” “I really want to do more projects like those we did during the summer institute,” and so on. After two years of working with the same group of teachers in the first school, we reached a point in our study where we could have resigned to the question, “This is as good as it gets?” However, because this was an intervention study, by definition, we persisted and continue to explore ways to address the contradictions between the espoused beliefs of teachers and their beliefs in action, and generate strategies to address and study their impact. It is important to note that we feel that all of the participating teachers are dedicated individuals who simply had different personal and professional demands on their time. For future projects, we would suggest that complex professional development projects like ours should have a built-in time frame of over five years in addition to more structured progress check points, and incentives co-sponsored by the school administration/school district. In addition, having more parent and administration involvement throughout the project could encourage developing integration teachers to more consistently follow through with their espoused beliefs and commitments. In this way, teachers might be more inclined to view the important time they spend on these kinds of projects as an essential component of their jobs with significant long-term benefits as opposed to an “add on” to their already busy professional and personal lives. In returning to the original question, “How do we document or represent the kind of growth in teachers and students that we see as important, particularly to represent their learning qualitatively?” I hope that I have competently demonstrated in this response that the answer is multi-faceted and too complicated to fully explain in one manuscript. In our chapter, we chose to describe in more detail some of the successful action components we were able to enact through the modeling and demonstrating intervention strategy. In other manuscripts, we document more fully some of the challenges we encountered and the other strategies and action components we implemented to manage them. We use the term “manage” purposely because we feel that when it comes to working in complex cultural sites, such as urban schools, researchers interested in working with teachers to effect change can only expect to manage the multiple challenges they will encounter. Nevertheless, what is most urgent, in our view, is to avoid becoming paralyzed by these obstructions. Instead, we must conduct more longitudinal intervention studies


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that further the investigation of the challenges associated with integrating multiple literacies in today’s culturally diverse science classrooms, as well as continue to develop effective strategies to manage those challenges.

REFERENCES

Rodriguez, A. J. (2008). The multiple faces of agency: Innovative strategies for effecting change in urban school contexts. Rotterdam, Netherlands: SENSE Publishing.

Rodriguez, A. J., Zozakiewicz, C., & Yerrick, R. (2008). Students acting as change agents in culturally diverse classrooms. In A. J. Rodriguez (Ed.), The multiple faces of agency: Innovative strategies for effecting change in urban school contexts. Rotterdam, Netherlands: SENSE Publishing.

Rodriguez, A. J., & Kitchen, R. S. (2005). Preparing mathematics and science teachers for diverse classrooms: Promising strategies for transformative pedagogy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Rodriguez, A. J., Zozakiewicz, C., & Yerrick, R. (2005). Using prompted praxis to improve teacher professional development in culturally diverse schools. School Science and Mathematics, 105(7), 352–362.

Weiss, I. R., Banilower, E. R., McMahon, K. C., & Smith, P. S. (2001). Report of the 2000 national survey of science and mathematics education. Chapel Hill, NC: Horizon Research Inc.

Alberto J. Rodriguez, San Diego State University

Science Education as a Pathway to Teaching - Sense Publishers

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