Connecting Culture and Place with GRC

From the K-12 NRC Framework for Science Education: (chapter 11)


  • Learning is cultural. Instruction should relate learner’s everyday experiences to local and cultural experiences.
  • Instruction should help students value and use science as a process to obtain knowledge based on empirical evidence consistent with cultural practices, families, and communities.
  • Instruction should empower students to leverage their full communicative resources during sense-making and share their knowledge of science and their culture beyond the classroom.

GRC Connections

Science learning is a cultural process stemmed in our natural curiosity. Cultivating that curiosity to influence science learning requires that classrooms embody an environment that makes meaningful connections with the cultural knowledge, experiences, values, and sense-making practices of our students and their communities. A community-based context for science learning generates useful language and facilitates communication skills as students apply their learning beyond the classroom. Science learning is enhanced when connections are made to familiar contexts and build on students’ prior knowledge (NAESM,2018a.).

The structure of instruction is critical. The gather, reason, and communicate reasoning instructional sequence leverages student's interests, knowledge, everyday experiences, and sense-making practices as students ask questions, gather information, reason through, and communicate reasoning why something happens. By supporting students in constructing explanations for causes of phenomena or solutions to problems that are relevant, students can develop the knowledge and skills needed to make sense of the world.

"Phenomenon travel in packs and often have similar causes." Brett Moulding

All of the lessons published on this site are developed with local teachers, many are context-based and utilize local phenomenon and/or problems.

Phenomenal GRC Lessons- Going 3D- Connecting Culture and Place