BOLD VISIONS IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
BOLD VISIONS IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
Alberto J. Rodriguez (Ed.)
San Diego State University
In this era of mandated high stakes and standardized testing, teachers and schools
officials find 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 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. 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.
BVER 26
Science Education as a
Pathway to Teaching
Language Literacy
Alberto J. Rodriguez (Ed.)
Alberto J. Rodriguez (Ed.)
SensePublishers
Science Education as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy
Science Education as a Pathway to
Teaching Language Literacy
SensePublishers
Science Education as a Pathway to
Teaching Language Literacy
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,
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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.
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.
v
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
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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
viii
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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FOREWORD
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
x
FOREWORD
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
xi
FOREWORD
(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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FOREWORD
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.
xiii
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
xv
PREFACE
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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PREFACE
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.
xvii
PREFACE
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.
xviii
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
A. J. Rodriguez (ed.),
Science Education as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy, 01–22.
© 2010 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
J. P. GEE
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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SCIENCE, LITERACY, AND VIDEO GAMES
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
3
J. P. GEE
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
4
SCIENCE, LITERACY, AND VIDEO GAMES
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
5
J. P. GEE
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.
6
SCIENCE, LITERACY, AND VIDEO GAMES
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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J. P. GEE
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 nonviolently as possible with the content knowledge that going in one door with other
8
SCIENCE, LITERACY, AND VIDEO GAMES
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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J. P. GEE
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
10
SCIENCE, LITERACY, AND VIDEO GAMES
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.
11
J. P. GEE
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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SCIENCE, LITERACY, AND VIDEO GAMES
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
13
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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SCIENCE, LITERACY, AND VIDEO GAMES
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
15
K. R. BRUNA
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-tobe 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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SCIENCE, LITERACY, AND VIDEO GAMES
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
17
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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PLAY AND THE REAL WORLD
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
19
J. P. GEE
“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.
20
PLAY AND THE REAL WORLD
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
21
J. P. GEE
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
22
ALBERTO J. RODRIGUEZ AND CATHY ZOZAKIEWICZ
2. FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION OF MULTIPLE
LITERACIES THROUGH SCIENCE EDUCATION AND
1
LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES
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.
A. J. Rodriguez (ed.),
Science Education as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy, 23–59
© 2010 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
A. J. RODRIGUEZ AND C. ZOZAKIEWICZ
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 sociotransformative 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.
24
FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION
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.
25
A. J. RODRIGUEZ AND C. ZOZAKIEWICZ
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,
26
FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION
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 socioculturally 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.
27
A. J. RODRIGUEZ AND C. ZOZAKIEWICZ
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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FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION
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 learningtechnology 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 BrainPop (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.
29
A. J. RODRIGUEZ AND C. ZOZAKIEWICZ
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
30
FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION
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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A. J. RODRIGUEZ AND C. ZOZAKIEWICZ
Challenges
Establishing a
Professional Community
of Practice
Following
through with
Professional
Development
Goals
Patience &
Managing Our
Own Sense of
Urgency to
Effect Change
InterventionStrategies
Modelling &
Demonstrating
Prompted
Praxis
Students as
Change
Agents
Action Components
Designing &
Implementing
sTc Activities
Unit
Collaborative
Planning w/
Concept Maps
Before
Teaching
Summer
Institute
During
Teaching
On-Site,
On-Going,&
Responsive
Support
After
Teaching
Student
Agency
Tech
Wizards
Tech
Coaches
Sharing
Students'
Artifacts
Team
Teaching
Sharing
Preliminary
Analysis
Monthly
Meetings
Students Leading
Parents' Night
Pre- & Post
Concept
Maps
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
32
FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION
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,
33
A. J. RODRIGUEZ AND C. ZOZAKIEWICZ
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.
34
FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION
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).
35
A. J. RODRIGUEZ AND C. ZOZAKIEWICZ
Table 1 (continued)
36
FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION
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.
37
A. J. RODRIGUEZ AND C. ZOZAKIEWICZ
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.
38
FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION
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
39
A. J. RODRIGUEZ AND C. ZOZAKIEWICZ
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: Comprehension 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
40
FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION
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
41
A. J. RODRIGUEZ AND C. ZOZAKIEWICZ
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
2
3
4
42
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.
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.
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.
The students’ roles were switched often during the simulation.
FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION
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Alberto J. Rodriguez,
Cathy Zozakiewicz,
San Diego State University
San Diego, CA
45
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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T. C. SOLOMON ET AL
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 sociotransformative 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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FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION
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 teacherresearcher 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.
49
T. C. SOLOMON ET AL
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 literacylearning 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
51
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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FACILITATING THE INTEGRATION
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
53
A. J. RODRIGUEZ
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 codeveloped 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 longterm 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
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