“Helping rural children connect their local rural knowledge with school science is key to creating meaningful science education.”
“When you’ve seen one rural community, you’ve seen one rural community. Every rural community has certain social, economic, and/or environmental issues that are unique to that particular community and contribute to its diversity.”
Context is critical for us to ground our science education work in culturally responsive teaching approaches, which are emphasized in the NGSS. Culturally responsive teaching recognizes the values, resources, resilience, accomplishments, creativity, imagination, ingenuity, and culture that resides within each of the learners in our classroom communities.
When we use the word culture, we are thinking about:
“When you’ve seen one rural community, you’ve seen one rural community. Every rural community has certain social, economic, and/or environmental issues that are unique to that particular community and contribute to its diversity.” ~ Gene Theodori
The way that we talk about students and the language we use is very important. Often we use the language of policy and may identify students as English Language Learners or students experiencing generational poverty. Culturally responsive teaching asks us to shift our lens and focus instead on using positive language to identify the resources or funds of knowledge students have. This includes the personal culture and experiences that our students bring with them and embody everyday. They may be similar to your own, and they may be very different.
"Since culture and difference are essential to humanity, they should play a central role in teaching and learning. To ignore them is to assure that the human dignity and learning potential of ethnically, culturally, and racially diverse students are constrained or minimized." ~ Geneva Gay
Think about how all of our differences in perspective and experience are valuable to our work together in the Oregon Science Project. There is a similar richness in your classroom community due to the different perspectives and experiences your students embody.
Reads all three of the documents below.
Complete Survey 1.B.